COMING HOME Movie Review

Coming Home and the Aftermath of War on Screen

The other sections of this book deal with specific wars or parts of wars. This one is devoted to the aftermath. What do the participants—both winners and losers—do with the peace? How do they handle the internal and external changes that war has brought about? It's a complex subject, and it has inspired some excellent films.

Two of the best were made in 1946. Edmund Goulding, who had been wounded in World War I, handles Somerset Maugham's novel, The Razor's Edge, with a confident touch. The idea of a veteran (Tyrone Power) going to Paris to find the meaning of life has become a cliche, but it's a cliche in large part because Maugham, Goulding, and Power make it seem so attractive. The addition of a solid ensemble cast makes this one of those perennial favorites that'll keep you up late on a weekend.

William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is universally regarded as one of the finest films to come out of World War II. It's gotten better with age. This is popular entertainment taken to the highest level by a craftsman in complete control of his medium. The story of three returning veterans and their families is told with a complexity that reveals more of itself with every viewing. The same can be said of the post-war thriller, The Third Man. Beyond the famous zither score, Orson Welles's portrayal of the morally blighted Harry Lime combined with director Carol Reed's vision of a desolate Vienna and Graham Greene's perceptive script makes this one of the finest and most watchable films of the late 1940s.

Judgment at Nuremberg explores the most difficult moral questions in a courtroom setting. The subject is the degree of guilt shared by German citizens for the atrocities of the Third Reich. Beyond the matters of who did what, the film suggests that no one's hands—not even the victors'—are perfectly clean. Again, that depth of complexity is almost never expressed in American films.

It certainly is nowhere to be found in Hal Ashby's Coming Home, where leftist politics preclude a reasoned view of the America that Vietnam vets returned to. Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July can be criticized on the same grounds. He and writer Ron Kovic wear their outrage on their sleeves. Though it is impossible to deny the injustices they show, their moral certainty is not so self-evident.

In Courage Under Fire, Edward Zwick shows how the pressures of combat—in this case, the war with Iraq—can place individuals in situations that cannot be judged by civilian peacetime standards. Zwick and writer Patrick Sheane Duncan (84 Charlie MoPic) combine elements of serious drama with a flashback-heavy plot. They tell interrelated stories of an officer (Denzel Washington) racked by guilt for his own failings, real or imagined, and a dead helicopter pilot (Meg Ryan) who is either a hero or an incompetent coward.

Once the busy details of the plot have been worked out, the film is reduced to family. Do the experiences of a war destroy the family, or is the family group able to withstand the pressures? That, finally, is the story that all of these films tell. They arrive at radically different conclusions—some happy, some believable, some neither—but all of them show how the effects of war spread far beyond the battlefield into the home.