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February 5, 2009
Oscar Challenge: The Best Years of Our Lives
When we last left our intrepid hero and heroine, they had just suffered through the mostly loathsome The Lost Weekend. It *tried* to be the first actually modern film in Oscar history, but it's so cliched and melodramatic that it totally failed and is really just, well, cliched and melodramatic.
So we've seen a couple of war movies in the last 20 or so years. We've seen Wings, which is more an OMG LOOK, MAW, WE CAN MAKE A MOVING PICTURE than a statement about The Horrors of War. We've seen All Quiet on the Western Front, which is really and truly a testament to the stupidity and futility about a criminally unnecessary war. We've seen Cavalcade, which is set against a backdrop of wartime horrors, but it's Noel Coward and the witty dialogue inspired us to throw some creme de violette into some Champagne and christen a new cocktail. Mmmm, zeppelin-tastic.
We get Gone With the Wind, which is not so much about The Horrors of War than about how totally hot Vivien Leigh is, then eventually we get to the two brilliant pieces of "Wars Suck, But This One Is Totally Justified - ACK! HITLER! INORITE?" propaganda that are Mrs. Miniver and Casablanca.
AAAAAnyway. The Best Years of Our Lives. All I knew about it was that it's about WWII vets coming home from the war and having not so great a time, and that the guy who plays the Navy guy with two prosthetic hands is a real guy, not an actor, and he really lost his hands in the war (and he won an honorary Oscar because the Academy thought he was awesome and deserved an award but didn't think he would get the Best Supporting Actor award that he was nominated for because he wasn't a professional actor (whatever that means) and then he WON Best Supporting Actor anyway and he totally deserved it, and I also have seen (a hundred times) the scene where Myrna Loy greets her returning soldier husband, which is a masterpiece of physical characterization. She hears the doorbell ring, and suddenly she realizes that her husband has come home, and she comes into the hall and all the tension she's been carrying since 1942 comes flooding out of her eyes, her legs, her hands, and her slightly uncoiffed hair. I could see this scene a thousand times and learn something new about acting every time.
I had few preconceptions of this movie, and I've been watching a lot of movies made about the war during the war, whose message is undeniably "We must fight and win this war, and all our sacrifice will be worth it and if you don't agree, you're an unpatriotic wanker."
But then all of a sudden there's a scene in this film where an infantry soldier's son gives him a lecture on the evils of nuclear war, and then another in which a sailor with no hands and an Air Force officer are mocked for having been suckers who fought on the wrong side of the war. It's shocking and weird and unsettlingly modern.
But it's not modern. Aside from the stark clarity of the deep focus cinematography, what makes this picture resonate is the eternal notion that veterans have always come home from war feeling like outsiders and always will. This is exactly what All Quiet on the Western Front is about. The boy who has been forced to endure the trenches visits his home and realizes that he doesn't fit in, will never fit in, that war has ruined him for civilian life. But unlike Paul, who is pointlessly slaughtered and therefore spared, the three men in "The Best Years of Our Lives" have to live and survive and cope with a world in which they don't entirely belong.
Comments
I say this with total sincerity; great insights. Now I'd like to see The Best Years of Our Lives just to see that scene.
Posted by: Bob at February 7, 2009 12:16 PM