slush

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2007)

I like a lot of director Capra's films - but not this one.
This is among one of the most vile floods of slush ever to be photographed. The characters are simpering when they aren't whining. James Stewart give us the worst, most over-wrought performance of his career - high-school student do better. The camera work looks expensive - and dull. The editing is perfunctory. There's no effort to use film to tell the story.
The story itself is a banal rip-off from "The Christmas Carol" - but the worst part of it is that Stewart's character spends his every moment visiting the 'alternate universe' (that would have happened had he never been born) trying to convince everyone that he really was born, and there is no 'alternate universe' - which makes no sense whatsoever, and completely blows any chance at insightful or revelatory alternate character development, and reduces his final submission to fate to a rather cheap, histrionic "gee, I'm sorry; let's try it again, OK?"
The raw cynicism that went into the making of this film - kept alive by generations of movie-reviewers as a kind of shared in-joke ("hey, let's face it, most Amereicans are just dumb" - would be frightening if it hadn't sold so well - which is the really scaring thing about it.