Film

Coming Home

A Marine wife's slow awakening while her husband is at war, and the paraplegic veteran who becomes both her lover and her conscience. Jane Fonda and Jon Voight carry a film that's less about combat than about what combat does to the people left standing at home. Quiet, aching, and still one of the most honest American films about Vietnam without a single jungle scene.

TMDb rating7.0

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The Deer Hunter1978

The other great 1978 Vietnam film, and the one that goes into the war itself rather than staying home. Devastating, operatic, and impossible to shake once you've seen it.

But Three hours long and genuinely harrowing — this is not a comfortable evening in front of the TV.

The Deer Hunter poster

Born on the Fourth of July1989

Tom Cruise as a wounded, radicalised veteran in Oliver Stone's furious, personal companion piece to this film's quieter grief. Same wound, louder scream.

But Stone doesn't do subtlety — if Coming Home's restraint appealed to you, this may feel like being shouted at.

Born on the Fourth of July poster

The Best Years of Our Lives1946

The template for every homecoming drama since, made while the wounds were still fresh. A real disabled veteran plays one of the leads, and it shows.

But Black and white, unhurried, and the postwar optimism sits differently than Coming Home's bitterness.

The Best Years of Our Lives poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Pride of the Marines1945no page yet

The same triangle — wounded veteran, waiting woman, question of whether love survives disability — three decades and one war earlier, minus the cynicism Vietnam earned.

John Garfield plays a Marine blinded at Guadalcanal, wrestling with whether the woman who loves him can really want a broken man. Made while WWII vets were still coming home to test it out.

But Wartime propaganda instincts pull it toward uplift where Coming Home refuses to flinch.

More like this (8)

Platoon1986

If you want the war Sally never sees firsthand, this is it — grunt-level, morally exhausted, and drawn from Stone's own tour.

But Relentlessly violent with none of the romantic softening — a very different kind of film.

Platoon poster

In Country1989no page yet

A teenage girl trying to understand her dead father's war through her damaged uncle, with Bruce Willis quietly excellent. The homefront grief this film explores, a generation later.

But Slower and more melancholic than dramatic — it simmers rather than boils.

Cutter's Way1981no page yet

A one-armed, one-legged Vietnam vet turns amateur detective in this shaggy, paranoid neo-noir. Underseen, brilliantly acted, genuinely strange.

But Tonally all over the place by design — comic, tragic, thriller-ish — which won't suit everyone.

Da 5 Bloods2020

Spike Lee sends Black Vietnam veterans back to the jungle decades later to confront what the war actually cost them. Angry, sprawling, unmistakably his.

But Runs long and swings hard between heist movie and history lesson — some seams show.

Da 5 Bloods poster

Full Metal Jacket1987

Kubrick's cold, precise dissection of how the military makes men before it breaks them. The other half of the story Coming Home only shows the aftermath of.

But Icy and detached where Coming Home is warm — admire it more than you'll feel it.

Full Metal Jacket poster

First Blood1982

Before Rambo became a cartoon, this was a genuinely sad film about a veteran nobody wants back. Stallone's best acting, buried under muscles.

But Action-movie bones mean it resolves its grief with a body count rather than a conversation.

First Blood poster

Hearts and Minds1974

This is the real war Luke and Sally's story unfolds against — the same moral reckoning, stripped of romance and told by the people who actually lived it.

A documentary made while the war was still happening, interviewing soldiers, villagers and generals with a fury that fiction has to work harder to earn. It won the Oscar and still stings.

But No characters to hold onto, just testimony and atrocity — a much colder, angrier watch.

Hearts and Minds poster

The Waterdance1992no page yet

Same subject — a man's paralysis and the identity crisis that follows — but told from inside the ward rather than through the eyes of the woman who loves him.

Eric Stoltz, Wesley Snipes and William Forsythe as newly paralysed men learning to live in a rehab ward, based on the screenwriter's own accident. Funnier, ruder and more clinical than you'd expect.

But No love story to soften it — this is about bodies, catheters, and dignity, not romance.

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