Government Warning: This Film Could Seriously Damage Your Health

Rating: 7/10 (5 December 1999)

It's A Wonderful Life is one of the perennial Christmas favourites, a seasonal treat that has the admirable trait of being screened annually at British wintertime, along with the incongruous choices of 39 Steps and The Great Escape. Why the latter two should be used, without fail, to mark a time of religious significance has never been discovered, yet It's A Wonderful Life's winter-set, ultimate "feel good" atmospherics make this ideal for such a schedule-filling occasion. However, a warning should be issued to people that brave to see this film: it could end up making you feeling a lot, lot worse.
When I first saw this film for the first time it was indeed the 25th of December and I had split with my girlfriend just three weeks previously. I had indulged in that bizarre male ritual of "purposely losing touch with all your friends when you meet a new girl" and no buses were running that year to my parents'. Bear with me, this is no idle backstory, but did in fact greatly effect my appreciation of this movie.
Endearingly shot, it concerns, for those that don't know the famous story, George Bailey, a man on the verge of suicide. So far, so able to empathise. A wonderfully surreal opening gives us Angels that are the stars and constellations in the sky, looking over key moments in Baileys' life, like a kind of supernatural Citizen Kane. This is all carefully wrought and contains enough sense of (stylised) reality to keep it watchable. When George's guardian angel finally arrives, it is in the form of Clarence, a vulnerable angel who is so saccharine-coated and self-consciously loveable that he could have walked straight in from a Disney production. He gives us a glimpse of George's life as if he had never lived, and shows the influences he made, sort of like Quantum Leap forty years early. This segment of the film rapidly sees the invention start to dull somewhat and the film capsize under the weight of its own overplayed sentiment. Yet I'm sure it's no spoiler to reveal the picture's parting "message", (Though if it is, Spoiler Alert, Spoiler Ahead) that a man's life is always worth living, provided he is surrounded by people who love him.
I looked around my empty house and suddenly that "head in the cooker" option took on a fresh urgency...