Coming Home

Rating:
Summary: Comming Home
Review: Great movie. The music make the whole movie. Great 60's music and story. I enjoyed Bruce Dern as the Captain who goes to Vietnam gung ho and comes back with a different attitude. Jane Fonda and Jon Voight are great.

Rating:
Summary: Hal Ashby's Stunning Masterpiece
Review: Hal Ashby's greatest work is about the Vietnam War, and manages to top both Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and Cimino's "Deer Hunter" by never giving in to the impulse to actually portray the horrors of Vietnam, thereby rendering them a sort of entertainment, no matter how gruesome or awful they are. While Cimino's unspeakable and propagandistic war scenes in Vietnam sparked a host of unintelligent imitators throughout the 80s (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, etc), few have attempted to revisit Ashby's approach in remaining entirely on the home front (with a brief sequence in Hong Kong) and allowing Vietnam to go unseen. Ashby's Edenic images of happiness and love between Fonda and Voight are all we need to know, in a way, to recognize just how monstrous Vietnam must have been. The monstrosities remain an abstraction, different and specific to every veteran, their violence unrelenting, endless, indescribable, locked in the psyches of these poor, ordinary people who now have to put their lives back together. While there are political overtones to this film, the real idea is much more sophisticated than a typical "anti-war film." Ashby is really acknowledging how incommensurate life is with the uncontrollable forces that not only dictate what happens, but what we think we want. Both Voight and Dern's characters go off to war as patriotic Marines, convinced of their worth; both return to a world in which nothing makes sense and (almost) no one is around to lend a hand in their reacclimation. The film argues that war is necessarily trauma (a fascinating idea) that has to be expunged, one way or another, upon arrival back into peacetime society. Dern's breakdown in one of the film's most pivotal scenes is more powerful and convincing a testament to the perversity of Vietnam than all of the gore and Asian-bashing that Coppola and Cimino can put together between them. Jane Fonda's incredible performance hits all the right notes as someone who boldly braves the distance between what she has been told the world is like and what it actually is. To watch her expressions and reactions is to witness a sublime depiction of self-becoming, and points beyond the specter of war that the men of the film remain mired in.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Protest.
Review: I don't usually get as excited about movies as I have been about this one. The war is actually kind of remote in this movie, as a marine officer says TV is what it is like, but TV sure as hell doesn't show what it is. Jane Fonda was an outright opponent of American military policy in Vietnam, and I believe that an American military victory in Nam would have been awful in ways that no real American could understand. This movie just picks away at a lot of little things about the time in which that war took place, and in which the war itself was often treated as a minor matter of administrative routine in a larger geopolitical policy picture which didn't really care much about Nam one way or the other, but it was something. This movie makes it one of those things that gets so outrageous in things like a crazy suicide and the F.B.I. reporting what is on the tapes they make that the sense of revolt against the whole ideology is overwhelming. I liked it because I wish that any protest against something could be this good, but fat chance.

Rating:
Summary: COMING HOME
Review: I love the movie. It is pretty much a realistic story of people who were involved in the vietnam war.Though, I am looking for the soundtrack.If you know where I might find this audio cd or cassette, I would buy it!email/[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Most moving of the Viet Nam films by far...
Review: I realize that some folks' contempt for Jane Fonda has caused them to feel equal contempt for this movie... Dont let it... Regardless of one's perspective on Fonda's political position(s) over the years, "Coming Home" is nonetheless the most poignant of all the Viet Nam movies.

Made in a period before the subject had been done to death (especially in the 1980s, where pretense, posturing and insincerity reigned), "Coming Home" which, as per its title, takes place almost entirely on American soil, get the mood, and late-60s "look" uncannily correct.

Focusing on a paraplegic vet (Jon Voight) who falls in love with a married and not-worldly army nurse (Fonda) while her officer husband (Bruce Dern) is overseas, the Oscar-winning "Coming Home" is its era's equivalent of 1946's "The Best Years of Our Lives"... Some may consider that blaspemous, but it isn't-- at all.

Too bad this movie seems to be buried now... Is it because of the done-too-much-since-then subject-matter, or is it bias against Miss Fonda? I dont know. But despite all those other Viet Nam films that would come along, this a (rare) classic take on that period-- a period now so long ago.

Rating:
Summary: A must-see film
Review: I remember seeng this astounding and outstanding movie in 1978...I just viewed the DVD release(anamorphic 1.85---Dolbly digital mono) and was moved to tears once again.. Oscar-winning performances by Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, with a tremendous Bruce Dern and a soundtrack vintage 1968. If you're looking for a "special" movie, this is it..

Rating:
Summary: Coming Home
Review: I saw this film many years ago, and don't remember whether I've yet seen it on video. I remember it being a profoundly moving movie with excellent portrayals of people seeking what they need to be happy and others realizing their reality is not satisfying anymore. I liked Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and Bruce Dern in roles that were realistic and poignant. Look for excellent scene at end of movie with Bruce Dern accompanied by the music of The Rolling Stones.

Rating:
Summary: Coming Home
Review: I saw this movie when it first came out. My husband had been in vietnam. I think it was a great movie. It had a great sound track that captured the music of the times. I've been searching for the soundtrack but haven't been able to locate it. Any suggestions where to look?

Rating:
Summary: One of the best movies about the effects of the Vietnam War
Review: I've seen quite a few movies dealing with the subject of the war in Vietnam but this is the best by far. I love the realism in this film and how effective the plot of the movie plays into the lives of the two main characters. This is one of the best films ever made period, the acting,writing and directing is superb on all counts. John Voight is brilliant in this movie as the bitter paraplegic. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1978, which I was glad that he did because he truly deserved it. Bruce Dern (in his Oscar nominated role) is also wonderful and very convincing even Jane Fonda who I have never been fond of was very good. This movie was directed by the late Hal Ashby and Waldo Salt wrote the terrific screenplay. This film is excellent in every way and it would make a great addition to anyone who collects great movies such as this one.

Rating:
Summary: The Vietnam hell strikes in your eyes !
Review: Jon Voight and Jane Fonda made a collosal tour de force with this merciless and incisive portrait about an ex-soldier who comes from Vietnam transformed in a living wreck .
One of the most shocking films ever made about the final effects of a war in the human soul , far beyond the physical wounds .
A must see .