Coming Home (1978)

 This film was both brilliant, realistic, tragic and disappointing.

It is 1968, and the US is at war with Vietnam. Sally Bender Hyde (Jane Fonda) decides, more on a whim, to volunteer at a hospital which treats wounded veterans. Her own husband, Bob (Bruce Dern) is a captain and is now overseas himself and is proud to serve. And he doesn't want her to work while he's away, but she clearly has other ideas. The scene when she goes to volunteer is a scene in which you cannot take your eyes off the screen, not even for a millisecond. She walks into Luke Martin's (Jon Voight's) urine bag and he flips out. Turns out that Sally went to high school with Luke (what are the odds?) and she befriends him as he slowly recovers and gets released and starts to protest the war. The two even begin an affair while Bob remains overseas before finally returning home with a minor injury. But he's not himself anymore, drinking too much and still sleeping with his pistol, which doesn't freak Sally out as much as you would think. 

The ending is both predictable and ambiguous. While Luke tries to urge high schoolers to take the war and their involvement in it seriously, while Sally buys steaks for a cookout and Bob strips his clothes and goes into the ocean, just like in at least two versions of A Star is Born, so that way of implying that he was committing suicide is just stupid and besides, there was already a suicide, the brother of Sally's friend, Vi (Penelope Milford), Billy (Robert Carradine, years before he was the father on the Lizzie McGuire show), who is suffering from sort of mental breakdown and commits suicide in the worst way, as his friends bang on the office door, desperate for a nurse to come around and shoots a syringe full of air into his veins, dying by the time help finally arrives. So while Bob killing himself may have been realistic as he refused Sally's help, livid that she cheated on him while he was away, upset that he belongs nowhere, but I still felt that another suicide was just too much for this film. 

Despite my issues with the ending, the acting (especially Voight) is brilliant and four of actors were nominated for Oscars (with Voight and Fonda winning), and they were all well-deserved awards. And the film is painfully realistic, with the gritty hospital scenes and difficult performances that seem effortless to the actors is so small feet, too bad the ending was just too problematic for me. Grade: B+

Side Notes:

-This film also shows how difficult it was to be in a wheelchair before all the regulations they have today.

-We never truly learn how Luke and Bob got injured in the war. 

-The weird subplot of Luke being spied upon should also been developed more, though it was a twist the film did need. 

-The subject of children is never discussed in this film.

-When Bob returns from the war, he reacts more strongly to Sally's hairstyle change than to her new car.