William Devane did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying Major Charles Rane in Rolling Thunder.
Rolling Thunder, though only co-written by him, is another entry into the Paul Schrader "Man on a razor's edge" subgenre, this time about a returning POW from Vietnam who finds a less than warm welcome home.
William Devane, a character actor with a very precise and particular voice, plays the returning war vet Major Charles Rane who comes home after years of imprisonment and torture over from Vietnam to a hero's welcome. Devane enters the film with a calm demeanor, a proper soldier with a stiff manner as he accepts his plaudits, without a hint of either the trauma or pride one could connect to his situation. Not a mistake or an error by Devane rather a most effective choice of presenting a man going through the motions of the return, that suffers below the surface of the pageantry as he almost immediately finds out that his wife has been cheating him, his son has been raised by this other man, and she intends to stay with this other man. All of this leaves Rane with barely a reaction, again not an error but rather a fantastic choice where Devane alludes to the entire existence of a man who has dealt with his horrible imprisonment by nearly breaking from reality. Devane's performance has an exceptionally subtle manner that alludes to just the hint of all that Rane is keeping in even as he so calmly seems to accept this horrible plight. The only minor respite is with his son where Devane plays this hint of warmth, a genuine warmth, but the only warmth that he can get out of loving his son. Even then though Devane presents this effort Rane to connect still, a connection he wants to make but still struggles to make.
Unfortunately because Rane lives in the Schraderverse, not everyone wants to let Rane just live with his accomplishment and his gifted silver dollars as his home is raided by a group of sleazy thugs. An event that leaves both his wife and his son dead, and Rane with his hand being put in a garbage disposal. Devane's performance is again effective in the way he plays the character's trauma below the surface of the character in this pent up intensity, as he maintains his composure even as this horror is going on around him and to him. Devane presenting the man who managed to live through his torture as a prisoner, though in no way a well man, just held together by the barest vicious conviction. The horror does seem to give Rane final purpose in his life as he goes about looking for the men who committed the heinous act, with the help of a local woman Linda (Linda Haynes) who is obsessed with him. Devane suddenly plays the soldier in a way as he enters these scenes as a man of action and combat. Devane brings this precision in his violence of a man with intention and purpose suddenly. Like the warmth he released for his son that he had to find, Devane presents this alternatively, though quite effectively as a man's set gear as he goes about using his trauma for this violence that he commits with this exact intensity of a man who has a reason to live oddly enough.
Where this seems like the film's chance to really get going, it doesn't. Partially in the romance with Linda, which is too idealized for essentially stemming from an obsessed fan, though I think both actors are fine and Devane is more than fine as he doesn't compromise the character in these scenes, they just aren't quite there on a writing level. The film also gets frequently derailed by a subplot of his deceased wife's lover also trying to help out Rane, where the character is just boring and the scenes truly feel like filler to get the film to feature length. What keeps the film afloat is Devane with his excessively official manner of speaking that works in line with crafting this character of the soldier who can't escape any element of that in the war or in civilian life. Eventually the film even gets to the point when he recruits his old squad-mate Tommy Lee Jones to, in the character's words "Kill a lot of people". Something they eventually do, and leading to the film's climax is a bizarre piece that one would perhaps attempt to ask the director what he was going for, and I would guess maybe he wouldn't even entirely know. You certainly don't feel bad about Rane and his buddy murdering these guys, since these guys are made to be the absolute lowest of the low, but at the same time, perhaps just the strength of Devane's performance, is that it doesn't feel heroic revenge either. As Jones and Devane both bring this glee to the scene and accentuate the moments of torturous shooting particularly as such with each man showing they're having the time of their life. Although this too is then subverted with the immediacy of the ending, where we get a corny 70's song to close out their rampage that is completely tonally dissonant and I can't be sure that was intentional. Regardless, what Devane does in the finale entirely works, much like his entire film in creating a captivating portrait of a man broken as a soldier and only able to find any life being a soldier even after his theoretical war has ended.
