Let’s draw up a good list of films worth watching and considering on this Veteran’s Day.
My first thought?
The Straight Story.
It’s a powerful, moving story of a veteran in his later years. He is clear-eyed about what is important in life. And he sets out on an heroic journey to make peace in the great unresolved conflict of his life. Along the way, he is haunted by the cost of war, and by all of those soldiers who fought alongside him, the dead he cannot bring back. In a sense, his quest to reconcile with his brother is one last battle, a fight to save something worth saving. But it is also a desperate attempt to bring back into his life one he lost along the way—a vanished relationship that he can, indeed, restore.
Veterans can face so many formidable challenges upon their return. In some ways, the battlefield of home can be the toughest battle of all. Alvin Straight is a hero of adaptation. Haunted by horror, afflicted by pain, he soldiers on.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
The Straight Story is on my top 5 list. I’ve watched it 5 times and the scene in the bar with the other vet gets to me every time. Lots and lots of layers in this movie.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Wow, I’m thrilled to find someone else who’e even heard of The Straight Story! It’s David Lynch’s very un-Lynch, unknown masterpiece. It’s one of my all-time faves.
The scene with Alvin and the other World War Two vet in the bar just kills me every time I see it. Powerful stuff.
I’m not sure if it fits into the list we’re making here, but I really like Kevin Costner’s Civil War vet in “Open Range.” I’m always moved by his character’s haunted past from that war.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
The Straight Story sounds facinating — I’m going to have to track it down.
Being a Canadian living in Canada, my vote is for Passchendaele. It’s about WWI, which is what Remembrance Day (as we know it here) was originally created for, and it’s from a Canadian perspective.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Gonna have to go with Joyeux Noel myself. English, German and French… and the amazing true story of the Christmas Truce.
November 13th, 2009 at 9:17 am
I am quite drawn to both “The Thin Red Line” and “Flags of Our Fathers”. I have a feeling I will want to watch them again and again to be drawn into deepening contemplation on the nature of war and man. Both of these would fall in the “challenging” category of war films, by which I mean that both are not easily categorized and both have very complex things to say. I think that both of them honor veterans by telling truths about war. One scene I will never forget is the one in “Flags” in which one veteran cries on the shoulder of a deceased soldier’s mother, refusing to simply comfort her with platitudes as he is ordered to do.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:39 am
I’m a pacifist at a Mennonite university, so we had a strange choice for a Remembrance Day evening film. We watched the documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” about a women’s peace movement in Liberia at the turn of this century. Not your usual war movie, but it does give you a feeling for the heartache and terrors of war, and it definitely gives hope through the determination of these women to stop the violence. I think it’s good to not only remember our veterans who died fighting for what they believed, but also for the ordinary people of modern times who live through war every day.