A Timeless Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2004)

"It's A Wonderful Life" is one of the glories of American cinema, to be ranked with "Casablanca", "The Wizard of Oz" and "Citizen Kane", a work of art and entertainment that seems to be destined to last forever.It's a movie that not only doesn't age but gets better with age.
High praise for a (deceptively) simple three-act 1940s "Christmas movie" about an angel who comes to Earth on Christmas Day to convince a suicidal man that his life is worth living.
The movie opens with a conversation between two celestial bodies as they hear prayers for a man on Earth and appoint him a guardian angel. The guardian angel is shown his charge's life in flashback, up until he stands on a bridge contemplating suicide. Then the guardian angel comes to visit him and shows him what would have happened to his community and family if he hadn't been born. The man sees that (here comes the message of the movie) he has had a wonderful life and that the world is a better place for his being in it.
This is a virtually perfect movie. Yes, it is unabashedly sentimental but anything but corny, shameless or naive. It couldn't have been improved in any aspect-except one. The angel in this movie is the soul of a dead man from the nineteenth century. Any Christian child knows angels are beings created by God for companionship before He created humans and are not former humans but apparently the director, writers and stars did not. This movie is theologically absurd and what's worse every single crappy Hollywood movie involving angels coming down to Earth to help humans (like "The Preacher's Wife" spit, spit) has copied this!
When I saw for the first time "It's A Wonderful Life" as a 13 year old, I saw it as a lovely and triumphant movie about the difference one man can make in the world. Now, I see it more as a movie about a talented, ambitious, extraordinarily kind man of superior intelligence with big dreams who sacrificed it for a few ignorant, unintelligent, ungrateful and selfish losers. It's unspeakably sad that a man like George is forced to spend his entire life in a small town as a savings-and-loan manager and even sadder that the people of Bedford Falls have so little awareness how much he gave up for them and how much they owe him. Well, that's a true sacrifice, one that is offered willingly and selflessly, whether the receiver is aware of it or not and expecting nothing in return, not even recognition or gratitude.
In real life It's NOT A Wonderful Life. One person's life is completely insignificant in his/her own lifetime, much less on the spectrum of seven million years of human history, where it isn't even a fourth of an eye blink. Whatever you may think, you are not important, your life has less than zero impact on those around you, even the closest.
It would be a priceless gift to be able to see what you life would be like without you in it. Very likely, it would be exactly the same-the same teacher in the same classroom teaching the same students, the same neighbors, your friends would be the same, the same city. Only your parents would have one child less.
To use a line from the movie you think the whole world revolves around you, well it doesn't, in vast configuration of things you aren't a scurvy little spider, Mr. Potter and that goes for you too and for you too, George Bailey.
Is life, pointless, useless and insignificant, well living all the same? Absolutely.Life is a great gift from God to the individual and if you had never been born, you would never have been born and missed out on all of it. It Still Is A Wonderful Life.