Vol. 46 No. 2 1979 - page 279

JONATHAN BAUMBACH
279
heroine's liberation comes when she makes love (graphically, as if we
needed to know how it might be done) with a handsome paraplegic
(Jon Voight). As in most contrived works of this sort. the characters
have no felt past, discover the world as if they were born the moment
the film was threaded on the projector. No one apparently ever told the
heroine (Jane Fonda) or her war-loving officer husband (Bruce Dern)
that officers don ' t fraternize with enlisted men or officer's wives with
enlisted men's women friends. The characters' behavior is in the service
of the necessities of plot. In its pursuit of Truth,
Coming Home
is
constrained to sacrifice particular truths. At the outset, when we need
to be shown the implications of the war, the Jon Voight character is a
wild man at the hospital, crazed with self-contempt. When the plot
requires it, he is transformed into a figure .of stability and wisdom,
upon which the other physically and emotionally wounded rely. The
film's main, thought disguised, concern-it is what we as audience are
made to want-is the erotic coupling of the two central characters.
When Fond's stiff-necked patriotic husband returns, we are faced with
the conventional soap opera triangle. Instead of being outraged-true
to character though banal as narrative-the broken-spirited officer
takes his wife's betrayal as an indication of his own deficiencies. The
Fonda character insists high-mindedly that she still loves her husband,
has always loved him, though we've had no experience as audience of
any love between them. The film manages to have it every way at every
turn.
Coming Home
moves toward its resolution with a succession of
cross-cuts in which we see alternately Dern prepare himself for a
suicidal walk in the ocean and Voight tell a high school class about the
horrors of Vietnam. Dern's plot-convenient death is meant
to
seem a
casualty of the war, I imagine, a token illustration of Voight's moving
lecture. The real message of course is that the husband is out of the way
and that the wife and the sympathetic lover can now be together
without violating the rules.
Coming Home
rewards our suffering with
an implicit happy ending. The ingredients of manipulation are so
blatant I'm surprised more hasn't been said about them-sex and
inspirational content, eros and sentimentality, voyeurism with a
catharsis of tears.
One further note. Almost all of the films of some distinction that
played in New York City in the past year were eventually made
available to Seattle audiences, either through the Festival or in com–
mercial runs. At this writing, the Cinema 2 in New York City is
announcing the American premiere of a minor French film called
Bonjour Amour.
The fact is that
Bonjour Amour
premiered in the
Seattle Film Festival a month earlier. Provincialism is everywhere.
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