I'll give you the moon, Mary.

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2016)

Directed by Frank Capra, "It's a Wonderful Life" stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a young man living in the picaresque town of Bedford Falls. George has dreams of becoming an adventurer, of seeing the world and travelling to distant lands, but the impromptu death of his father forces him to become the manager of a local Building and Loan company instead. George takes this job to protect the inhabitants of his town from Mr Potter, a greedy banker who keeps local workers poor and unable to purchase housing.
"Life's" first act watches as George matures, finds a wife and becomes a "responsible" member of his community. He also saves the life of a boy who goes on to become a decorated war hero, and positively touches the lives of countless other locals. Though he doesn't realise it, George is a saviour; the world is a better place because he exists. More importantly, the Building and Loan company he operates functions as a means of staving off commercial banks. The latter operate for private profit, for their shareholders, and with the ultimate goal of accumulating everything in Bedford Falls. The former, at least in theory, to do the bidding of depositors.
"Life's" final act finds George accidentally misplacing thousands of dollars. Fearing a scandal, he attempts suicide. A guardian angel then intervenes, at which point the film becomes a retelling of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Here George is shown how life in Bedford Falls would have unfolded had he not been around to protect its inhabitants. Shown that he positively influenced the world, and so purged of all regrets, George aborts his suicide. The town of Bedford Falls then magically rallies around George, donating thousands of dollars to help save his Building and Loan company.
Aesthetically, "Life" is a bit of a masterpiece. Snappy, carefully lit, and ambitious in the way it navigates time, the film also boasts beautiful Norman Rockwellesque sets. And then there's Jimmy Stewart. In another actor's hands, George Bailey would grate, but Stewart keeps Bailey lovable; a chirpy dude who chooses principles over personal desires and so whose life serves as a plea for social solidarity in times when fears make people selfish.
On another level, however, Capra's film is devious as hell. Prayer, Christianity and "good" communal banks are positioned on one side, and fat individualists, capitalists and "bad banks" on the other. But George Bailey, the banker-populist who altruistically exists for community and for the working poor and who "makes loans based on character and not credit", has always been a dangerous myth. Perhaps the best summation of this was made by director David Mamet in an issue of Sight and Sound: "George is as close as Hollywood can get to the notion of an equitable distribution of wealth: the reliance upon a person of character in a position usually occupied by the heartless. In this praising of individual conscience, we thus indulge a peculiarly conservative ethos: enlightened or compassionate conservatism. Such may pass muster as wish-fulfilling entertainment, but as a political aim it can be adopted only by the self-deluded. For if the worker has no power to demand other than as an appeal to conscience, he or she has nothing. And so the memory of the war and of the Depression waned and America voted for Ronald Reagan. His administration, in the fulfillment of a conservative erotic dream, broke the back of labour, and the voter was induced to vote for fantasy. And it was in those Reagan years that "Life" replaced "Casablanca" as the unofficial Favourite Film of America - the fantasy of the compassionate conservative."
And so George becomes the type of hero common in John Ford's films. Never mind that replacing all banks with mutualistic Building Societies would still lead to poverty, unemployment, debts outpacing money in circulation and all the usual contradictions of capitalism. Never mind that, at every node of the network in even an idealistic world like Bedford Falls, value would still be reaped from the ignored energies of the low-paid, unpaid and natural resources, none of which appear in the accounting of production costs, but as invisible gains to capitalists. Never mind that George is essentially in the business of sub-prime lending and that if Bedford Falls didn't bail him out he'd have taken them down with him. No, like Ford's Judge Priest, George remains a beautiful impossibility; the upstanding, god-fearing, community-saving, benign wielder of power.
And yet despite being goofy, overcooked and dumb, "Life" remains one of Capra's smartest films. The film's visions of Pottersville - a banker's paradise in which communities are destroyed in the name of The Almighty Dollar – remain prophetic. Also smart is the way the film shows how money alters relationships (Pottersville even pushes women into prostitution), breeds monopolies and systematically devalues everything decent that cannot be monetised. Also clever are the film's narrators, angelic beings whose perspectives imply that George has no free-will. George himself feels as though he has been repeatedly forced to stay and live in Bedford Falls. What George comes to realise, however, is that he has been choosing all along; he hasn't been a victim of fate, but has been making a series of very precise moral choices. In a contemporary America in which the average net worth of someone in their 20s is negative 39,000 dollars, in which over 75 percent of the populace lives paycheck to paycheck (nevermind that over 80 percent of the planet lives, and must live, in poverty), these are all quite timely, and even philosophical, themes.
8/10 – From Capra would spawn Disney and Spielberg and then a whole slew of films (Minnelli, Sirk, Lynch etc) which attempted to counter such idealized visions of 1940s/50s America.