Why the ending made me love the film even more ...
"Mrs. Miniver" is an insightful slice of upper-class life in small British towns. And Oscar-winning Greer Garson was born to play that role. She illuminates the screen with her delicate traits and her naturalness covering a wide range of attitudes (a more fitting word than emotions) from gravity and dignity to sympathy and some bits of extravagance. Of course, every now and then, Walter Pidgeon steals the show as the loving and caring husband, but the focus is clearly on the titular heroine.
And speaking of heroine, it seems like within its documentary value, William Wyler also tries to highlight the everyday heroism of women like Kay Miniver before the word would take its fullest meaning when War would be declared to Germany. Yes, it takes some moral strength, some guts, to raise a family, to make a man like Vin (Richard Ney) out of a boy, to make his involvement to defend his country going without saying, to take care of a house, man, children during a time where women were not -like feminists love to point out- slaves of men, but like the trustworthy sentinels of the family sanctuary, no less sacred than the city, whose defense relied on men’s shoulders.
Men outside and women inside, this was not a denigration of women's rights but an equilibrium that every civilization had reached in a long natural process whose ultimate goal was to ensure harmony on a longer term. A film like William Wyler's "Mrs Miniver" is the perfect answer to feminism because it demonstrates the positive role played by women in the early 20th century, they weren't devoted to men, but to an order that valued men and women as well, in different yet complementary ways. And now that characters like Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Lara Croft or the Bride became fashion, there is something refreshing in the more traditional form of courage and strength embodied by Garson. In her own personal way, she kicks ass.
Of course, I'm not ignoring the film’s political motives. I concede a similar film could have been made with a "Frau Muller" mother a happy German family, but "Mrs Miniver" is immune against such accusations because the film clearly was made at a time where Germany had the upper hand (maybe even released before America's involvement) therefore, Britain was the hunted, the wounded one, and it's legitimate to show British people victims of a war they didn't start, well, not the civilians anyway. Later, a film would show Germany destroyed by the bombings, "Germany: Year Zero" but it was in 1947, "Miniver" is from 1942, these five years, let’s just say an eternity, war wasn't over yet and Germany still could win, “God defend the 'right'” was still a prayer, and the year of the film’s release makes the atmosphere of the final act even more unsettling.
And the film evokes the War’s infamous ‘innovation’, as the vicar says at the end in the memorable speech: "it's people's war", homes became battlefields. It's very revealing of the war’s barbarity that the three victims of the final bombing were a child, an old man and a young lady. Fighting became such a natural choice, the word ‘hero’ I mentioned lost its meaning. For us, these people are worthy of admiration, but for them, they were just doing their duty. Men were assigned to escort some ships and could not ‘sail back’. Being a father myself, I hope I'll never have to cover the ears of my daughter, and pretend nothing will happen while hearing a strident whizzing getting louder. The merit of "Mrs Miniver" is to show the war from the distant perspective of civilians, working like warning for future generations. No one who lived a war can wish for one to happen, and no wonder we have so many warmongers in our politicians’ baby-boom generation.
Still, "Mrs Miniver" could've been just a war picture, with an emphasis on 'picture', a story, with events working like plot devices. A brave wagon master played by Henry Travers wants to enter his beautiful rose named after Mrs. Miniver, in a contest that only Lady Beldon (a great Dame May Whitty) ever participated in and won ... we know the old coot will have a change of mind (or heart, in that specific case). When Carol, her grand-daughter, played by the beautiful Teresa Wright comes to ask Miniver to convince the man to withdraw his rose, her son Vin accuses her of snobbery ... naturally, they fall in love right after. Men talk about a disappearing German pilot, and bingo, guess who finds him. It's like every chain of events works in the most predictable way, and this is why, as soon as good old Vin joined the RAF... he made his death the most predictable one.
The omen starts with his parents’ concerns, the last-minute calls of duty, the reluctance of Lady Beldon to have her Carol lose her husband at war like she did at a younger age, and naturally, Carol herself, who shares her fears with her mother-in-law, and explains that she wants to make the most of life before turning into a widow. And God, I didn't see it coming ... the story's masterstroke. I don't know if it can be labeled as a twist ending, but it had for me the same shocking effect. It's an irony of fate or maybe God's response to men’s presumptuousness. Tragedy struck down the Miniver family by killing off Carol, and as sad as it was, this was the highlight of the film for me, I was blown away by that ending, because all the inspirational and emotional stuff that rhymed in conventional was immediately redeemed by Carol's death, one that was true to life's unexpectedness.
Sorry to conclude with movie-geek jargon, but enough of grandiloquent words, “Mrs. Miniver” features perhaps one of the most underrated (and powerful) twist-endings, and this is why I went from liking to loving it.
"Darth Vader is scary and I The Godfather"