An Enchanting Take on POV

NOTE: EDITED TO REMOVE ANY POSSIBILITY OF SPOILERS!

I apologize for being a little late this morning. I normally write my posts a few days ahead of time, but my latest WIP has been chirping like crazy in my head, and I'm afraid I got so wrapped up in it, this post slipped my mind.

Lacey's post yesterday about Hugh Laurie and how he communicates the character of House on screen even though you never get inside his thoughts was a great setup for this topic, because I want to talk about a movie I saw last week. Specifically, the new Disney film, Enchanted.

First, I have to give this film a little plug (which it may not need, as it's apparently doing well at the box office). I loved this movie. It was sweet without being saccarine, pokes a little fun at the whole Disney milieu without becoming mean, and is very, very romantic. Before all the men who read us Mavens run away tearing out their hair, let me add that my husband, who is usually quite curmudgeonly when it comes to "chick flicks," also loved this movie. My kids all loved it, too, although my youngest (five years old) wrote in his school journal that he liked it even though "there was kissing."

So what, you may be wondering, does a movie have to do with point of view? Aren't movies more "third person omniscient" than "third person limited?" I suppose in some global sense, that's true. Since you're never really able to get inside a character's head and find out what he or she is thinking, and since when the characters are interacting, you're privy to both their facial expressions and gestures and all the other techniques actors use to communicate emotion and state of mind, movies are closer to third person omniscient in POV.

And yet, in Enchanted, I nearly always felt as I was watching that I was in one character's POV more than the other and, more, that the filmmakers had done that deliberately. Obviously, when only the hero or the heroine is in a scene, it's easier as a viewer to decide whose point of view to "identify" with in that scene. But when the hero and heroine are interacting with each other, how do you choose?

In the case of Enchanted, I found myself instinctively identifying the POV as belonging to whichever character was being more strongly affected by what was going on in the scene. I always found myself sharing the point of view of the character for whom whatever was happening would seem most inexplicable or emotionally wrenching.

So, what does all of that say to point of view in writing? After all, we can put the reader directly into the characters' thoughts and feelings and make it absolutely clear who the reader should sympathize with, so how can this observation about a movie help?

Well, here's what it did for me. It drove home to me again the importance of writing each scene from the perspective of the character for whom what's happening is most pivotal, meaningful, or life-changing. That's easier said than done, of course, because most scenes (especially between the hero and heroine in a romance) have an effect on everyone involved in them.

Of course, if you're writing in first person (and not doing shared first person like Audrey Niffenegger in The Time Traveler's Wife or third person/first person mix like Diana Gabaldon and Elizabeth Peters), this isn't an issue. You've only got one point of view to deal with. But even then, you have to choose which parts of a story are relevant and meaningful to that point of view character and only tell those.

YOUR TURN: What are some tricks you use for deciding which character's POV to use in a scene? If you write first person exclusively, do you find that freeing or limiting in terms of showing the "whole" story? And have you seen any good movies lately?