Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

jasonastrange I've watched over 100 of the best films of the 1970s including every single Best Picture nominee and winner and Coming Home edges out every film to be my #1 of the decade.The film traces the lives of a paralyzed Vietnam veteran (Voight) who befriends a Marine wife (Fonda) whose husband (Dern) has just shipped off to the war. Their friendship blossoms into an affair and then back to a friendship again once they both realize that they can't continue on as lovers.The film is brilliantly acted by both Voight and Fonda and both deservedly won Oscars for their performances. Bruce Dern was also nominated for his role and, while The Deer Hunter is a brilliant film, did not deserve the award in 1978 for Best Picture. Robert Carradine also gives one of the best performances of his career and somehow managed to parlay it into the Revenge of the Nerds franchise. Hey, we're not all born smart, I guess.Loosely based on Ron Kovic's life, the film explores the effects of Vietnam not only on the body, but the mind and delves into how people can heal each other just by offering their time and attention to each other. Voight does a far better job than Cruise (Born on the 4th of July) in capturing the emotional impact of a devastating and permanent war injury. He serves as the all-wise and all knowing veteran who has seen the war for what it is, while Dern plays the part of the gung- ho soldier marching off to battle. Fonda holds the story together as a woman caught between the two worlds of early 1960s nationalism and late 1960s disillusionment. Hal Ashby scored a number of wins in the 1970's, but this film is his crowning achievement. A must see for any war film or history buff.Doc StrangeAnd the Losers Are

bkoganbing When all is said and done despite the Vietnam War and its aftermath for those who went and survived, Coming Home is your romantic triangle movie. Jane Fonda is married to Marine captain Bruce Dern who has been sent over to Vietnam in 1968 at the height of the hostilities. Wanting to do something to show she's behind her husband's endeavors, Fonda volunteers in a veteran's hospital and there meets paralyzed sergeant Jon Voight who is having trouble adjusting. She certainly helps him adjust.A lot of Coming Home with the veteran scenes is taken from The Men, the film about a VA hospital where in his cinematic debut Marlon Brando played a paralyzed veteran of Korea. That too was a war where we had no defined objectives in fact Harry Truman called it a 'police action'. Voight is a paraplegic just as Brando was, but as we find out at least there is one part of his anatomy that he and Fonda are grateful still functions.Which brings another movie comparison that of The Sun Also Rises where hero Jake Barnes is rendered impotent by his injuries. In the film adaption of that Hemingway novel Tyrone Power can only sit on the side as the woman he loves goes from man to man. Impotence is a subject even now most are reluctant to treat in film.But Voight helped by Fonda adjusts to his reduced life and in the end finds meaning and purpose. Dern who returns a medal winner cannot adjust and is inspired by Norman Maine. Both Voight and Fonda won Oscars for their roles, the best in leading categories. It is a pity Bruce Dern was not given a nomination as Best Supporting Actor. In many ways he outclasses both the leads in Coming Home.Coming Home could be remade today with the survivors of Afghanistan and Iraq. Just change those Sixties fashions.

Desertman84 Coming Home is a drama film that stars Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern. The screenplay is based loosely on the novel of the same name by George Davis.It was directed by Hal Ashby.The plot examines the impact of the Vietnam War among the men who fought it and the women in their lives. Left alone in Los Angeles when her gung-ho Marine husband Bob (Dern) heads to Vietnam in 1968, proper wife Sally Hyde (Fonda) decides to volunteer at the V.A. hospital where her new friend Vi works. There she meets Luke Martin (Voight), a former high-school classmate and Marine who has returned from Vietnam a bitter paraplegic. As their relationship grows, Sally sees the effect of the war on the soldiers after they come back, inspiring her to rethink her priorities; Luke's spirits begin to lift, and a hospital tragedy helps focus his anger toward meaningful protest. After a Hong Kong visit with her increasingly withdrawn husband, Sally finds a love and companionship with Luke that she had never known with her husband. Once Bob comes home with his own injury, however, the three must find a way to deal with a changing world and with a system that betrayed the men fighting for it. The film ends with Bob swimming out into the ocean in utter despair, presumably to kill himself. As Sally enters the supermarket at the end, the two doors close behind her, accidentally forming the symbolic phrase "Lucky Out". She and Luke are now free to pursue their romance.Coming Home is an excellent film which illuminates the conflicting attitudes on the Vietnam War debacle from the standpoint of three participants - Sally,Bob and Luke - and how it has affected their lives. It also has stellar performances from Fonda and Voight,who won Oscar for their role in it.Overall,it is classic film about the scars the Vietnam War left on the bodies, minds, and souls of many soldiers and civilians.

Steffi_P Not all wars were dealt with the same way by cinema, and I don't mean just in their reflection of public opinion. In World War Two Hollywood got fully involved in the propaganda movement, and movies made after the war looked mainly at reliving the heroism involved. By the height of the Vietnam war, Hollywood was more independent and the war was widely criticised. During wartime this was manifested in numerous examples of veiled anti-militarist commentary, but very little actual reference to the conflict itself. And even when the war finished, it was a couple of years before pictures about it started to be made, but when they did, the Vietnam war movie soon became a prolific subgenre in its own right. Coming Home was one of the earliest, and yet it remains one of the most honest and heartfelt. Made the same year as Oscar-sweeper The Deer Hunter, it dispenses with that picture's before-during-after structure, to focus purely on the aftermath.Coming Home has as its director the very direct and compassionate Hal Ashby. I don't know how Ashby would have handled a Vietnam action movie – he never really did anything so ostentatious – but his total focus here on the humanity of the situation makes the lack of some contextualising violence superfluous. Ashby does not use many extreme close-ups, but he is a master of a kind of shot that nevertheless makes a character dominate the screen, with Spartan backgrounds and few camera movements. He doesn't draw our attention too much to the undignified position of the veterans, and their wheelchairs seem almost coincidental in the shot, although he has a great knack of dropping in a reminder so subtly it looks unintentional. For example, there's a shot where Jane Fonda is wheeling along a paraplegic who is complaining about the lack of information he's been given about his situation, and just as he comes fully into view, we see her stick a "bowel and bed" sign on the end. Zoom lenses were overused in the 70s and their use often looks corny today, but Ashby spares them for moments when you are so totally absorbed in the scene you are unlikely to notice. There are a lot of reaction shots in Coming Home, often while a character continues speaking offscreen, for example during the pool-playing veterans conversation in the first scene, and Ashby really helps to make this a picture about reactions and reflections.This straightforward focus on people pays off in the superb acting performances. What's great about Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, is that their performances are so uncomplicated, unlike much of what passed for good acting at the time. They don't have the obviously improvised look of Robert De Niro or the deliberate gestures and mannerisms of Meryl Streep. They simply believe in their characters and act out the script. The result is that they come across as totally believable. Voight brings through such an amiable personality, and Fonda has such honesty to her every action, that we forget the potential awkwardness or inequality of a relationship between a disabled person and an able-bodied one, and simply see two people falling in love. The only over-the-top performance in the picture is that of Bruce Dern, but it works very well to make this character slightly ridiculous, giving a quality to his rage that is pathetic rather than truly threatening.And after all it is Bruce Dern who is really the most tragic figure of this story. The screenplay by Nancy Dowd, Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones is bookended by his leaving for Vietnam and his coming home. In the opening credits, the recording of The Rolling Stones' Out of Time seems to imply that he's the "poor, deluded" one. He may be a bit of a pompous fool, and the antagonist as far as Fonda and Voight's affair goes, and yet he becomes curiously sympathetic. While Voight's character makes his psychological recovery, Dern becomes a victim, not so much of the war but of military life.It's this kind of humanist insight that makes Coming Home what it is. In 1950 there was a movie with a similar plot called The Men, which looked very frankly at the harrowing circumstances of a man made paraplegic in World War Two. Coming Home however does not go into the gory details of disability or even particularly highlight the indignity of Voight's condition. The heart of the movie is in scenes like Voight crying to Robert Carradine's guitar playing, or getting some cheeky kids to help him with his shopping. Even the scenes of protest against the war are not nearly as polemical as in Born on the Fourth of July, but more a sombre reflection of the times. It is less like The Men, and more like Vietnam's version of The Best Years of Our Lives. It's a picture about social cohesion, and the healing of wounds after conflict has ended.