Movie Notes: The Best Years Of Our Lives

August 13th, 2010

= 5 stars

Starring Myrna Loy, Frederic March, Dana Andrews
Directed by William Wyler

Synopsis

After World War II, veterans Al (Frederic March), Fred (Dana Andrews), and Homer (Harold Russell) return home to their respective families, hoping to pick up where things left off.

The Good

• The three returning soldiers are from different walks of life, with different homes and situations waiting back home. Each soldier’s experience proves different: because of several mix ups, one doesn’t reunite with his wife until an hour in, another gets a promotion to a bank, while the third faces unemployment, a collapsing marriage, and post-traumatic stress syndrome. I soon became caught up with the characters and invested in their eventual fates.
• I recently watched several World War II movies which increased my appreciation, as I kept imagining depictions of what the soldiers had experienced in the minds of these characters. Even without the modern-day allowance for graphic content, the film depicts war with an unsettling minimalism — one soldier lost both his hands and therefore makes do with hooks, a constant visual reminder of their wartime past.
• Wyler displays a directorial knack for painful, romantic yearning (Wuthering Heights, Roman Holiday). One scene where some soldiers play on a piano in the foreground is undercut by the sad image of another in the background, trapped in the corner, making a depressing phone call to a lover. This scene is echoed during the conclusion, where the main characters are positioned perfectly across the foreground and background, reflecting past experiences and potential futures. The use of deep focus is likely due to cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane).
• Acting standout: Myrna Loy, as a wife biting her tongue when dealing with a much-changed husband (in particular, he’s taken to drink).

The Bad

• Occasionally swings towards melodrama, there’s one cheesy, stagey scene when the daughter tells her parents she’s going to break up a marriage. The heartache is more effectively illustrated in future scenes without hysterical dialog.

Conclusion

Yet another classic I’m slapping my head for not seeing before, thinking a war movie from 1946 would be dull, unable to leverage the graphic realism we’re accustomed to today. But much to my surprise, this film compensates with a permeating sadness — the knowledge of the horrors of war is held just beneath the surface in every scene, even when they contain the most mundane events.