COMING HOME (45)

Directed by: Hal Ashby (1978)

Starring: Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, Penelope Milford

The Pitch: A Marine's wife takes a job at the local Army hospital after her gung-ho husband goes off to Vietnam, falls in love with a paraplegic veteran - and finds her easy assumptions about the war increasingly challenged.

Theo Sez: Welcome to the Hal Ashby Radio Hour, where you're never more than five minutes away from a beloved pop classic! The wall-to-wall songs (this must've been around the time when record companies first realised they were sitting on a goldmine) may have been intended as period shorthand, but they have the unfortunate effect of wrapping a painful tale in a warm glow of baby-boomer nostalgia - and incidentally contributing to the cosy complacency that's the worst thing about it. Voight is powerful, and truly moving in his final speech, but the character is ludicrous, settling down after 10 minutes or so of Righteous Anger into a wise, forgiving figure who's not only come to terms with his own pain (able to call himself a "gimp" without rancour or self-loathing) but also understands Fonda's pain and even her husband's pain, talking him down with barely a flicker - "I'm not the enemy here" - when he threatens to shoot them both (did we mention he's also a great lover who does the things her husband never dreamt of, and gives her an orgasm for the first time in her life?). Thoroughly insufferable for 90 minutes, till it belatedly moves up a gear in the final act - after Dern actually comes home - even using the soundtrack in intelligent ways (a key scene underscored with an atmospheric five-minute jam) ; the shift in audience sympathies isn't without a certain smug didacticism, like in AMERICAN BEAUTY when the homophobe father becomes more sympathetic by in effect admitting he was gay all along - similarly, the point here is that hawkish Dern is nicer because he now knows the truth, his right-winger's eyes finally opened - but at least it's there. Interesting and no doubt valuable (though both THE DEER HUNTER and WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN? were better Vietnam-vet films in 1978), but everything it has to say it says in the opening credits, Dern jogging briskly while being admonished by the Rolling Stones : "You're out of touch, my baby / My poor old-fashioned baby..."