Julia Roberts has been entertaining the movie audiences for three decades now. For the first time in her career, she has stepped into the world of television as part of the main cast for Amazon Prime’s Homecoming. She has previously guest-starred in several shows, but, her role in the new thriller series marks a diametric shift, as leading Hollywood stars are looking to open their doors to let the breeze of the small screen envelope them.
Earlier this year, we saw Amy Adams slip into the shoes of Camille Preaker in HBO’s Sharp Objects; and, in Homecoming, similarly, Roberts stands in the center, with every character designed to move around her. She plays a counselor, named Heidi Bergman, who helps soldiers get back on the plane of civilian life. Her charming smile is used to its fullest extent as she wears it readily during her conversations with her patient-turned-friend Walter Cruz (Stephan James). Cruz also has a smile, which transitions from handsome to playful, and, it’s a delight to watch these two actors talk about road trips that they might take in the future.
Homecoming is divided between two periods – one, in 2018, where Bergman is settling into her job as a counselor at the homecoming facility, and, the second one in 2022, where she’s working as a waitress at a diner. While the 2018 portions are shot in the widescreen aspect ratio, the latter is boxed in a square as a visual metaphor since Bergman can’t remember much about her days as a counsellor. Her incapacitated view of what’s happening around her is presented on-screen in this amusing manner.
In the initial episodes, when Shrier (Jeremy Allen White), a soldier and Cruz’s roommate, argues that the programme is a scam, we don’t believe him. What could a bunch of soft-spoken people do to soldiers, after all? And, in the same way, when a bureaucrat (Shea Whigham as Thomas Carrasco) from the Department of Defense asks Bergman if she knows Cruz, outside the diner, she answers in the negative. At this point, we don’t know, like Shrier and Carrasco, what’s true and what’s not.
These nifty elements add to the intriguing nature of the series. Homecoming is based on the fiction podcast of the same name by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, and all the half-hour episodes of the first season are directed by Sam Esmail (the creator of Mr. Robot). The season ends on a hopeful note, albeit with a bleak twist, and I’m waiting to see what the mega heads behind this carefully crafted show are going to bring us in season two.
Carrasco, in particular, as an employee at an organisation that doesn’t recognize his skills, took my heart. He stops by at the diner to follow up on an anonymous complaint that’s lodged against the homecoming facility. From there on, you can see how patient and invisible he acts. Whigham plays him, with a sense of confidence, and not with a sorry face, even though he’s constantly made to feel small by his boss as she brings up his position in the office. In one of the last few episodes, he gets a chance to lose his temper and yell at Colin Belfast (Bobby Cannavale), Bergman’s former boss, as he gets ridicules by him for simply doing his job. But, Carrasco’s hard face doesn’t show any emotion and he stands there as if he’s turning a deaf ear.
Homecoming reminded me of Adrian Lyne’s Jacob's Ladder and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for different reasons – Jacob’s Ladder deals with soldiers and their traumas; whereasEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind digs deeper into what some people want to hold on to, and what they want to let go of. These two brilliantly written films may have inspired the creators of Homecoming, but Horowitz and Bloomberg have their own take on how certain factors of science fiction can scare the living daylights out of us.