The Best Years of Our Lives

Two years after World War II ended, the Academy awarded Gentleman's Agreement the Best Picture trophy, a movie that tackled how, even though we helped liberate Jewish people from Nazi captors, antisemitism was still present in American life. It was a bold movie to make, challenging not only everyday society, but the hypocrisy behind a people being good enough to save from extermination, but not good enough to stay at a hotel. I knew nothing about it before I watched it, so it was quite a surprise, and a pleasant one, even if the movie didn't 100% commit to holding feet to the fire. So my surprise was doubled when I watched The Best Years Of Our Lives, which was released and awarded the same prize the year before, and dared to tackle the mental health of soldiers returning from the war, and the challenges of their re-integration into daily life. Not even a year after arms were laid down, and here's a movie asking hard questions about war and those who lived through it. Best Years looks at the lives of three soldiers immediately after returning home; Al Stephenson (played by Frederic March), an older man who was called to war and developed a drinking habit, Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a pilot who married someone in a whirlwind before the war and discovers she's not the woman he thought she was upon return, and Homer Parrish, a sailor who lost both hands in an attack and has prosthetic hooks in place. Their stories intertwine as they navigate a world that welcomes them back with open arms but doesn't have much use in the professional world for a ex-soldier, and isn't evolved enough to understand the mental health sensitivities of someone who has spent literal years in a state of combat. It would be naive to assume a movie made in 1946 -- when PTSD was still called Battle Fatigue -- would have the same level of analysis as a movie would forty years later. Best Years never once questions whether WW2 was worth it, and it does take a rather simplistic "pull yourself together!" approach, but that's to be expected. It wouldn't be until after Vietnam that America was willing, as a country, to admit that war was not the rollicking adventure movies and news reels made it out to be. So one has to temper their expectations with how Best Years approaches the topic, and appreciate that it's even willing, barely a year after the war was over, that it was willing to engage with the subject at all. In that regard, Best Years does a damned fine job with its subject. Not perfect -- some storylines sit idle for long periods of time, and there's no getting around the hand-waiving of their trauma -- but far better than one would expect. A large part of the movie's success is the honesty of the material and the cast being able to bring it to life. Al battles with memories of the war and struggles with fitting back in with a family that has not only gotten along without him for a few years, but where the children have become older and unrecognizable. Fred discovers the wife he idealized in the bomber capsule of a plane is not the woman he finds waiting for him when he gets home. And Fred has to come to terms with how his prosthetics will make daily life a challenge, and if it's fair to his sweetheart to ask her to not only be his wife but his caretaker. At almost three hours long, these stories and how they intertwine needs a strong cast, and Best Years has an acting arsenal at its disposal. Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Hoagy Carmichael, Virginia Mayo, Cathy O'Donnell, and more round out a fantastic cast of friends and family who are just as thrown off course as the three soldiers are, having to figure out room in their lives for their returning boys while understand what they've been through. There is both compassion (from the movie and the characters themselves) for the soldiers, but also an acknowledgement of the uncomfortable reality that they'd been gone so long, slotting them back into regular life wasn't just as easy as changing the toilet roll. Best Years is not going to rattle you to your bones, or change the way you think. Its small-town warmth is lovely, but also quaint. Its approach to trauma is certainly muted by today's standards, so the movie might feel a little toothless if compared to, say, the last 10 minutes of The Hurt Locker. But for the time, the fact this movie exists at all, let alone does what it does with its subject matter, is bold. And while it does suggest a happily-ever-after that would make teeth grind these days, it doesn't promise it by any means. And even if, for some reason, you can't displace your sense of history and judge it where it lives, the acting is still excellent. This was another pleasant discovery in my journey through the Best Picture.