Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Kris Kristofferson, who died this week, made a lot of movies, worked with some excellent filmmakers, and distinguished himself by mining the particular kind of lanky gravitas he could bring within his range. That was plenty. Going through my old reviews, I found this piece on an extremely obscure 1989 release, Welcome Home, one of the many post-Vietnam hangover movies of that era. It was the final film directed by Franklin Schaffner, and also the final film of Trey Wilson, from Raising Arizona. As you can see, at the time I thought it had…something. It certainly has Kristofferson, and some other good people, too. This piece originally ran in The Herald in September 1989.
Welcome Home is a film so without irony, so without hipness, that it could be mistaken for a soap opera from the 1950s. Except for its subject matter, that is, which tells of a soldier in Vietnam who was lost behind lines in 1971 and presumed dead.
The soldier (Kris Kristofferson) emerges in Thailand 17 years later. He has spent his time in prison camps and later in hiding in Cambodia, where he married and had two children. The sore point: He also has a wife back in Vermont, who thinks he has been dead all these years.
The movie’s main matter is bringing Kristofferson back to the United States and letting the dramatic chips fall where they may when he reappears. His father (Brian Keith) gets over the shock readily and happily, but the wife (JoBeth Williams) is, understandably, shakier. She’s remarried (to Sam Waterston), for one thing; then there’s a son, now 17, whom Kristofferson knows nothing about.
The revelation of the son is entirely predictable, and a lot of the hubbub surrounding the wife-with-two-husbands business seems hyped up. The film also lays on a side plot about a military coverup of Kristofferson’s re-emergence that seems to exist purely to have something else going on.
With all of that, Welcome Home should be a bad movie. It may very well be a bad movie. I must say that I found it so completely unaware of its own implausibilities, so unashamed of its melodrama, that it was effective, even moving, on its own terms. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
Williams and Waterston are capable as always, Brian Keith is better than he’s been in years, and Kristofferson – well, he’s nobody’s idea of a master thespian, but if you want to communicate the immediate sense of a scorched soul, he’s the man. The script, by Maggie Kleinman, often skirts around the sizable clumsiness of some scenes with economical, stripped-down dialogue.
Welcome Home is the last film from Franklin J. Schaffner, a generally solid craftsman who enjoyed a brief time in the upper echelon of American directors (he won the Best Director Oscar for Patton). Schaffner, who died earlier this year, won’t be remembered as one of the greats, but he made some entertaining movies and he always showed a strong sympathy for the outsider. As a sendoff, Welcome Home is nothing to be ashamed of.
October 4, 2024
