We as a country did not treat our Vietnam Vets properly once they came back home to America. This is not a political statement so much as it is a factual observation. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and when I was in high school, my history teacher invited two men to our class to speak to us about Vietnam. These men had been in combat during that war; one of them looked physically fit, and one of them was in a wheelchair, permanently disabled on the battlefield. Had I closed my eyes and just listened to their voices, I would not have been able to tell them apart, the way they talked about the war. Both men had been damaged by it; physically or mentally, it mattered not. At sixteen years old, hearing them, it didn’t affect me the way it would now, having more world experience and a greater appreciation of what these men went through. This was not like any other war in our history up to that point, even Korea. People felt we didn’t belong there, and that sentiment has not changed in the decades since.
Hollywood initially shied away from commenting on the Vietnam War. Films like The Green Berets came across as disingenuous with their depiction of the war and why we were there. It rang false for many reasons, including its depiction of the soldiers who were mostly older men rather than the late teens and early twenties that made up the bulk of the fighters. Other films like M*A*S*H hid their commentary by setting the film in Korea, but that didn’t fool the US Government, who banned the showing of it on military bases on the basis of morale and its irreverent views on the war. By the late 1970s, as the troops were evacuated from Vietnam and reintegrating back into society, it was becoming clear that they were coming home to a population that didn’t celebrate them like the soldiers returning from WWII. That, too, was being reflected in the films of the time.
Rambo came out of this with the film First Blood targeting this distrust for Vietnam vets. That movie focuses heavily on not only the PTSD that soldiers in that war faced but also the discrimination returning soldiers had to deal with, being scorned and called baby killers. But four years before First Blood was addressing that, two other films were also tackling that subject. These two films faced off against each other in 1978, not only at the box office but also at the Academy Awards. Those films were The Deer Hunter and Coming Home. I will write about The Deer Hunter in more detail at a later time but will say here that of the two, it is the harsher depiction of PTSD. Perhaps that is what pushed it over the top, winning it the Best Picture Oscar that year. Coming Home is no slouch, though, but it does tackle many of the same themes and there are moments where it gets the same points across in a more subtle way.
Coming Home takes place in the middle of the war, but it focuses primarily on those readjusting themselves to society. The focal character is Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda), a conservative housewife whose husband, Bob (Bruce Dern), is preparing for deployment to Vietnam. Bob is a dedicated military officer who is shipping out to the war primarily as a means for promotion. While he is gone, Sally takes on volunteer work at the VA hospital treating wounded soldiers. This brings her in contact with Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a former high school classmate who has been paralyzed and bedridden. Luke is bitter about his fate and takes his anger out on the nurses, raging about the war and why they are there. Being hospitalized puts him in frequent contact with Sally and the two slowly begin to bond.
Eventually, Luke is released from the hospital, and he begins to reacclimatize to the real world. Sally keeps in contact with him, even after he reveals that he often is thinking about being with her romantically. She informs him that she has never been unfaithful to her husband but that will eventually change. After he witnesses a friend in the hospital commit suicide by injecting air into his veins, Luke chains himself outside the army recruitment center in an attempt to dissuade people from signing up. This gets him on the news as well as followed by Army Intelligence. When he and Sally finally spend the night together, it is noted by the Army Intelligence officers, and once her husband comes home from the war, discharged after injuring himself with his own firearm, they inform him of what his wife has been doing in his absence.
I’m sure there are some who came back from Vietnam and didn’t experience the things we see depicted in films like this. But that wouldn’t make for good drama, nor would it send the message these filmmakers are trying to make. War is hell, even when it is for a noble cause. When it is a situation like Vietnam, it becomes even worse. This was the last major war to date where soldiers were drafted and sent into battle against their wills, and our country’s families resented having to sacrifice their sons and fathers for a cause they did not believe in. Then those sons and fathers began coming home, suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and haunted by the violence they witnessed and participated in. Spouses struggled to relate to them anymore because the men who left were not the men who came back. It was even worse for those who returned missing limbs, paralyzed, or otherwise disfigured. Often spouses couldn’t handle the change, and divorce or abandonment happened. Sometimes they stayed together but the stresses of the war turned to abuse in the home. Situations like Sally having an affair while her husband was deployed were not uncommon; people get lonely when their spouse is gone for extended periods of time like this. It’s not right, but it does happen.
On top of that, sympathy develops between nurse and patient, and that can sometimes turn romantic. What happens between Sally and Luke doesn’t happen overnight. The way it happens in the film takes a long time to develop, which is very realistic to real life. Jane Fonda has the unenviable task of playing a woman who loves her husband but has an affair without her coming across as being an unlikable person. She has empathy for Luke and for the others around her, patients and staff. She starts out at the VA hospital primarily because of a friend, the bohemian Vi Munson (Penelope Milford), whose brother has come home from the war with severe emotional problems after just two weeks in Vietnam. Sally stays there, despite knowing her husband would not approve, because she has empathy for the patients she is taking care of.
This was a passion project for Jane Fonda, who saw it as a way to launch her production company, IPC Films. She was a friend of Ron Kovic, a paraplegic veteran and the subject of the film Born on the Fourth of July, whom she had met at an antiwar rally. There is more than a little of Ron in the performance of Jon Voight, especially of the anger he is feeling over his injury and what he perceives is to blame. This portrayal would earn Voight an Oscar.
While his screen time is limited, Bruce Dern has the more interesting character arc, though. When he returns from the war, he is a broken man. He says he shot himself in the leg accidentally and is unhappy with the idea of being honored for bravery upon his return. He breaks down emotionally when confronting his own experiences in the war and what he witnessed his own men doing, let alone the enemy. On top of all that, he finds out that his wife has been having an affair while he was gone, but when he confronts them, he can’t bring himself to violence anymore. He’s a shell of a man that has lost his emotional core. His final scene is just as emotionally scarring as that of Luke’s friend injecting air into his arm.
For obvious reasons, Jane Fonda promoted this film heavily and in opposition to The Deer Hunter. She had a financial stake in its success as well as her own personal attachment to it. It was being compared to another Oscar darling, The Best Years of Our Lives, another film about reacclimatizing to home after a war, and there is some similarity between the two films. But Coming Home focuses a lot more on the relationship between a lonely woman and an emotionally and physically damaged man than that older film does. It’s paced just right to accurately portray both parties as damaged people in need of each other’s comfort. While it lacks the pure raw power of The Deer Hunter, it is still an emotional powerhouse and has several moments that are truly haunting. I can only imagine someone who was in Vietnam watching this and how they would react. The way it is acted felt genuine and would probably be difficult for anyone who had experienced the war firsthand.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Jerome Hellman
Best Director: Hal Ashby
Best Actor: Jon Voight (won)
Best Actress: Jane Fonda (won)
Best Supporting Actor: Bruce Dern
Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Milford
Best Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen: Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones with story by Nancy Dowd (won)
Best Film Editing: Don Zimmerman
____________________________________________________
Release Date: February 15, 1978
Running Time: 128 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, and Penelope Milford
Directed by: Hal Ashby
Comments
Post a Comment