Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Rolling Thunder (1977)

Charles Rane (William DeVane) is one of two soldiers returning to the U.S. after being released from a Vietnamese POW camp. It's not an easy return; his son was a baby when he left and looks more naturally to a state trooper that's taken up with his mother, Rane's wife, in the interim. Rane can't sleep, and stays in his workshed because it reminds him of his cell.

He gets a big box full of silver dollars at some public ceremony, which makes him the target of some guys looking for quick cash. He won't tell them where the box is hidden, even when they jam his hand in the garbage disposal. His son, not understanding the situation when he arrives home, does tell them, and the thieves shoot them all, though Rane doesn't die. And thy were kind (read: stupid) enough to mention where they were going and who they'd be seeing, so he knows where to start looking, as soon as he learns to use the claw hand he's got.

The quieter moments, where DeVane gets to show how out-of-place Rane feels, work pretty well. The awkward conversation with his wife the first night back home. She tells him she saved all his back pay, and bought him a big box of Mounds bars, because he loved those. And he sits there, and all his responses are muted, and she eventually gets around to what she's been building up to the entire time: admitting she and the state trooper are together now. And Rane just kind of shuts down. Doesn't want to deal with it.

There's a different woman, Linda (played by Linda Haynes) who describes herself as his "groupie" (then has to explain the term to him), who tags along on his revenge trip without really understanding what he's doing. She keeps trying to get him to forget about this and let the police handle it. It never works, but she can't bring herself to either walk away or call the cops herself like she threatens.

Rane eventually turns to a fellow soldier and POW (played by Tommy Lee Jones) who returned on the same flight, and they take care of things in the big, final shootout. But the interactions between them are interesting in comparison. There are a lot of silences, but it doesn't feel strained. Jones doesn't rush to fill them like everyone else does. He waits and lets DaVane choose if he's going to talk or not. Or the two of them sit in a room of Jones' relatives, all chattering about the poor quality of American-made goods, and Jones and DeVane are just silently watching each other the entire time. Jones knows there's a reason DeVane's there, and he's ready. Everything else is just chatter. At the end, as they stumble out, the shoulder DeVane gives Jones to lean on is probably the most natural-looking physical contact either character demonstrates in the movie. If you didn't know better, it could be one guy helping a friend who had one too many make it out to a taxi.

But the pacing and some of the choices are just so odd. There's a subplot about the state trooper/new husband guy trying to track down Rane, only to get gunned down by one of the thieves before ever getting close to catching up. It comes off as, "we need a brief action scene, but we don't want to kill anyone important yet." That character is basically irrelevant. Rane doesn't care about him one way or the other, so why should we?

The first bar Rane goes to, the one the guys mentioned as meet-up point, they aren't there, but he gets the name of a different bar. He goes there, he finds one of the guys, who is not surprised at all to see him, likely because the guys at the last bar called ahead. Rane gets the claw grip on the guy's nuts enough to use him as a shield, but then lets him go and bails. And this is not apparently meant to goad them into chasing him onto a battlefield of his preference, because it doesn't happen. I mean, what the hell? The element of surprise is gone. If he's really wanting to die - and I'm not sure he isn't - the numbers will still be against him when he catches up to the rest, even with Jones' help.

It's strange, because he told the cops he didn't remember anything about the men who attacked him, specifically because he wanted to do this himself. But it doesn't seem like all the time he sat on the information resulted in any sort of a plan. He's not some efficient, ruthless killing machine, but he's also not some raging berserker. He's a slightly more competent, or just better-armed, version of the main character in Blue Ruin. Just sort of doggedly moving forward on this path, dealing with the messes his previous actions create as they arise.

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