MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Welcome Home’ Hits Plight of MIA Veteran’s Return

Something sad and fine seems to be echoing around inside the Vietnam family drama “Welcome Home” (citywide). There’s a compassion and sensibility splitting through the banalities of its story and dialogue, like pure tones in a dull and featureless darkness.

The last film of the late director Franklin Schaffner, it’s a thinly written variation on the “Enoch Arden” theme: What would happen if a pilot, shot down over Cambodia and missing for 17 years, returned to confront his wife and her new husband? In the movie, Kris Kristofferson’s Jake Robbins--a small-town football hero--is now, unsettlingly, home: an embarrassment for the service, and also for his wife (JoBeth Williams) and son (Thomas Wilson Brown), who prefer to remember him as a dead hero, enshrined on the Vietnam War Memorial.

The writer, Maggie Kleinman, fastens on her gimmick as if it were provocative and new, instead of a Victorian plot device ancient when D. W. Griffith first filmed “Arden” back in 1908. And because she’s so reverent with her characters, they remain abstractions: the good but unheroic soldier; the good father (Brian Keith); the good but troubled, sensual wife; the good but threatened husband (Sam Waterston); the resentful and sharp-tongued but basically good son; the good and compassionate senator (Ken Pogue) and even--in a flood of fine fellowship--the tyrannical, deceitful, but basically good-hearted colonel (Trey Wilson) who runs the cover-up on Jake’s identity.

Goodness pours from the script like cream from a country pitcher. It slops over all the inconsistencies and hoary plot devices, suffocating the life out of these people before they speak. Without this lubrication, we might wonder about Jake’s patron, Sen. Camden, who seems to work without aides or a schedule, flies worldwide on a moment’s notice, and decides to help Jake after they meet on a jogging track.

Kristofferson gamely plays Jake as passive. He escapes Cambodia without volition, borne to the Thailand border, unconscious, on a litter, reticent and apologetic about everything. This is a promising beginning for an offbeat character--as disaffected and wounded as the voyeur James Spader plays in the intellectual cult hit “sex, lies and videotape.” But Kleinman probably doesn’t see Jake in those terms. Instead, he’s a victim: a poor guy, trapped in an awful war, who needs a fairy godfather of a senator to bail him out.

The script doesn’t really have dramatic confrontations. It has therapeutic tableaux, where the characters make crucial life decisions and reach out for what they most need--frequently a hug. But something about it is moving, anyway.

Schaffner was dying of cancer while he directed “Welcome Home” and, in a way, you can feel him working his way toward the kind of subject he used to do best: before his Oscar for “Patton,” before his submergence into big-budget liberal epics in the ‘70s and before his disastrous run of ‘80s movies--”Sphinx,” “Yes, Giorgio” and “Lionheart”--that were near-parodies of his former excellence.

Here, we almost see again the Schaffner of the ‘50s and ‘60s. If the words aren’t there, if the characters are too obvious, there’s still a kind of relief. We can feel his simple pleasure at the chance to frame a father and son against a slowly flowing lake, or to suggest the unease of a man who will never again feel at home in his old hometown.

In parts of the film--the Kristofferson-Keith scenes, especially--there’s a quality that suggests the mute but sorrowful resignation the Japanese call mono ne aware , the guiding mood of the Buddhist film maker Yasujiro Ozu. Mostly it’s sub-surface, a matter of rhythm and image. And it can’t transform “Welcome Home” (MPAA-rated R for sex and language) or save it from the script’s small talk and creaky twists. But it’s nice to sense that feeling, to see, at the end, even a failed attempt at the idealist themes and human stories with which Schaffner and his generation were most truly at home.