Homecoming a slippery take on identity

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This article was published 10/11/2018 (2841 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here was my first thought watching Homecoming, the sinuously hard-to-classify series currently streaming on Amazon: this is Julia Roberts, but this is not Julia Roberts.

Roberts was a huge star in the 1990s. Like many women in Hollywood, after hitting 40 she seemed to disappear, occasionally showing up in smaller roles or smaller films but no longer headlining big hits.

The 51-year-old Roberts makes an extraordinarily effective comeback in Homecoming’s lead role. Much of that effectiveness comes from the way the series messes with her Pretty Woman star persona, simultaneously calling back to it and quietly dismantling it. There’s a bit of get-things-done Erin Brockovich here, a whiff of the conspiratorial mood of The Pelican Brief (also an actual pelican, which is both disturbing and hilarious), an ironic shout-out to the gelato scene in Eat Pray Love, even a smidge of Mystic Pizza.

But it’s all just a bit off. And that off-ness really works, because that’s what this unsettling, intelligent, eminently bingeable show is about.

Part slippery conspiracy thriller, part affecting emotional drama, part sci-fi freakout, Homecoming balances expertly on the line between the real and the not-real. Examining what happens to identity when perception is faulty and memory becomes unreliable, the series deliberately keeps viewers slightly off-balance.

Just for starters, the show is called Homecoming, which suggests the warm embrace of a Lifetime movie but actually denotes something much chillier. Homecoming is the name of the sinister facility at the core of the story, and everything from its isolated, secretive location to its fake-cheerful corporate-speak suggests shifty, for-profit shenanigans.

Adapted from a popular podcast created by Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz — really, is there anything podcasts can’t do these days? — the story centres on Heidi Bergman (Roberts), an earnest, well-intentioned caseworker at a facility where soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are assisted in the difficult transition to civilian life. Or so it seems.

Heidi is particularly drawn to Walter Cruz (Stephan James), a young soldier who is smart, funny and upbeat but also admits to intrusive, repetitive thoughts about driving his head onto the sharp corner of his bedroom desk. Meanwhile, Heidi fields frequent phone calls from offsite boss Colin Belfast (Bobby Cannavale), an almost cartoonish caricature of cutthroat capitalism who combines clichéd corporate boosterism (“Fist bump!”) with glints of teeth-baring menace.

We also see Heidi in the near future. Having retreated to her mother’s small-town home and a waitressing job at a grim greasy-spoon cafe, she looks stricken and sad.

The series — a self-contained first season made up of 10 nicely concise half-hour episodes — toggles back and forth between these two time periods, circling around whatever terrible and traumatic thing has brought Heidi from her Homecoming job to this subdued state. When a dogged investigator from the Department of Defense (Shea Whigham) shows up with some questions about her old job, Heidi seems unclear on her experiences. That was all “years ago,” she says vaguely, though that number turns out to be only four.

The series is directed in its entirety by Sam Esmail, known for the twisty, mind-messing Mr. Robot, and he brings loads of handsome visual style to the project. It’s not just style for its own sake, though, but another way of keeping the viewer unsure.

From the immaculate production design to the lush, soaring strings of the series’ 1950s-style score, Homecoming is deliberately stagey and artificial.

The script plays around with realness and fakeness, from Walter’s comic invention of the movie Titanic Rising, supposedly a blockbuster sequel to the 1997 hit Titanic, to a creepy sequence that hinges on the fact that big swathes of Florida are just cheap post-modern simulations of old-time Americana.

Homecoming keeps you unsure. While the plot delves into the true nature of the Homecoming corporation — whatever it’s covering over with all that “Thank you for your service” talk — the larger issue is the true nature of identity.

“I’ll be in my car right when I wake up, and it’s like I appeared out of nowhere,” Heidi says at one point, with a kind of melancholy bewilderment. “My life feels phoney and fake.

“Where’s the real one?”

Roberts’s fascinating central performance also asks us to think about realness. There are traces of the Roberts we recognize, and then there’s this other woman. And this is not because Roberts is now 51, and not the lanky young ingenue she once was. Roberts does look older, as she should. She also looks very much like herself.

The real difference is that she spends much of her screen time tamped-down, dour, depressive and unsure. At a crucial pivot point in the series, Roberts finally turns the full glory of her Pretty Woman smile on us – but it’s for all the wrong reasons. Taking Roberts’s star power and turning it inside out, Homecoming has weaponized that famous smile.