Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 3-June-07
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Coming Home (1978)

With all due respect to the boy from Tatooine, the coolest Luke from the late 1970s is the jock turned paraplegic veteran in Hal Ashby's wrenching drama "Coming Home." Embodied with brilliance by Jon Voight, Luke Martin defines the hero whose worth lies in having returned from Hell determined to preserve his dignity and humanity. "Coming Home" is built around a love story, but its central message concerns the sad consequence of a war like Vietnam where the only heroes it makes are the ones who never stop fighting.

The film begins with the departure for the East by a Marine captain named Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), a straight-laced fellow whose whole life has been geared towards proving himself as a soldier. He leaves behind a tender wife Sally (Jane Fonda), whose whole life has been geared towards Bob. With him gone, she looks for something to occupy her time and energy and decides to volunteer at the V.A. hospital. She has the ideal personality for the job. Naive but intelligent, kind but honest, Sally offers no pity to the angry, wounded men she attends, just enthusiastic TLC. In fact, the arrangement is mutually beneficial, for they help her blossom into her own person as she has never done before.

In what must be Hollywood's only amorous meeting involving a catheter bag, Sally runs into Luke on her first day of work and remembers him from high school. He was the golden captain of the football team back then, whereas now he's confined to a stretcher and apt to rip a person's head off at the slightest provocation. Her insight into his altered state makes him particularly intriguing (along with his monstrous sex appeal), and soon they develop a tenuous attachment. After visiting Bob in Hong Kong, where she feels powerless to help him through the trials he's facing at the front, Sally begins an affair with Luke that's as much about love as liberation.

Ashby knows a thing or two about life-changing romance — he directed "Harold and Maude," after all — and he depicts the affair with an expressive eye for details like the way the lovers' bodies intertwine. He also makes excellent use of music to establish the era and punctuate the action, and of his stars, who both received Oscars for these roles. The characters seem like everyday people, but they have so much at stake and so much hardship in their past and future. When Bob comes home under suspicious circumstances, his wife's infidelity is the least of his problems. The triangle he completes is not about who loves Sally most or whom she loves most, but rather which man can cope with his part in the war and remain standing by her side (psychologically if not physically). The movie shows that although home is where the heart is, the man who has lost his soul hasn't anywhere to go.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.