Sometimes It's a Wonderful Life

By Roger Rosenblatt

Why has the film It's A Wonderful Life overtaken every other Christmas fable--including A Christmas Carol, Charlie Brown and the Grinch (with or without Jim Carrey)--as the story of the season?

As a tale of redemption, it is no better than so-so; the revelation that George Bailey's world was better off with him in it has none of the social message or the moral urgency of Scrooge's ghost-bed conversion. The angel-wing stuff is silly. James Stewart, Donna Reed, Thomas Mitchell and company are all terrific in their parts, but that would not explain the near mythic stature of the thing, or why, Christmas after Christmas, one reluctantly finds oneself tearing up without knowing what the weeping is about.

One could get cute and explicate the movie as an anticorporate parable. Without George and his community-conscious building and loan, the cartoonishly bad Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) would have synergized Bedford Falls into a grim and soulless company town. Do people respond to the movie as a protest against takeovers? I doubt it.

No, I think the story's recyclable success lies in the toast that George's brother Harry, momentarily home from the war, raises to George as all the townspeople have come to help him out of his money problems. "To my brother George," he says. "The richest man in town." The angel, Clarence, adds an unnecessary celestial message about no man's being a failure if he has friends, in case we don't get it. But the key moment is the toast, because while it appears to pop up from nowhere (like Harry), it has been building steadily and noiselessly throughout the picture. Just when George thinks he's alone in the world, the world shows up to declare its love for him.

This is what the picture is about--the subtle and casual surprise of friendship. Most of the time, we go along clouded by the suspicion, often justified, that we're alone in the world. Then once in a while, miraculously, we're proved wrong. Friends appear at the front door prepared to gather round and save us. The reversal of feeling is as blindsiding as it is moving, especially at the time of year when the deserting light can leave us alone in the dark. Suddenly we have company. Suddenly it's a wonderful life.

Run the movie backward from Harry's toast, and the story shows something very odd: nobody, with the exception of Potter, is unkind to anyone else--that is, up to when George is about to go off the deep end. Until then, everyone acts decently, helpfully, cheerfully, with George setting the standard by making a bank into a generous neighbor--not an easy thing to do.

The cop; the taxi driver; tipsy Uncle Billy; the man at the window who watches George court Mary and tells him to "kiss her"; the good-hearted, decorously loose woman (Gloria Grahame)--they do what friends are supposed to do, which outwardly is not all that much. Bacon, Montaigne, Emerson and a few brave others who attempted to write essays on the subject failed to define friendship because, unlike romantic love, the emotion is generally undemonstrative; it is made up of the things we do not do--betray, belittle, be harsh. When it does manifest itself, we often don't see it coming, which is where friendship gets its power--from the slow, cordial dance of ordinary life.

It is like the first act of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with a different George. For most of the act, the disparate parts of Seurat's painting each have an isolated, independent existence outside the painting, which they are destined to compose. They function as separate atoms, until "piece by piece," Sondheim starts "putting it together." We gasp at the picture, not because we did not expect it, but because, while expecting it, we did not believe it. So hard is it to trust our dreams of life being whole and beautiful that we focus on the particles, wintry as they are. When the picture comes together from time to time, we somehow knew that it could happen and yet, at the same time, could not imagine such a wonder. Call it the suspension of belief.

These past weeks have been a time of big talk about big matters--the meaning of votes, the authority of courts, the stability of the Republic. But most of us live in bits of small talk about nothing much, the accumulation of which, when well intended, staves off the cold.

There's George, standing with his family by the piano while his friends close ranks around him, and Harry breaks through the crowd to say a few words. Gets us every time.