Coming Home (1978)
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Coming Home Movie Review
Coming Home is a 1978 romance film directed by Hal Ashby and starring Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern. It’s a solid, but ultimately overly clichéd effort.
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“You know, I spend 95% of the time at the hospital
thinking of making love with you“
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It follows a young woman who starts an affair with a paralyzed Vietnam War veteran after her husband leaves for the marines. Yes, this is one of those love triangle movies meaning that it’s very familiar, frequently annoying and mostly just tired. Now, it isn’t terrible and is in fact better than most such love triangle movies, but it’s still far from great and particularly that third act is troublesome.
I really disliked that third act which featured an obvious, overly emphasized, melodramatic conflict and it just felt overly aggressive and not particularly realistic. I definitely liked the second act best as the romance is quite sweet at times and some scenes are quite touching. But the first act is slow and it really takes a lot of time to start things going. So yes, only the second act is pretty good and the part where the movie shines the most.
The movie features Oscar nominee Bruce Dern and Oscar winners Jane Fonda and Jon Voight. It’s thus a rather elite movie when it comes to the Academy Awards and especially the acting categories. And although not inspired or truly fantastic, I certainly agree with the critics praising the three as they are all very good.
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Well, Bruce Dern not so much as his character is most definitely an annoying caricature. He did the most he could with such a thankless role, but still I wasn’t satisfied. But Jon Voight is very strong with his realistic, powerful performance and Jane Fonda steals the show as a very strong, powerful female character, rare for the seventies. She’s the focus and the highlight of the entire film.
But I wouldn’t call Penelope Milford’s performance Oscar-worthy as the character just isn’t as important in the movie itself. I don’t mind her being nominated, but she didn’t really deserve it. And of course the movie winning for Original Screenplay is absolutely ludicrous as the story is the absolute weakest part of the movie. Not only is it uninspired, but the political aspect to it is, as many have said already, overly on-the-nose and not sophisticated at all.
The nod for Best Picture is also ridiculous and I definitely found ‘The Deer Hunter’ a much better Vietnam War film from the same year. The editing is also pretty bad as the film is frequently padding and its runtime is bloated, not to mention that the focus is frequently lost and leading to many boring, unnecessary scenes. So yes, only the main acting nominees are deserved here with the rest being overrated.
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Coming Home is well shot and I really liked the emotion in the film. My highlights include the romance between the protagonists and especially the sex scene which is brave for its time in more ways than one obviously. It is a sex scene involving a paralyzed person as well as an early scene featuring female orgasm. For those reasons, I appreciated it against all odds. But the score in the movie is so bad as it’s aggressively on-the-nose with the sixties hits playing constantly that it really annoyed me.
Coming Home has a very strong second act with the romance being excellent and the sex scene is one of the highlights. The standouts are Oscar winners Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, both giving terrific performances. But the plot is your typical love triangle, the movie lacks sophistication and it’s overly on-the-nose – both in its politics and in its particularly over-the-top soundtrack.
