Frank Capra’s family fantasy takes the exhaustion of being good seriously, and James Stewart makes its sentiment feel earned. The whimsy can be overinsistent, but we would recommend it well beyond the Christmas faithful.
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is an unusually moving film about the weariness of being dependable, and we would recommend it to almost anyone. James Stewart’s George Bailey keeps making the decent choice and watching his own plans recede. Capra asks us to take those disappointments seriously before accepting any comfort he might offer. At 131 minutes, the film gives George’s frustration room to grow; its affection for small-town life never quite disguises how badly he wants something else.
Stewart is the reason it works so well. He makes George likeable without making his sacrifices look painless, and the anxiety beneath his warmth becomes harder to overlook. We were unsettled by Stewart’s frustration each time George puts someone else’s needs ahead of his plans. He lets George want to help and want to get away, sometimes at once. That makes him someone we care about even when he is not especially pleasant company.
Donna Reed’s Mary Hatch is essential to making the life George has feel worth attending to, even while he wishes it were different. Reed gives the domestic material a warmth that keeps the film from becoming an extended complaint about responsibilities. Lionel Barrymore’s Mr Potter is less complicated, and this is where the screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Capra takes an easy route. The division between ordinary decency and grasping wealth can be blunt, though it gives the questions about housing and class a welcome directness.
Joseph Walker and Joseph F. Biroc’s photography makes the small-town setting inviting enough for George’s wish to escape it to seem, at first, unreasonable. The streets and interiors feel like places where people know one another, which is comforting until we consider how little privacy that leaves. We can understand the town’s appeal without expecting George to be satisfied with staying there. The surroundings matter because Capra spends so much of the film establishing the everyday life that his fantasy will ask us to reconsider.
William Hornbeck’s editing lets the account of George’s life take its time, and the accumulation of obligations is worth the patience required. Some of the homely business could be shorter, particularly when Capra is still persuading us to like people we already like. Dimitri Tiomkin’s score is less restrained than Stewart’s performance, and occasionally presses an emotion the actor has already made clear. Yet its warmth belongs here; a dry, embarrassed treatment of this material would be a different film, and probably a poorer one.
As a family fantasy, this is unusually willing to dwell on an adult’s anger about the life he has ended up living. The whimsy is less persuasive, and Capra occasionally makes reassurance sound like an instruction. We can understand why someone resistant to this sort of sentiment might prefer Stewart’s unease to the film’s comfort. For us, George’s frustration has been taken seriously enough that the comfort need not feel dishonest.
Give it an uninterrupted evening rather than treating it as reassuring background noise. Its length allows us to notice each compromise George makes and how much harder the next one becomes. The wrapping paper can wait.
