That’s the way I’ve always viewed it. It gives me cold shudders to think that people find it a uplifting, holiday movie. It grows more bleak every time I watch it.
It’s an interesting perspective, and a very well-written article, but I think that people who pick on It’s a Wonderful Life and claim it really depicts a bleak and depressing world despite itself are missing a kind of crucial detail. Like most Capracorn, it’s not supposed to be a realist drama. It is, instead, a fable, constructed with the takeaway that even the most seemingly inconsequential human has a meaningful effect on the world around him.
Because it’s a fable, the lights and darks are taken to extremes. Fluffy stuff is made fluffier (George and Mary aren’t just in love, they’re in undying love), but the dark stuff is also pushed darker (George isn’t just a nobody, he’s a nobody who wants to be a somebody but can’t), and it’s all stretched to fit the bounds of the society that was viewing it. I, personally, think finding out Mary is “Just about to close up the library!!!” is one of the most hysterically big-whup “awful” fates ever to befall a character in a movie, but also understand that, in the world the fable (and the people telling it) occupy, spinterism is pretty much the worst thing that could happen when compared with meeting your absolute lock-down soul mate.
And to top it all off, you have Stewart capturing every extravagant bit of light and dark in it, in a really powerful performance. It’s a fable, and a damn well-told one, and I love watching it every year.
I think it’s a great movie.
I think it’s a complex movie.
I don’t think it’s a feel-good movie.
That was a horrible review. He just didn’t like it because he doesn’t like traditional morality. Big whoop.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
That’s all true. But what makes most Capracorn unwatchable for me is the emotional dishonesty I sense when I watch it. For a fable to “work,” the emotional truth has to show through the hyperbole of the metaphor. This is why Buffy the Vampire Slayer is so successful: for all the wacky, campy exaggeration of the literal level of the story, the human truths that the metaphors describe feel real and honest. Not so, for me, in most Capra; it’s a metaphor for an artificial ideal, or something. It’s emotional manipulation without an honest payoff.
Oh, I don’t know. The “payoff” for me is “No man is poor who has friends.” That seems pretty honest and, within the terms of the story, earned. It’s not about how “perfect” Bedford Falls is, or how “corrupt” Pottersville is; it’s about a guy finding out that without him a lot of people would be majorly unhappy. (I doubt, for example, that Cracked-Out Prostituted Violet really takes much solace in the fact that Pottersville is more sustainable in the long run than its alternate-reality counterpart.)
Edited to make more sense, I hope.
I thought the idea was that you could tolerate almost anything if you had Donna Reed to come home to.
That shot of her standing by the fire when he finally gets home on their wedding night still does it for me.
I have mixed feelings about this movie. Definitely not one of my favorites. (I don’t think being a librarian is a fate worse than death for one thing.)
I’m a librarian myself, and I think most librarians grit their teeth a bit at that particular scene. I generally enjoy the movie, but come on!
I made a lot of the same points in a thread when Clerks II came out. On the surface it was a happy ending where Dante marries the local girl and opens his store so he can keep hanging out with Randall. But I pointed out that Kevin Smith had been faced with the same decision and he married Jennifer Schwalbach and left New Jersey and by all accounts he’s happy with how things worked out. Maybe he was saying that Dante made the wrong decision.
The wife and I love this film. We’re about to give it our annual viewing this weekend.
Could it possibly have anything to do with your perspective of life and expectations today as opposed to those of a person coming into adulthood in the 1940-60 period?
I want to know why if George had never been born, Mary would have had bad vision, since she only wears glasses in the world where he doesn’t exist.
I love the movie for the simple story line of how people can make a difference in other’s lives. I too like the honeymoon scene right down to the homemade rotisserie with the record player (which plays while she’s cooking).
But George’s father wasn’t driven into an early grave, he was murdered by George’s girlfriend. Think about it. When George tells her he wants to leave town to explore the world she immediately makes a wish for him to stay and father her evil children. The only way that George would stay would be something that forces him to take care of his mother. A stranger then entices George into a physical relationship with her. Less than 4 minutes after she makes the wish (sealed with a broken window) old man Bailey is dead. All this was done while she dances naked under a full moon. This ritual was foretold in an early scene of her where she makes an amulet of George lassoing the moon. A clear indication she wanted to bind George to her will. Her “wish” conjures a nether-world spirit who lures George to jump into a freezing river where he then goes on a drinking binge causing a head-on car accident. This all goes back to the day George tries to lure his younger brother into a freezing pond. It’s not Bedford Falls, it’s the village of the damned.
Nope, not possible.
The movie has always creeped me out, mostly, I guess, because Jimmy Stewart always creeps me out. I can’t watch it, it creeps me out so bad.
I, personally, me, myself that is, think it’s a terrible piece of dreck. I am not going to offer some deep, insightful criticism, since I am one of those awful people who doesn’t know dick about Art, but I know what I like.
Now, Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol? That’s a great role in a great movie.
Without his banker’s salary, she couldn’t aford Lasik. Plus she’s a librarian/old maid, and glasses just come with the package.
Again, it’s not so much that she’s a librarian that she has to be librarian, because she’s alone. She doesn’t have a husband to support her, she doesn’t have kids to take care of. She’s a spinster, so she’s miserable. I didn’t fully understand that. I mean, what happened to Sam Wainwright? Although he comes across as the type of guy who’d leave her at the altar, I guess.
How do you feel about that scene in The Mummy?
The role of spinster/librarian is an iconic representation of a lonely person who has withdrawn to a world of books. It’s not that librarian is a bad job but combine it with the idea of a loveless existence it produces a powerful image…