It's A Wonderful Life. Gets Me Every Time.

Every year around this time, I bust out my copy of the Jimmy Stewart classic, It's A Wonderful Life.

Like most holiday specials, it's got an element of the supernatural Christmas miracle as the central McGuffin.  An angel shows the hero what the world would be like if he'd never been born, forcing him to accept that the life he thinks of as a failure is actually a grand success.

A friend once asked me how I could count this among my favourite films when I don't believe in angels.

There are two answers to this.

First the simple, slightly snarky answer:

I don't believe in Superman, but I love me a good Superman film.  I can enjoy a film about angels in much the same way.

The second answer is less obvious and has two facets.

This is NOT a movie about a supernatural miracle.  Oh, there's an angel and a supernatural miracle, but that's the frame, not the picture.  

This is a movie about living.  I've always assumed that John Lennon wrote the line "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" after watching this film.  Real people have dreams and schemes and plans for their future that almost never come true because they have to pay bills, support aging parents, fix the roof or just somehow get through the week.  In a lot of cases, those dreams and plans are all that stand between us and jumping off that bridge George winds up on, at least some of the time.  This is a movie about real people, living real lives while their dreams and hopes slip through their grasp, only to be replaced by more grounded, tangible things like love, friendship and loyalty.

The second, even less obvious point here is that while George is certainly the main character, he is not really the hero.  Nor is Clarence the angel.  The hero is Mary.

 

George Bailey Lassos Hero

While George toils at a job he loathes, Mary makes his life exponentially better.  No sooner are they married than she saves the building and loan by sacrificing their honeymoon,   She is the home maker in the biggest sense of the term.  She literally rebuilds the rotting hulk of a house they move into, cheerfully bears him four (four!) children and helps him with his business and does it all with grace and a smile.

When George finds himself about to be arrested for fraud/embezzling/whatever and can't get out of his own head long enough to think of a way to save himself, she steps in.  She finds out what's happening by calling Uncle Billy, makes the rounds to all the people George had helped over the years, organizes the first Go Fund Me in cinematic history and single handed saves her husband and the day.

This is a movie about a good man who is just smart enough to marry an even better woman. 

If you made this movie in 1974 and took the angel out and had George overdose in a suicide attempt and then had him hallucinate the world without George Bailey, the movie would work just the same.  It might not play as family friendly, but the fact that Mary saves the day and that George's innate goodness radiates invisibly throughout his hometown, bringing friends and relations to his rescue in his time of need would still be the core of the story.

And if Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed still played the lead and the hero respectively, I'd probably still get weepy watching it every year at this time