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SEARCHING FOR HOME: COMING BACK FROM WAR Send This Review to a Friend
Documentary filmmaker Eric Christiansen’s “Searching for Home: Coming Back from War” surveys an array of soldiers who have served in combat and struggled to resume lives on returning home. Some bear physical wounds, some psychological trauma or a mixture of both. The interviews emphasize the impossibility of training soldiers to be killers and then expecting them to fit back into society unchanged. We observe veterans of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. There is a common thread of the toll taken and one feels for those who served and must come to terms with their lives afterward.
That said, at times the film seems more numbing than illuminating. Christiansen has chosen as his style presenting snippets of interviews edited so that they switch back and forth in categories, and thus the film, for all its poignant truths, becomes choppy. It would have been far more effective, I believe, if we had been given straightforward interviews with subjects so that we could have a flowing portrait of each person and family in whole segments and get a total picture without constantly being pulled away to someone else.
Also a creepy, incessant score underlines virtually the entire film, presumably to set a somber mood, but whatever the intention, it takes away from the focus on the veterans. What they say certainly doesn’t need an annoying underscoring. It is quite another thing to intersperse war scenes to stress the horrors of battle.
“Searching for Home: Coming Back from War” has important things to say, and even flawed, vital points are made as we get to see the human toll on specific individuals and the need for society to address their problems with more dedication. But the well-intentioned, sporadically effective film could have been much better. Reviewed August 24, 2015.
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