The Return of the Soldier is a “modernist” -- meaning that it responds to new thinking of a hundred years ago -- novel filmed in a contemporary way -- well, a “Masterpiece Theatre” way. By that I mean excellent actors and lots of space in which to think -- which doesn’t really work unless the story gives you something to think about. Luckily, this is philosophical story-telling, a romantic (involving love) moral reflection. The dilemma is not new -- it’s basically the problem of amnesia, years lost out of an identity -- and yet it IS new. We’ve all been reflecting about battle-induced post-traumatic stress syndrome, which is what this amnesia is, as well as a new idea that the right chemicals in the right place at the right time can quite totally erase memories in a way that makes them forever inaccessible. Should that be done to spare a person a terrible and debilitating memory?
The psychological part is important in this story: amnesia as a way of ducking out on obligations and an unhappy life. What will jar a person’s mind into remembering, even if they don’t want to? And, of course, the shadow behind the amnesia problem is what to do if a life is a mistake, a miserable script you don’t want to follow anymore, esp. in a time and place where honor and status are everything.
So Alan Bates is a big vital man traumatized in battle who doesn’t remember his wife. Instead he remembers two earlier relationships: one a happy childhood friendship with his cousin and the other a romance ended before the war, seemingly over class differences. So we have a set-up meant to represent this man worth caring about and three women who care about him but who are bound to have different opinions about what ought to happen to him.
Julie London is the beautiful but petulant and childish wife. Ann-Margret is amazingly the mousy cousin who sees and understands everything, though no one appreciates her. Glenda Jackson is the rock-solid lower-class woman of the ended romance. The wife wants everything back the way it was, no matter the cost, even if she has to tolerate the previous lover. The cousin balances and waits, half-hoping that this man will turn to her and finally realize how much she loves him. (Cousins have been known to marry.) The former lover takes the moral task seriously -- what is the RIGHT thing to do, in spite of her returning love for this man. Her husband is the most patient and generous one of all.
Enter the psychiatrist, a not entirely likeable or trustworthy fellow, who is interested in the women’s points of view and trying to work out a solution that will help his patient, including just leaving him alone. The poor officer seems to be a passive victim who cannot help loving this plain but strong woman from his past. She had discovered that he had not broken off with her as she thought. Her family had moved and his letters to her had not been delivered. It appears that the love was true and that it ended by mistake. Will all concerned realize this and the lovers begin again? Or would the difference in class prevent a happy marriage now just as it would have then?
Throughout there has been a mysterious nursery which the wife enters as her private domain in intimate moments. When the soldier tries the door, exploring the upstairs rooms, it is locked. His wife is within, resentfully smoking. Earlier she has remarked that the nursery should have been dismantled but the soldier wouldn’t permit it. We don’t get the story at that point. In fact, we never see the soldier in the nursery.
Finally the secret comes out: there had been a small son who died. In fact, the Glenda Jackson character had also had a small son who died. Now the moral problem is not one of love but of grief. This amnesia has relieved the soldier of his war trauma maybe -- though he’d had some flashbacks-- but it has also removed the memory and grieving for his son.
Now the wife seems to want to deny and hoard her own feelings about that child, not share them with her husband. Or else nothing touches her. The cousin again balances. It is the Glenda Jackson character who says that one MUST accept the grief over a lost child, that one isn’t complete without that. Lost love affairs are one thing, but a lost child is a morality of an entirely different order. So she’s the one who agrees to go tell him.
The point is not the sweeping away of the amnesia. We watch the moment from a faraway upstairs window with the wife and cousin, so that the recovery of memory is entirely mimed by body language as the soldier “returns” to the house. Up close we see the reactions of the two women: the wife pleased, almost gloating, that she has her husband back; the cousin, stabbed to know what pain awaits the soldier -- something beyond a battle wound. We don’t have to be told what the sturdy and self-disciplined former lover feels now, but we are relieved that she goes home to a thoughtful and supportive husband.
Now I’ve told you the whole plot and you won’t even have to rent the movie, but nevertheless it’s worth watching for the nuance and implications as the story unfolds. The choices are always against high drama or predictability, but they are always full of veracity and attention, which is more than one can say about a lot of movies.
But wait, on a second watching new things pop up. The movie begins with a dream in which the cousin imagines herself as a child on the battlefield. The Captain, also a child, ungallantly picks up a stick and “shoots” her, but she declares she’s not dead. SHE picks up a stick and “shoots” him -- horrifyingly, he explodes. What does THAT mean? And what does it mean when the wounded soldiers in the coffee shop, who seem to know him, curse him and say he was worthless? Wasn’t he a hero? Isn’t it always the heroes who suffer from heroic amnesia? In the end all three women know and still want him. If he weren’t Alan Bates . . . would we?
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