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Simply A Masterpiece

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I watched this again after some 40 years. I was glad to see it aired. Being a Vietnam Vet, I like anything that focuses attention on the War, lest the suffering be forgotten. I read some of the reviews here. The one that says there's never a reason to go to war is nice. Only if we hadn't fought and prevailed in WWII they'd likely be writing in German or Japanese, or more likely, not writing at all.LOVED the music. Interesting that I think mostly all the songs were played in their entirety. And to hear two Beatles songs - wow - what did that cost?A very important and moving film, with a message not to be forgotten.

War films I like okay, and too I'm a fan of anti-war pictures and with this 1978 film from the outspoken and to the point director Hal Ashby I must say that "Coming Home" is a strong drama that shows how war can affect the lives of many involved and those involved learn it probably wasn't for the best. Certainly many might say that this was one film that was very outspoken that displays the post and ever lasting impact of the Vietnam War.As anyone who remembers the Vietnam War and it's after period of the late 1970's most will agree that it was one trying period in our nation's history. The story is pretty plain and simple Marine Captain Bob Hyde(the very strong Bruce Dern in probably his best performance ever)leaves for Vietnam left behind is his wife Sally(Jane Fonda)who finally volunteers at a local hospital. At this veterans hospital she meets Luke Martin(Jon Voight)who's a smart, likable yet desperate man who while as a former sergeant suffered a war injury that left him a paraplegic. Now battered with rage and filled with anger and never ending frustration, slowly yet surely Luke finds comfort and new hope in the arms of Sally as it even leads to passion and intimate romance.This whole new change for both transforms the film and all those involved into a new direction, as the feeling of life and love blend full circle with the horrors and impact of war. To intersect and complicate matters when Bob finally returns home the trio all now are faced with the brutal impact of war, life, and change. In the end a different direction of thought and life is taken for all. Clearly this film displayed a loud and clear message about the impact of war and that military service is not all what it seems as the impact and damage done to one's life is forever as when one watches they should consider and take to heart the message of the film proving that war and military life is brutal and ever lasting. "Coming Home" is one outspoken truth revealing drama not to be missed.

Coming Home is a drama film that stars Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern. The screenplay is based loosely on the novel of the same name by George Davis.It was directed by Hal Ashby.The plot examines the impact of the Vietnam War among the men who fought it and the women in their lives. Left alone in Los Angeles when her gung-ho Marine husband Bob (Dern) heads to Vietnam in 1968, proper wife Sally Hyde (Fonda) decides to volunteer at the V.A. hospital where her new friend Vi works. There she meets Luke Martin (Voight), a former high-school classmate and Marine who has returned from Vietnam a bitter paraplegic. As their relationship grows, Sally sees the effect of the war on the soldiers after they come back, inspiring her to rethink her priorities; Luke's spirits begin to lift, and a hospital tragedy helps focus his anger toward meaningful protest. After a Hong Kong visit with her increasingly withdrawn husband, Sally finds a love and companionship with Luke that she had never known with her husband. Once Bob comes home with his own injury, however, the three must find a way to deal with a changing world and with a system that betrayed the men fighting for it. The film ends with Bob swimming out into the ocean in utter despair, presumably to kill himself. As Sally enters the supermarket at the end, the two doors close behind her, accidentally forming the symbolic phrase "Lucky Out". She and Luke are now free to pursue their romance.Coming Home is an excellent film which illuminates the conflicting attitudes on the Vietnam War debacle from the standpoint of three participants - Sally,Bob and Luke - and how it has affected their lives. It also has stellar performances from Fonda and Voight,who won Oscar for their role in it.Overall,it is classic film about the scars the Vietnam War left on the bodies, minds, and souls of many soldiers and civilians.

Not all wars were dealt with the same way by cinema, and I don't mean just in their reflection of public opinion. In World War Two Hollywood got fully involved in the propaganda movement, and movies made after the war looked mainly at reliving the heroism involved. By the height of the Vietnam war, Hollywood was more independent and the war was widely criticised. During wartime this was manifested in numerous examples of veiled anti-militarist commentary, but very little actual reference to the conflict itself. And even when the war finished, it was a couple of years before pictures about it started to be made, but when they did, the Vietnam war movie soon became a prolific subgenre in its own right. Coming Home was one of the earliest, and yet it remains one of the most honest and heartfelt. Made the same year as Oscar-sweeper The Deer Hunter, it dispenses with that picture's before-during-after structure, to focus purely on the aftermath.Coming Home has as its director the very direct and compassionate Hal Ashby. I don't know how Ashby would have handled a Vietnam action movie – he never really did anything so ostentatious – but his total focus here on the humanity of the situation makes the lack of some contextualising violence superfluous. Ashby does not use many extreme close-ups, but he is a master of a kind of shot that nevertheless makes a character dominate the screen, with Spartan backgrounds and few camera movements. He doesn't draw our attention too much to the undignified position of the veterans, and their wheelchairs seem almost coincidental in the shot, although he has a great knack of dropping in a reminder so subtly it looks unintentional. For example, there's a shot where Jane Fonda is wheeling along a paraplegic who is complaining about the lack of information he's been given about his situation, and just as he comes fully into view, we see her stick a "bowel and bed" sign on the end. Zoom lenses were overused in the 70s and their use often looks corny today, but Ashby spares them for moments when you are so totally absorbed in the scene you are unlikely to notice. There are a lot of reaction shots in Coming Home, often while a character continues speaking offscreen, for example during the pool-playing veterans conversation in the first scene, and Ashby really helps to make this a picture about reactions and reflections.This straightforward focus on people pays off in the superb acting performances. What's great about Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, is that their performances are so uncomplicated, unlike much of what passed for good acting at the time. They don't have the obviously improvised look of Robert De Niro or the deliberate gestures and mannerisms of Meryl Streep. They simply believe in their characters and act out the script. The result is that they come across as totally believable. Voight brings through such an amiable personality, and Fonda has such honesty to her every action, that we forget the potential awkwardness or inequality of a relationship between a disabled person and an able-bodied one, and simply see two people falling in love. The only over-the-top performance in the picture is that of Bruce Dern, but it works very well to make this character slightly ridiculous, giving a quality to his rage that is pathetic rather than truly threatening.And after all it is Bruce Dern who is really the most tragic figure of this story. The screenplay by Nancy Dowd, Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones is bookended by his leaving for Vietnam and his coming home. In the opening credits, the recording of The Rolling Stones' Out of Time seems to imply that he's the "poor, deluded" one. He may be a bit of a pompous fool, and the antagonist as far as Fonda and Voight's affair goes, and yet he becomes curiously sympathetic. While Voight's character makes his psychological recovery, Dern becomes a victim, not so much of the war but of military life.It's this kind of humanist insight that makes Coming Home what it is. In 1950 there was a movie with a similar plot called The Men, which looked very frankly at the harrowing circumstances of a man made paraplegic in World War Two. Coming Home however does not go into the gory details of disability or even particularly highlight the indignity of Voight's condition. The heart of the movie is in scenes like Voight crying to Robert Carradine's guitar playing, or getting some cheeky kids to help him with his shopping. Even the scenes of protest against the war are not nearly as polemical as in Born on the Fourth of July, but more a sombre reflection of the times. It is less like The Men, and more like Vietnam's version of The Best Years of Our Lives. It's a picture about social cohesion, and the healing of wounds after conflict has ended.