The Best Years of Our Lives (1946): Eitan's Take

The Best Years of Our Lives blows the lid off of "The Greatest Generation" in two profound and contradictory ways: first, it shows us that the generation -- long known to be obsessed with its own stature and role in history -- was filled with mundane and shortsighted little folks just like you and me, lost in the world, dealing with typical challenges like finding jobs, falling in love with the right and wrong people, and approaching the future with both caution and excitement. And, secondly, it shows us that these people were not like my generation at all; tortured by the global inhumanity of war, they focused inwards, too caught up in their own selfish interests to engage with the world in a progressive or intellectual way. The film, following intertwining lives of three men -- one from the Air Force, one from the Navy, and one from the Army -- in the months after their return from the not-so-front-lines of WWII is an ambitious project, in that it tries to capture the entire essence of a certain place and time (the foreplay leading up to the reproductive madness of the Baby Boom), but it's crippled by how dated its ideas, characterizations, and central issues have become.

Of course, there are wars in every generation, and I understand the plethora of great Vietnam films more than I understand The Best Years of Our Lives because our country is still fighting demons dating back to that war (see: 2004 Election), and we still see its aftershocks in film, art, literature, politics, and war. I went into this film with a great load of hype surrounding it, and on an artistic level, I was truly not disappointed -- the performance of Harold Russell as amputee Homer Parrish is particularly great, with its dark subtlety and deep pathos, the cinematography and writing is uniformly excellent, and scenes like the assault in the ice cream shop and Al's drunken speech to his banking partners were laden with both curiosity and frustration about the new role of Americans in the global community -- but I felt oddly unmoved by the whole exercise, as though all of these events were just too far back for me to even grasp, let alone appreciate. It's great art, no doubt, and as an icon of its generation (it is to the 40's what The Graduate and Easy Rider are to the 60's, Coming Home and Nashville are the the 70's, American Beauty is to the 90's) it is a towering representative of all that the Academy must have wanted to reward in the crucial rebuilding years following WWII. Because I admire its rich characterization and powerful exploration of the psyches of new and unwilling veterans, I feel compelled to like it. Nevertheless, I have to admit that it just didn't click with me the way I expected it to. I will leave this film to a bygone generation and award it a respectable 7/10.