It Really Is A Wonderful Life
On the Magnificent Empathy of Frank Capra in the Lens of 2020
In most years I would take this gift of blank space and happily stoke the fire of debate around whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. For the record, it’s not. It’s a movie set at Christmas for the juxtaposition of violence during a time of peace and joy. But go ahead and watch it by your tree, I’m not here to stop you. I might alternatively have indulged in a definitive ranking and examination of every sweater Cameron Diaz wears in The Holiday, which by the way, is also not a holiday film, but a holiday rom-com — a subgenre unto itself defined by the heightened misery of being alone for the holidays and the magic of finding true love under the glow of a string of lights.
But this isn’t most years. And so, I have instead found my thoughts turning to what I would argue is a holiday film, less for its Christmas Carol-esque content than for its grand beating heart: It’s A Wonderful Life.
Released in 1946, It’s A Wonderful Life is nothing less than a grateful exhale after a period defined by the horrors of war. Like most of us, I came to know the film in fits and starts on various television broadcasts around the holidays. Its themes were too adult, too world-weary for much anything but the pool hidden beneath the gym floor to stick with me as a child. The magic the film reveals is made of much smaller stuff than the Grinch’s heart growing three sizes.
After all, Mr. Potter, like so many real-world Scrooges, remains untouched by anything in George Bailey’s story. And George Bailey’s own catharsis is not-so-dissimilar to Dorothy Gale’s, but it comes without a witch or poppies or anything much fantastical at all. It’s a small wonder it didn’t register.
And yet, there is no denying the fantasy of the premise. A good man who, put upon one time too many by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, takes arms against his troubles and considers ending them, only to be waylaid by a second-class angel named Clarence and the incontrovertible truth that his life is worth something.
If you haven’t seen the film, I must at this point urge you to do so. And because it’s in the public domain, you don’t even have to leave this page to make it happen.
It took a semester in a transcendental film class that was ultimately a slog through the bleakest, most wrenching cinema you can imagine for me to come to understand the magnificent empathy and incredible lightness of It’s A Wonderful Life. Preceded by months of the likes of Au Hazard Balthazar and Breaking the Waves, I finally and truly saw It’s A Wonderful Life on a snowy December day at the end of term. It’s safe to say that a handful of film students at CU Boulder in late 2009 hadn’t really lived through much of anything, but unable to shake the lingering angst of what came before, we all saw George Bailey’s ascension from despair in a new way.
Reflecting on the emotional turmoil that 2020 hs wrought from the pandemic and isolation to long-overdue social reckonings, I wondered if the film might again be different.
It was. As George Bailey deferred his dreams again and again, I saw our current collective inability to set aside personal desires in favor of protecting people we may never meet. In Mr. Potter’s calculated bottom-line offer to buy building and loan shares for pennies on the dollar, the squabbling of people who collected six-figure incomes to debate if the rest of the country should get $600.
But I saw other things too.
I saw George reach for petals from his daughter’s flower to confirm his own existence. As if only her trust that he could fix a sick flower could make him whole again. I saw Mary, propelled by hope, stage her home to remind George of the one night when she thought things might be different for them. Then again, Mary, freshly denied a honeymoon setting up a moonlight serenade for George — transforming the drafty old house George wouldn’t live in as a ghost to the site of romance she imagined it to be. I saw George, prepared to go to prison, in awe of his family, and thrilled to find he meant as much to the people in his life as he realized they meant to him.
In short, I saw what George Bailey saw. That without the low lows, there would be nothing to separate the high highs from any other day. You need both to really live. And if this year was our lost deposit, it goes to follow that 2021 might be the moment our friends show up to remind us what it’s all for — if that’s not worth sobbing through a round of Auld Lang Syne, I don’t know what is.