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Unfailingly modest and profoundly humane, "The Way We Get By" profiles three people over the age of 70 whose lives have been changed by a simple act of service: greeting troops at Bangor International Airport in Maine.
For the last six years, Bill Knight, Jerry Mundy and Joan Gaudet (the mother of the film's writer and director, Aron Gaudet) have welcomed and bade adieu to almost a million grateful soldiers and Marines. Offering handshakes and hugs, candy and free phone calls, the greeters volunteer around the clock, often rising in the wee hours and in treacherous weather.
"It puts a little meaning back into my life," says Knight, 87, a World War II veteran who can no longer afford to feed his beloved cats. For Mundy, 74, the vocation eases the pain of his son's death many years earlier, while Joan Gaudet, 75, whose eight children are busy living their own lives, admits she would "be lost" without the airport routine. As the three wage their own private battles - with illness, loneliness and crippling debt - the director slowly extrapolates a portrait of society's overlooked: those whose compassion reflects an awareness that death is more than an abstraction.
Neither pro- nor antiwar (unlike many cable-news ideologues, Aron Gaudet and his subjects easily distinguish between the troops and their mission), this fine, affecting film perfectly exemplifies Milton's famous claim: "They also serve who only stand and wait."
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