AFI Top 100: #37
War movies can be some of the greatest, technical spectacles in the history of film, as their tendency to use the vastness of the world to their advantage is often impressive. However, what impresses me most is when filmmakers are able to use the timeliness of world events to make a film unlike anything audiences could expect. William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is a very different kind of wartime film and one that entirely focuses on the effects of war on veterans returning home. Set in a small town and placed within the drama genre, this film does a fantastic job of following its characters' stories as they navigate post-war life and try to readjust to the working class. However, I really do not think that this movie had enough interesting substance to warrant a full three hours. Wyler's direction and pacing of this film are incredibly slow and I found myself frustrated with the unnecessarily extended subplots. The melodrama of it all did not really work for me either, but if there is one thing that this film does great, it's present a unique vision of what a war film from this era can be.
Returning home from WWII, three veterans named Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), Al Stephenson (Fredric March), and Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) bond on the plane flight and end up becoming friends, as they live in the same small town. As the three of them have many troubles readjusting to civilian life and finding their place in a postwar world, they also have to navigate their refreshed relationships with the people that they left behind. If there is one, overarching element of this film that I genuinely appreciate more than anything, it's the representation of veterans coming home from war and the focus on their readjustment struggles. The writing behind this film, by Robert E. Sherwood and based on a novel by MacKinlay Kantor, is great in this regard and I loved how this movie took a more dramatic, family-based approach to the war genre. There are no massive battles, there are no gunfights, and there are no overly philosophical analyzations of trauma, but there is a genuine and down-to-earth vision of what it's actually like for veterans to come home. I loved this fresh take on the genre and especially being so recent after WWII actually ended, this choice to focus the story on people coming home was very progressive for the time. The three main characters themselves are fantastic and I loved seeing the developed relationships between them all and how they continued to struggle with life at home. The performances that accompanied these characters from Andrews, March, and Russell are all incredible in their own right. They each play such a different character but are able to bring a distinct personality and background to every one of their interactions. Gregg Toland's cinematography, however, is what stood out to me the most throughout The Best Years of Our Lives. His use of shadows and dark contrast in his camerawork was phenomenal and if nothing else, this film is worth seeing for his shots alone. So much movement and crazy rigging and overlaying of shots were all used to make this one of the most visually entertaining films of this era I have ever seen.
The writing, although it had its very strong points within the characters and the premise of this film, was a bit too much at times. I feel like this film is trying to tackle too many subplots at once and while I liked the blanket theme of societal reincorporation, the individual characters' arcs proved to be too much. I could never really attach myself to any of these characters and watching their lives go on, intersect, and often crash down around them just never paid off for me. There was plenty of compelling story choices made with the characters' relationships and marriages back at home but I still think that these screenwriters' eyes were bigger than their stomachs. This was also mostly due to Wyler's direction and how mismanaged I felt like this story was. His direction shows that he knows how to handle a gargantuan story like this but I feel as if his scale was far too large. A story like The Best Years of Our Lives deserves to have a very personable and relatable treatment, as its focus on these small characters returning to their lives almost requires a small-scale, dramatic setting. Wyler's choice to expand upon these characters' stories in the most grandiose form possible made it really hard for me to feel for these men. I do not think that the treatment this story was given was very appropriate and I just had an overall hard time connecting with the subplots in any emotional capacity. This tremendous scale of direction would work really well for Wyler in the future with his biblical adventure film Ben-Hur but for something as dramatic and cathartic as this movie, I was not a fan. And on top of all my problems with this film's direction, I was just plain old bored. I appreciate what Wyler and the writers did with handling these veterans but I just thought that maybe they could have touched on their actual mental health and its impacts more. That is a lot to ask from a film released in 1946 but I grew disinterested very quickly with their predictable and frankly unimportant little side drama. For a film about the effects of war, this movie sure spends a lot of time making its characters incredibly horny, and for what?
William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is a solid film with a great premise that presents a fresh vision of life for the characters of these veterans. Even though the script and Wyler's direction tried their best to sell the plot of the relationships and melodrama throughout the film, I could never really get into it because of how long this film was stretched out. A much shorter runtime would have made this film a more concise exploration of the postwar lives of veterans and while this film never failed at doing that, I just wish Wyler did a better job of keeping my attention.
My Rating: ★★★½
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