Jane Fonda, Coming Home

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Stephen Schiff

“Back in the late ‘60s, Jane Fonda was the most intelligent, visible and outspoken entertainment figure to oppose the Vietnam War. She made speeches, organized drives, went on an anti-USO tour of American troops and even journeyed to North Vietnam to film Introduction to the Enemy, a 1974 documentary sympathetic to Hanoi. If anyone in Hollywood had the knowledge and wherewithal to make a major cinematic statement on Vietnam it was Jane Fonda, and her Coming Home, filmed with activist cinematographer Haskell Wexler and liberal director Hal Ashby, promised to be one of 1978’s big events. But what may have begun as a bold political statement has turned out to be a tentative, toothless romance, an anti-Vietnam movie that wouldn’t offend the most vocal hawk…

“…. Trying to make a commercial, home-front anti-war movie, the filmmakers have wound up with a gimmicky, “greening of America” story. Fonda plays the prim, buttoned-down wife of gung-ho Marine captain Bruce Dern; she sports a Gidget haircut and insists on hearing the “Star-Spangled Banner” before her favorite TV station signs off.

[leaving out quite a bit on narrative details of her transformation; maybe include, to partially counter Haskell]

“Fonda’s transformation is fun to watch. She throws away her proper suits in favor of jeans and peasant blouses, lets her hair frizz, and gradually allows some of her familiar nerviness to trickle in. Yet this is the most pallid, reined-in performance she’s given in years. All long-suffering bravery, she tries to be a blank slate on which Vietnam can leave its marks. Such schematicism informs this film throughout: Coming Home is a blueprint for consciousness-raising and Fonda and Voight are demonstrator models.

“Only Voight transcends the manufactured feeling….”

Stephen Schiff
The Boston Phoenix, April 4, 1978
[left out some, as noted]

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