Jane Fonda, Coming Home

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Stanley Kauffmann

“If there is one film out of recent Americn experience that one could say was waiting to be made and that now could be made, it is a full-length fiction film with Jane Fonda on the Vietnam War. We’ve all known for some time that such a film was en route…; special expectations, unlike those for any other film I can remember, attached to it. The expectations were not overly specific—the film could have dealt with any aspect of the terrible Vietnam decade, toward the end of clarification through art or adequate memorial through art—but the hopes were high. Now the film is here, and in virtually every way it’s a severe disappointment.

“Advance publicity told us that, in Coming Home, Fonda was playing a Marine captain’s wife. It was possible, on that slender foundation, to build three or four different scenarios. Obviously it was not Fonda’s responsibility to fulfill any of those private scenarios, though in the most complimentary sense, it was her responsibility that one imagined them. What is her responsibility is that, after her public activity in the Vietnam years, after our rightful expectations of hehr, the Vietnam film she chose to appear in is a shaky sentimental triangle drama that could, essentially, have been about theWar of 1812….

“…. I’ve rarely seen a big scene handled more ineptly than the one in which the maddened husband, bayonted rifle in hand, faces wife and lover. Nothing was linked; the three people seem to be hanging in space individually, especially Fonda.

“Fonda’s performance seems—and I admit this may be my projection—crimped by the role’s careful sterilization. There’s nothing much more than Jane Wyman pertness at the start, to which is later added some Elissa Landi soul. I choose ‘30s references [Jane Wyman in the ‘30s?] because, under the ’68 trappings, a perennial movie-movie is what Coming Home is.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, March 4, 1978
Before My Eyes, pp. 118-120

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