Pauline Kael

“Jane Fonda isn’t playing a character in Coming Home, she’s playing an abstraction—a woman being radicalized. The time is 1968, the place is Los Angeles, and she’s Sally Hyde, the proper repressed wife of a hawkish Marine captain (Bruce Dern). Sally has been married for several years but has no children and nothing to do after her husband leaves for Vietnam, so she volunteers for work in the verterans hospital. On the day she signs up, she crashes into Luke (Jon Voight), who was an athlete when she knew him in high school and is now a paraplegic in a rage of helplessness. She discovers that the men injured in Vietnam are embittered by neglect, and that the other officers’ wives, frozen-faced, sitting in their club all groomed and primped, don’t want to know about it. As she works among the men, her identification shifts away from the idle-class women. She trades her sexless, crisply laundered clothes for T-shirts and jeans; she stops straightening her hair and lets it frizz up and tangle. Dramatists have always had a terrible time showing their characters “growing,” and have usually had to resort to speecheds announcing the interior changes; movies can spred the transformation, more novelistically, over a period of months or years. Sally Hyde graduallyl (and entertaingly) loses her inhibitions, but she develops only to the level of doctinaire awareness which has been reached by the people who put Coming Home together, and this means that the character has a hollow tone—the same inauthenticity that the home-front heroines had in Second World War movies. Fonda develops that sorrowing-woman smile. The other characters are playing abstractions, too….

“…. Coming Home … has a Waspy glaze to it—a soft, pastel innocuousness, as if all those involved were so concerned to get the message across without offending anyone that they have fogged themselves in. Jane Fonda’s face seems a little vague and pasty, as if she didn’t want to stand out too much; her features seem to have disappeared. She’s trying to act without her usual snap, and the result is so unsure she comes flutteringly close to a Norma Shearer performance….”

“Ashby’s mood scenes can be very personal and touching; a sequence with Luke on the hospital basketball court telling Sally that he’s being discharged from the place and Sally on the other side of the fence telling him that she’s going to Hong Kong to see her husband does everything it needs to do and more—the feelings spill over, and stay with us. The whole picture is evocative of that messy time; it’s permeated with free-floating anxiety, and Luke’s stricken eyes serve as an emblem of the country’s guilty confusion. Coming Home idles, it goes from scene to scene intuitively, romantically, until Sally’s visit to Hong Kong; after that the cutting is often like a door slamming in our faces…. And what is Sally doing in the scene in which she stands holding out her arms to her husband? Every time there’s a cut to her, obediently playing statue, we can practically hear the director thinking, Time stands still; this moment is an eternity. Bad moments are the real eternity….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, February 20, 1978
Taking It All In, pp. 402-403