Art that endures is art that evolves, that speaks to us across time and experience, that fully reveals itself only when we mature into its sensibilities. As Anthony Lane wrote in 2012, “The Portrait of a Lady that I read in my late teens bears the scantest relation to The Portrait of a Lady that I read today.” A book that was at first “a serene, rather aristocratic affair” became, in his middle age, “funnier, still sharp with the Jane Austen-like tartness of its predecessor, Washington Square, but it’s more than that. It’s a horror story.”
This seeing with different eyes is something many of us can relate to. New doorways to secret rooms open each time I read The Great Gatsby. New revelations manifest each time I visit Giovanni di Paolo’s 1445 painting “The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise” at the Met. New screwball absurdity bubbles to the surface each time I watch My Man Godfrey.
I expect, when revisiting my favorite books, paintings, and films, that they’ll reveal some new facet. Major, minor, doesn’t matter. A far rarer experience is returning to a work I don’t feel particularly attached to and finding it has aged into something radically different — which is what happened when I watched It’s a Wonderful Life, which turns 75 this year, for the first time in years.
By now the particulars of this well-worn story. directed by Frank Capra, should be well known. But as a refresher: Hard-luck George Bailey (James Stewart) can’t seem to break out of sleepy little Bedford Falls. He dreams of going to college and doing great things, but one disaster after another keeps him homebound: His father dies, leaving him in charge of the Bailey Building and Loan. His brother goes to college and returns with a wife and job, keeping George in town. He marries Mary (Donna Reed), who loves him unreservedly despite his often harsh attitude, but can’t go on a honeymoon because of the Depression. They have four kids and George helps build starter homes for many of his neighbors, incurring the ire of local wealthy banking caricature Potter (Lionel Barrymore), who tries to break the Building and Loan, then George.
He gets his chance when hapless Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), George’s business partner, misplaces $8,000 on Christmas Eve, leading to possible professional ruin and likely prison sentences for fraud. George, at the end of his rope, decides to kill himself — until guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers) shows up to save George by showing him what the world would be like without him. (Spoiler alert: It’s awful.) George begs to live again, returns to his world, and finds the whole town has come out to save him from disaster. Cue the bells and carols.
For many people, thanks to endless television airings, Capra’s 1946 film is a rite of holiday passage. ’Tis not really the season until the family gathers around the tube to cheer on George as he runs through the snowy streets of Bedford Falls, cheering and hooting as he celebrates life. It’s a film embedded in the firmament of American popular culture, with it’s bygone-Americana images and dialogue (“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings”) appearing on greeting cards, seasonal swag, and in hazy post-Thanksgiving memories.
It’s a Wonderful Life was certainly a presence in my house growing up, albeit in a butchered network TV form. NBC played it all the time, typically in a gnarly pan and scan transfer with out of whack contrast and terrible sound that reduced all nuance, and most dialogue, to meaninglessness. The endless commercial breaks didn’t help, nor did the occasional reminiscences of celebrities blathering on about some moment from the film that meant something to them once. All of this had the effect of wanting to spend as little time with the movie as possible, which meant coming in for the world-without-George stuff and the spirit-soaring climax. This had the effect of making It’s a Wonderful Life feel sickly saccharine and maudlin, a decades-old Hallmark card fallen behind the rack come to dusty life.
I never felt the need to revisit it until reading Mark Harris’ superlative book Five Came Back, about Hollywood directors Capra, John Huston, John Ford, George Stevens, and William Wyler making documentary and propaganda films for the U.S. government during World War II. All five were altered by their experiences, regardless of their assignments. Stevens captured footage of the liberation of Dachau; Wyler documented airmen who were shot out of the sky. And while Capra was stationed in Washington, overseeing the epic series Why We Fight, he nonetheless returned to Hollywood a changed (and shaken) man. And that manifested in It’s a Wonderful Life, his first post-war film. (It was the first film back for Stewart, too, who served in the Air Force.)
To paraphrase Anthony Lane, the film I saw this time bears the scantest resemblance to the one I grew up with. And it was no life-affirming confection.
Before watching Paramount’s excellent 75th anniversary Blu-ray, which was released in November, I never truly realized just how many tears are shed in this movie. It’s also unquestionably weird. After all, it opens on a montage of homes with the voices of the inhabitants praying that God protect George Bailey, followed by a tilt pan up to the heavens where two galaxies standing in for angels blink as they talk to one another and, later, a blip of a star representing Clarence. And then the plot hinges on Clarence showing George a world in which he didn’t exist — undoubtedly the earliest instance of the multiverse to appear in cinema.
But those are the bookends. What’s in between is creaky in execution — Capra leans unironically into the rose-tinted nostalgia of early 20th century America — but shot through with regret and resentment, buried under miles of small-town politesse and voyeurism. (There’s also a critique of capitalism, in the Potter/George dynamic, that feels both divorced from the anti-communist fervor of its time and totally of our eat-the-rich moment.) George’s dreams of travel and adventure, of building bridges and skyscrapers and seeing the world, are constantly dashed and undercut by his first-born-son sense of duty; the folly, carelessness, and selfishness of family and friends; and his inability to pull himself free from the unseen force exerted by Bedford Falls. He gets married, has a family, makes a home, but it often feels like a facade. This is what is expected of him, but this Bedford Falls existence is temporary.
When the walls finally close in, after hapless Uncle Billy misplaces the money, George’s mounting frustration — with his kids, his rickety house, his precarious freedom, his more successful friends and brother — is taken out on this little corner of his living room. It’s a kind of workshop where he’s built mockup bridges and skyscrapers. In the entirety of his giant old house, George gets a small nook where he tries to conjure his ideas and dreams into scale-model reality. And in a thrash of flailing arms and kicks, it’s all gone.
In a film full of heartbreaking moments, this is the most devastating. It’s an act of finality that pushes George fully into the abyss. He leaves home, seeks final refuge in the tentacles of Potter — who, after learning George has $500 equity in a $15,000 life insurance policy, tells him, “You’re worth more dead than alive” — and finally contemplates suicide. That, of course, leads to Clarence and the alternate timeline and George’s salvation. Still, hard to believe no one wanted to see that kind of despair in the triumphant glow of winning the war. The film was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, but otherwise flopped. It was only salvaged later thanks to television, which leaned hard into it’s Christmas spirit.
Except Christmas feels kind of incidental. Despite the holly and tinsel in the opening credits, It’s a Wonderful Life’s reputation as a Christmas movie is earned entirely by the last third of the movie. The climax could be set at Easter or the Fourth of July or Arbor Day and it wouldn’t much matter. The message — “No man’s truly a failure who has friends” — would still resonate. And still feel a bit discombobulating, given everything we’ve just seen.
As a kid, all I saw when I watched It’s a Wonderful Life was an old Christmas chestnut that conjured memories of winter juniper and musty boxes of decorations. Now, though, the experience was full-bodied and emotional. George’s moments of disappointment and despair land more forcefully after having lived some life, not all of it wonderful. I all-too-well recognize George’s anger, frustration, and prematurely gray hair. I know what’s behind the look he gives that wily bannister top that keeps popping loose. I know what’s behind those far away, hangdog looks he gives after blowing up his workbench. And I know what powers that explosion of joy when he returns to his own timeline. Christmas doesn’t factor into any of it.
It’s a Wonderful Life is hardly Capra at his best, but it’s a revelation just how mature the film is. Pop culture wants us to believe that this is the be-all-end-all of holiday uplift. I see something different. All that “Auld Lang Syne” optimism at the end feels a bit like if the conclusion of The Graduate was lopped off before the runaway couple realizes they’re probably screwed. George and his family and friends are happy now, but their problems and frustrations are deep-seated and intractable. There is no magic cure for disappointment. There is no erasing what George has seen and been through. He will persevere, but what comes after this turmoil? What’s after his war?
It’s a question Capra faced when making the movie, and it’s one we, as viewers, confront every day, especially in the wake of a global pandemic and in the face of rising fascism. He didn’t have any answers, which surely frustrated him the way it does George — two men of ramrod virtue used to solving all problems. But strip away all the holly-jolly yuletide schmaltz and bring to it some living and you’ll find Capra crafted a challenging film whose celebration of the endurance of the human spirit is worth more than seasonal banality.
It’s a Wonderful Life might not be a masterpiece, but it is a classic worth revisiting — and not just at Christmas.
