FOURTH OF JULY SPECIAL: Joe Dante's "Homecoming" - A Look Back

It's one thing to make a horror movie about undead zombies who want to vote.  It's something else entirely to make those undead soldiers embittered Iraqi War veterans who want to vote out George W. Bush...and to film the movie in 2005, two years after Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked into gear.  Filmed as part of Showtime's Masters of Horror anthology series, what makes "Homecoming" so smart - and what gives it longevity - is the respect afforded the dead.  Most of the brave young ex-men we see (curiously, there are no female soldiers) have poise, compassion, and a sense of honor.  The main cast of Washington insiders observe these resurrected souls for a moment or two, and then they figure out how to spin the supernatural disruption into a victory for their team.  When that fails, they intern the undead, Guantanamo style.  Forget the zombies - these guys are the real ghouls.

The satire in "Homecoming" barely qualifies as such, given that the "heroes" are essentially real-life politicos with different names.  Bald bespectacled presidential advisor Karl Rove is now bald, bespectacled presidential advisor Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo).  Blustery blonde conservative Ann Coulter, author of Treason, is now blustery blonde conservative June Cleaver (Thea Gill), author of Subversion.  Smaller bits are similarly cut whole-cloth from reality.  Hero David Murch (Jon Tenney) complains about being called a dick on live TV (a reference to Jon Stewart's infamous appearance on Crossfire).  A Cindy Sheehan lookalike is rudely cut off, O'Reilly style, by a busy commentator.  There's a fun time capsule quality to the film - what's here is an accurate picture of the social landscape in 2005.  Indeed, "Homecoming" might be an entry in Masters of Horror, but it feels like a morbid op-ed from the Onion.

The film's premise comes from Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage," a disquieting short story about dead people rising in response to gun control laws.  Scriptwriter Sam Hamm keeps a few of the same beats and reworks the rest into an attack on the presumed duplicity of the Bush Administration.  Despite some token attempts at parity, most notably with a quivering liberal candidate with no history of military service, the film is nakedly anti-Bush.  There's a temptation to write this one-sided material off as tasteless, the exploitation and politicization of dead soldiers, but given that soldiers represent the foreign policy of the USA, isn't their politicization impossible to avoid?  Don't they inherently say something about military policy, merely by their presence?  Or even their absence?  Reflect on how the former ban on photographing soldiers' coffins is itself a political statement.  Even if intended to be respectful, it's the government literally hiding a cost of war. 

Back in 2005, a film like "Homecoming" was rare, but not without peer.  It broadcast a year after the release of American Idiot, Team America: World Police, and Land of the Dead.  However, those ostensible screeds lacked the focus of Dante's film.  American Idiot's rock opera story offered only two anti-Bush songs (the title track and "Holiday") before shifting from attacks on a "redneck agenda" into a broader tale of doomed romance and disillusionment.  Team America tweaked empty rah-rah American exceptionalism ("America, fuck yeah!"), but Stone and Parker were willing to switch their full attention to an excessive critique of priggish liberal actors...or drop all pretense of satire for puppet intercourse.  Probably the closest analogue is George Romero's Land of the Dead, but despite that film's use of a corporate high-rise as an symbolic target, Romero's chief interest was class warfare instead of the military kind.  Viewed today, that film is prescient.  Its disenfranchised zombie uprising prefigures the emergence of Occupy Wall Street.

Re-watching "Homecoming" years later, I'm struck not only by how passionately felt it is, but by the range of the satire, which veers from the incisive to the oppressively blunt.  There's a scene where John Tenney's David Murch offers a quiet summation of George W. Bush's persona.  "He's not stupid - he has a gift for making stupid people think they're as smart as he is."  Marty Clark (Terry David Mulligan) is a convincing composite of cable news reporters, with his inability to challenge pundits and his oddly mannered cadence (echoes of Wolf Blitzer).  One of my favorite bits involves a corpulent priest invoking the zombie resurrection as proof of Christianity.  After the zombies start voting against Bush, he dismisses them as Hell spawn.  Elsewhere, Jane Cleaver levels a shotgun and screeches at "maggot-infested zombie dissidents!"

I'm also struck by the relative tightness of the story.  The film juggles its main premise alongside intriguing arcs for David Murch and Jane Cleaver.  As his blase attitude gives way to compassion, she self-improves (if "improves" is the right word) from a vulgar loudmouth into a sly usurper, stealing Murch's job from right under him.  Concurrently, the viewer gets progressively larger hints that something tragic lurks in David's past.  I admit, the needless voice-over narration frustrates.  It exists mostly to justify the opening action stolen from the film's final reel.  This is a common device used to start a slow-burn story with a "bang" ("Chocolate" from Masters of Horror similarly starts at the violent end and rewinds the tape), but I don't think it's necessary.  It's an acquiescence to screenplay how-to's and juvenile audience members.

After the critical success of "Homecoming," Masters of Horror doubled down on satire in its second season, covering controversial subjects like revisionist history ("The Washingtonians"), abortion clinics ("Pro-Life"), and the Terri Schiavo case ("Right to Die").  Even Hamm and Dante dipped back into politics, albeit gender politics, with an unsettling adaptation of "The Screwfly Solution," a story about a plague that turns men into misogynist psychopaths.  None of these episodes, however, offer the firecracker energy of  "Homecoming."  There's genuine fun in watching Beltway sleazeballs getting theirs, complete with broken necks and shattered skulls as punishment for their sins.  The closing images are gloriously cheesy, with the government in seclusion, Washington overrun with "reinforcements," and a zombiefied "Spirit of '76" that would be facepalm-inducing if it wasn't so damned cheerful.

However, for all these outsized attacks lobbed by the filmmakers, it's the reserved approach to the soldiers that I value most.  They're quiet.  They're deeply sad.  They're in pain.  A soldier explains that they don't communicate because it hurts to speak.  One sequence stands on its own, outside the drama.  The government's locking up zombie soldiers, and a wayward refugee takes cover in a restaurant.  The restaurant owner and his wife take pity on him - they have a son like him in the war.  They cover him in a blanket, offer him coffee.  Everyone else treats him like a pawn, but they learn his name.  They see him as he is.  A young man named Michael.  There's no traditional horror in "Homecoming."  The horror comes from watching soldiers sacrificed to a bunch of conniving middle managers in a global game of "friend or foe."