There’s a certain kind of film that weighs heavily on America’s collective nostalgia for kinder and gentler times. Yet in the same breath that we yearn for this simplicity, we often can’t help but scoff at it.
For most of us, there is a specific film that comes to mind: one that we remember fondly from childhood, or the one we watch each year on the holidays. After tearing up at human kindness, the triumph of virtue, and the redemptive power of love, faith, and family, we quickly go back to life’s little drudgeries. And while we appreciate such fine sentiments, we know this isn’t real life—as any savvy modernist will tell you.
The Sound of Music, re-released in 4K to commemorate its 60th anniversary this year, is the quintessential example, precisely because it hits on the extremes. It’s cloyingly saccharine in both style and substance, so much so that critics initially deemed it an emotionally manipulative flop. Yet it proved the test of time, sweeping the Oscars to become one of the highest-grossing movies in history and a staple lesson in both morality and musical education. Far from taking it as an insult to their intelligence, successive generations have come to love the film and its message at face value.
The critics were ultimately wrong and audiences were right: the film is surely sentimental, but remains earnest in its aesthetic, message, and overall intent. But what have we lost in today’s cynical culture that makes this obvious truth far more difficult to see?
As the film opens, the first thing you see is the mountains. Often, sweeping panoramic shots use nature to evoke fear or dread: the opening scene of The Shining, for example, builds tension following Jack’s car up the Colorado mountain road, while Werner Herzog famously used the untamable jungle to mock man’s ambition. Yet The Sound of Music evokes the opposite feeling in its opening scene: A sweeping crescendo of orchestral music builds as the viewer flies above the peaks of the Austrian Alps, and the hills quite literally come alive with the sound of music. We’re struck by a sense of awe and wonder at man’s place within all of this—not his alienation from it—and winding down to the valley, we come to find Maria exactly where she belongs.
Maria is torn between duty and self-realization, courage and self-doubt, faith and desire; how to reconcile her individuality with her commitment to being a good nun, or governess, or eventually a wife and mother? She’s a faithful novice, she tells us, at the convent, but at the same time she’s a free spirit inspired by love, music, and the beauty of the world around her. The tension does not arise because we doubt the sincerity of her faith, but because we understand and empathize with these earnest distractions of the soul. The nuns see the tension as well, so they test her resolve by sending her to the von Trapp estate to serve as governess to Captain von Trapp and his seven children, where the two eventually fall in love. Perhaps God has a higher purpose for Maria?
There is a parallel tension in the Captain, whose duty to his children, his Baroness fiancée, and his beloved Austria comes under strain. At first, like the nuns, he cannot reconcile his strict ways of child-rearing with Maria’s cheery and tender approach. His engagement to the Baroness offers a practical match that ensures social and familial stability, but true, passionate love—the type he comes to feel for Maria—is noticeably absent. And as the Nazis annex Austria and conscript his military service, he must choose whether to serve a regime he despises or abandon his homeland. The film has a happy ending, of course, with the now-wedded von Trapps and the children escaping over the same hills of the opening scene into neutral Switzerland. Yet we’re never meant to question whether the Captain rejects duty in favor of license. Rather, as the sound of music softens his heart, he too finds a higher purpose.
The Sound of Music has stood the test of time, whereas more cheaply manipulative films of the same vein and era have faded into oblivion.
The story is based on the memoir of the real-life Maria von Trapp, and critics latched onto the simplification of the historical record: the family’s wealth was extravagantly exaggerated; the timeline of the real couple’s 1927 courtship romantically revised against the backdrop of the Anschluss; and the suspense of a geographically impossible escape route. Yet all of this speaks only to the critics’ own cynicism—not the film’s.
Despite its artistic license, the film’s intent remains earnest. We’re not meant to apply a “critical” lens to the characters or their motivations. Although the characters’ internal conflicts are ultimately resolved, that does not imply that duty, faith, and discipline are mere tools of social control, rightly discarded when they conflict with other goods. A similar, but far lesser film, Footloose, preached that lesson two decades later, but in The Sound of Music, we’re meant to understand that a good life has a proper balance of both higher meaning and personal fulfillment.
Maria doesn’t give up on being a nun to “be herself” with a life of music, frivolity, or even chasing a man. The Captain doesn’t ease up on his children because they deserve license, or leave his fiancée and country because he no longer cares to uphold his obligation to them. Both see a higher calling in each other and the life they build together, in the tender vitality they feel through music, and in the preservation of the children’s innocence, which the music allows them to maintain in their escape. Their love for each other, the children, and music brings them personal fulfillment, but they still stand for faith, flag, and family—just in a different way than both originally thought. One does not have to be devoutly chaste or a military hero to lead a meaningful life; sometimes, for some people, the simple love of a family is a moral purpose in itself.
In today’s environment, it feels instinctive to be just as cynical as the critics. Life doesn’t really work like this; meaning and fulfillment are fleeting and material, if they even exist at all. The films of the subsequent eras—even the greats and now-classics—often instruct us to this end. We can watch The Sound of Music, tear up genuinely, and then move on with our day—but can we really appreciate such a simplistic film as meaningful art with a timely, or even timeless, message?
Through a contemporary lens, it feels there ought to be a tension between simplistic sentimentality and “real life.” Surely both can’t resonate with millions across cultures and generations. Yet the whole point of universality is to reduce the human experience down to its bare framework, something we can all share, admire, or aspire to. The sentimentality of the film may feel manipulative to a cynic, someone who foregrounds the complications and injustices of life and, absent any independent meaning, finds it only in the struggle against those. Obviously, the film does simplify the messier aspects of life, and real interpersonal relations rarely play out so elegantly; we all know this in our own lives. But in centering those things which hold actual meaning while allowing the messiness to fall to the background, the film affirms where real meaning lies. The Sound of Music never manipulates us into believing something that we don’t already believe, but pushes us towards what we already feel.
In truth, the human experience boils down to how we feel, or want to feel, about ourselves and others, rather than how we coldly reason our way through the world. We all earnestly want to see our own happy ending, the fulfillment and meaning of a life well lived, however one generation or culture may define it. And when we see our own earnest desires reflected in art, we can’t help but identify with it at some intuitive level—even when prevailing wisdom says otherwise.
It only feels as though there is a tension here because the values underfoot have shifted. It’s difficult to pinpoint a particular heyday for sappy and simple films like The Sound of Music: when and how they arose, and why they trailed off. They are typically mid-Century, but can’t fully be attributed to sheer post-war optimism; Frank Capra was piling up Oscars nearly a decade before Pearl Harbor. And while their decline coincides with the shattering of that optimism in Vietnam, they did not disappear altogether. Consider Spielberg’s E.T., for one, along with Pixar films that continued to deliver for decades. Yet it’s undeniable that the overarching current in art, particularly in Hollywood, which so greatly defines our common culture, over the last 60 years has trended towards pervasive irony and cynicism.
The Sound of Music has stood the test of time, whereas more cheaply manipulative films of the same vein and era have faded into oblivion. That we still watch it in awe—that there’s still a demand for theatrical fanfare 60 years later—suggests there’s an instinctive way that humans wish to and ought to live. The very modern manner of cynicism and irony is not it.
This is what we can still take from the film, and any work of art—which it indeed is—like it. For centuries, Western art existed to express truth as perceived by the artist, his deeply felt reality about life, emotion, or the human condition filtered through a subjective, and ideally superlative, lens. He filters this insight, shaping it with imagination, form, and emotion, resulting in a work that communicates something inwardly personal but resonates outward, inviting others to see, feel, or understand the world in a way they might not do on their own. The Sound of Music fits into this tradition far more than the postmodernist perversion that questions, undermines, and provokes—truth be damned. Its time and place may be so hard to pinpoint precisely because it fits into this grander tradition, which, through the sheer coincidence of modernity, began to decline just as film itself became the dominant form of art.
It’s not that the message in The Sound of Music is so simple that it lacks meaning, but that there exists a false belief that we’re too evolved to find meaning within it. The truth is that earnest simplicity and optimism can very well define “real life.” We must only recover the will to manifest it.