Plenty

I love a good World War II movie, and one that made a profound impression on me was Plenty (1985) staring Meryl Streep.  I don’t mean to suggest the movie is particularly enjoyable.  It jumps back and forth in time, is difficult to follow, and features terribly unsympathetic characters, but it contains a few pieces of wisdom that have stuck with me ever since I saw it more than a decade ago. 

Meryl Streep plays Susan, a young British woman who risks her life to work with the French resistance during World War II.  While in the midst of a terrifying assignment, she meets Sam Neill (another British spy) and spends a remarkable twelve hours with him.  Then the war intervenes and she never sees him again.  For the next twenty years, Susan becomes increasingly bitter and disillusioned with life, always remembering those twelve hours with her dashing spy, who she idealizes as the epitome of strength, courage, and romance.   Every man she will ever meet, every incident in her life, is measured against the yardstick of this phenomenal man.  How can she help but be disappointed? 

Susan is the classic example of a glass that is half-empty.  During her few months in service in France, she overcame mind-numbing terror to throw herself into the crusade against Nazi Germany.  She was rightfully proud of that service, rightfully in awe of her fellow compatriots, but she ultimately becomes impatient and self-destructive when she does not find that level of valor in her post-war existence. 

The movie was based on a play written by David Hare, whose inspiration came from the fact that 75% of the British women who engaged in wartime secret operations divorced within a few years of the war’s end.  What was to account for this shocking statistic? 

Many war veterans have commented on how warfare lends a sense of intense challenge, of comradeship, an intensification of emotions that simply is not felt in the normal course of life.  Participation in a just war gave meaning to their existence.  The constant sense of danger and the looming threat of death gave life an extraordinary clarity, and when the war was over, they crave that sense of purpose as life returns to its ordinary shades of gray.  This is the malaise that affects Meryl Streep’s character.   

In a scene near the end, Susan is reunited with Sam Neill more than twenty years after the war.  Her hero is now a paunchy, listless, middle-aged man in a mediocre office job where he is harangued by his boss.  For twenty years Susan had been scornful of her husband and lovers for never measuring up to this gallant man who she caught a glimpse of during one of his finest moments.  

Like Susan, I was initially disappointed to see what became of the dashing, heroic spy.  But the more I think about it, I was wrong, wrong, wrong to jump to that conclusion.  I think there are heroes all around us, but until we are given a cause to rise to the occasion, most of us will never know it.  The Sam Neill character is an Everyman.  He was a normal, decent man who became a hero when his country asked it of him.  This movie taught me to look a little more carefully at the everyday people in my life.  There are heroes all around us. It is hard to spot them when you are paying for milk at the grocery store or talking to the guy from I.T. who is unjamming the office printer.  Ordinary, workaday people….until they need to rise to the occasion.  I believe most of us can do so.