Over the weekend, I watched the movie The Best Years of Our Lives on TCM. (Here is their page on the movie, complete with trailer and clips.) I recall having watched this once before, and that I wasn’t thrilled by it then: it seemed to me that war heroes (at least WWII movie war heroes) should be returning home to parades and fanfare, not the difficult adjustment process that the three main characters went through in the course of this movie.
And yet, watching it this time through, with my recent deployment behind me, I was blown away with the reality of it. Everything about it was familiar: from the instant rapport with other service members of shared understanding of the experience you’d been through, to the pained strangeness of coming home to all that which is familiar and comfortable, to your slipping back into the place where you belong, albeit altered by your time at war. And granted, my experience was shorter and different in feel than any of these characters’ would have been, but it felt really familiar to me. Someone involved in the process of making the film had to have experienced this firsthand, because it really was mind-bogglingly familiar.
And what’s so weird to me is that I can see clearly that you can’t completely understand the movie unless you’ve experienced that. The commentators briefly mentioned how “war leaves scars that can never heal” or something to that extent, how war changes people, physically and mentally, forever… Which seems to me to be a rather odd message to extract from the film. From what I saw, it is more about the fact that, even though adjusting back after a charged and life-altering experience like war can be difficult, it’s just a matter of sticking it out and getting through that first bumpy transition.
The movie’s overall tone is overwhelmingly hopeful… The men and women in it are (with a couple exceptions) outstanding examples of the kind of person of character that I aspire to be. Particularly the women in it–what strong, noble, steadfast souls they represent! It’s a pity that (as I noticed in the course of watching it) the only woman in the film who really feels contemporary is the horrid and shallow nightclub-waitress wife of one of the characters (who eventually declares brazenly that she’s divorcing him, since he’s not making life “fun” enough for her). Speaks well of women of the past couple generations… Sigh.
But back on track: the movie is great and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s had a deployment and homecoming in the past.
Posted by Kjirstin 
