WERETALKINBOUTMOVIES
Critique de Jay Santiago
Less painful to watch, but equally engaging is Hal Ashby’s paraplegic love story Coming Home. Jane Fonda’s pet project was a by-product of her own commitment to the antiwar movement, and was inspired by her friendship with paraplegic ‘Nam veteran Ron Kovic (who Tom Cruise would go on to portray in Born on the Fourth of July). Where The Deer Hunter succeeds with grandiose production value, this film strikes a chord with its intimate exposition while still avoiding being overly sentimental. Yes, by all accounts, this is a romantic drama, but thanks to a restrained yet earnest screenplay that survived a handful of writers and several drafts (that sometimes were still worked on while filming was taking place with its leads Fonda and Voight pitching in lines of dialogue as well), it is a story that bears witnessing for its sincerity amidst brevity.
It triumphantly scored a Best Original Screenplay Oscar thanks to this collective effort. Fonda and Voight also deservedly took home the Lead Acting Oscars that year as well for their brave portrayal of two individuals who were searching for meaning in their disparate lives, and somehow wound up on the same page, both physically and spiritually. To say that theirs was just an emotional connection wouldn’t do justice to their performances. Their quest for meaning in a seemingly meaningless war during a confusing period in both their individual lives and in America’s as a whole, is nothing short of spellbinding. It takes an exceptional level of restraint, and an understanding of how life-changing the experience of another person’s struggles are to really effectively present a love story that goes beyond the usual trappings of romance. It is in this aspect that Coming Home truly shines: it is dressed up as an unlikely love affair set in one of the many VA hospitals that were inundated with injured veterans during the Vietnam War, but it is really a meditation on the search for redemption after the ravages of battle.
It’s hard to choose which film approached the war more effectively since both pictures paint an important portrait of this stirring time in American history. The Deer Hunter, despite its detractors, is still one of the most talked-about pieces of 1978, and I have to admit that to this day, its stark depiction of the horrors of war (however allegedly inaccurate) still made my skin crawl. And that’s what some of the best war films do; remind us of the atrocities of war to stir a sense of questioning in their necessity or validity. Coming Home, which I saw for the first time this year, was a genuine surprise. Its sensitive handling of the subject matter was punctuated by Fonda’s (and the rest of the team that she assembled through her own production company) obvious opposition towards America’s involvement in Vietnam. In a way, it seemed like the smarter way to get their agenda across, respectfully keeping their distance from onscreen depictions of the very conflict they were protesting, and bringing focus to the fact that the biggest battles are fought long after surviving soldiers are done evading gunfire.
