The Dark at the End off the Tunnel

By Frank Rich

COMING HOME Directed by Hal Ashby Screenplay by Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones

In his 1975 comedy Shampoo, Director Hal Ashby drew a scathing portrait of privileged Americans living in selfish bliss during the Viet Nam War. Shampoo was set in Beverly Hills against the pointedly ironic background of the 1968 presidential election; its characters were upper-middle-class philanderers whose lives revolved around the chic local beauty salon. Throughout the film, sad news from Southeast Asia blares forth from radios and TV sets, but no one in Shampoo bothers to listen. They are all too busy getting ready for a Nixon victory party that night to care about a war that seems a million miles away.

Coming Home, Ashby's latest film, is the flip side of Shampoo--and its perfect companion piece. Also set in Southern California in 1968, the movie is about those unfortunate Americans who could not escape the war's deadly grasp: the men who fought in Viet Nam and the women they left behind. Like Shampoo, Coming Home offers a devastating vision of this country's recent social history, but the new film is no comedy. Coming Home is, as its material dictates, one long, low howl of pain.

The movie centers on Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda), the wife of a volatile Marine captain (Bruce Dern) who goes off to Viet Nam determined to bring back a Communist machine gun as a souvenir. Sally had been a typically docile service housewife, living in a ticky-tacky base apartment, but her husband's absence forces her to change her ways. She takes up volunteer work at the base hospital, makes new friends and asserts her independence by renting a beach bungalow and buying a sports car. More daring still, she falls in love with Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a bitter paraplegic Viet Nam veteran who turns her against the war her husband is fighting.

Sally and Luke's romance is the heart of Coming Home. Though the illicit affair of a beautiful woman and a cripple is potentially mawkish stuff, Ashby usually does not allow his story to become overly sentimental. He does not view the couple's relationship as a panacea for all their emotional problems, and he refuses to shy away from harsh detail. When Luke finally leaves his wheelchair to join Sally in bed, the hero's handicaps bring the ensuing sex scene an added poignance.

The director's clear-eyed approach is further enhanced by the sharp acting of his cast. In the film's dominant performance, Voight shows Luke's pious arrogance as well as his tenderness; if the character were too sweet, he would be as gooey as Gershwin's Porgy. Fonda, though unconvincing in Sally's pre-liberation scenes, ultimately brings her character's horrifying internal conflicts to the surface.

Even Dern, stuck with the same crazy-soldier role he played in Black Sunday, manages to keep his anguish from seeming canned: as he realizes that both his wife and the war have betrayed him, the character's manic energy evaporates. Dern perfectly captures the unnerving calm of a man who has lost the will to live.

At times Coming Home is too ambitious for its own good. The screenplay not only spins the tale of a tragic love triangle, it also attempts to chronicle Sally's growing political radicalization and her feminist-styled friendship with another woman on base (Penelope Milford). In the film's second half, the narrative extravagance takes its toll. Contrived plot devices, including the suicide of a minor character and the sudden intrusion of malevolent FBI agents, spring up to jerk Coming Home toward its conclusion.

Once the finale does arrive, it turns out to be a cheat. The story's relationships are not satisfactorily resolved, and we are left with a melodramatic denouement that recalls, of all movies, the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born. It is quite a comedown from Coming Home's superb opening sequence, in which maimed veterans heatedly debate the war over a game of pool.

There are also occasions when Ashby reaches for cheap ironies. Luke's passionate lovemaking is glibly contrasted to the mechanical bedroom manner of Sally's husband. The vintage rock songs on the sound track, while important to the film's sense of period, are sometimes used to comment upon the action too literally.

Yet none of these flaws rob Coming Home of its considerable bite. Whenever the movie starts to lose its way, Ashby stages a powerful scene to bring the war back home. In one of them, Sally meets her husband in a sad Hong Kong hotel room while he is on leave from the front.

"My men were chopping [the Viet Cong's] heads off," Dern announces, almost matter-of-factly, "and that's what they were into." In another, Luke speaks before an assembly of high school boys, counseling them to avoid the draft. "There was a lot of shit over there I find f-- ing hard to live with," Luke tells the kids, as his voice starts to crack. "But I don't feel sorry for myself. I'm just saying that there's a choice to be made." At such moments Coming Home, like Shampoo before it, reminds us of the choices everybody made during those harrowing war years -- and of the price the nation paid thereafter.

-- Frank Rich

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