Darkest holiday fantasy since Dickens

Rating: 10/10 (15 December 2003)

For all its reputation as one of the greatest feel-good movies of all time, `It's a Wonderful Life's' main strength comes from its expression of pain. After a long and charming (but not overly sentimental) buildup, the dark final act of the film comes as a terrific surprise. This isn't a didactic but fundamentally kind object lesson like `Miracle on 34th Street'; instead, the moral gets delivered to us via a much crueler narrative turn. Indeed, the last 45-minute stretch is a spiraling nightmare, with jovial angel Clarence teaching his suicidal charge a lesson by showing him a sick, inverted caricature of his world. It's like a perverse version of `A Christmas Carol' imagined by Rod Serling. Of course it has a happy ending, but make no mistake, the genius of the film is that Capra is not afraid to hurt George Bailey (and by extension to hurt us)--often quite badly. Perhaps the most painful moments happen even before Clarence steps in; the last scene at the Bailey house is one of the most emotionally excruciating scenes in film history, with all of the technical elements (the witty dialogue and camerawork, Jimmy Stewart's dazed, crazed performance and Donna Reed's understated one, and perhaps most important of all, Janie's incessant rendition of `Hark! the Herald Angels Sing') combining to get us gritting our teeth and clutching our armrests in agony. After all that, the resolution comes as one of the most deserved, redeeming happy endings of all time--the audience feels as liberated and transformed as George does. As I mentioned, the sentiment never really overwhelms things; Capra and his (credited and uncredited) screenwriters inject enough darkness into the script (beginning with the Mr. Gower scene), and enough sharp and self-deprecatory humor, too, but most important the director never lets the plot stand still long enough to get treacly. His oft-imitated style looks to modern eyes not to be cheesy or dated, but remarkably elegant. It doesn't really matter how often we see this film; it still hurts, every single time, and in this case that's a beautiful thing. 10 out of 10.