Some Kind of Wonderful

December has arrived, so the run-up to Christmas is on. (I know, if you're a retail store, you think the run-up began at least a month ago.) I thought it appropriate to kick it off by checking out a Christmas classic that somehow, amazingly, I'd never watched before -- It's a Wonderful Life.

Naturally, though I'd never seen the movie, I was well aware of the plot in advance. It turned out that this made watching it a rather frustrating experience, due to the extremely odd pacing of the story. You might just chalk that up to the cinematic conventions of 60 years past, but I think it runs a little deeper than that.

You all know It's a Wonderful Life, right? A suicidal man is visited by an angel who shows him the impact of his life by whisking him into a world where he was never born.

Actually, not so much. That doesn't actually happen until over 90 minutes of the film have gone by, and barely more than half an hour remains. It's the last act of the movie. The rest of the movie is a glacially paced biography of the man's life, covering everything from childhood to adolescence, early adulthood to family man. It's a span of three or four decades and at times feels every minute of that.

Now, make no mistake, when the "real movie" finally does arrive in act three, it's pretty fantastic -- no allowances for the passing years necessary. The redemption of the protagonist is powerful, emotional, and engaging. And yes, to a large extent, you really do have to know about the man's history for some of this stuff to land appropriately.

And yet, I can't help but wonder if 90 minutes of exposition is strictly necessary, or if this was really the best possible presentation of it. At times in the climax, this format leads to moments where we're told things rather than shown them. Despite the fact that hero George Bailey is interacting with an alternate reality, the biggest revelations are simply told to him by the angel Clarence. He hear how George's brother died as a child without George there to save him; we don't see this. We hear about how the family business imploded years ago; we don't see it.

I wonder if we could have seen most of this long history of George Bailey as it occurred the "second time around," George there to witness firsthand the consequences of him not being there.

Too much like A Christmas Carol, perhaps?

In any case, I found It's a Wonderful Life to be an excellent 30 minute movie tacked at the end of a tedious 90 minute movie. James Stewart is solid throughout, with an acting style much more natural than most of the cast around him. That and the film's sterling reputation was enough to pull me through to the final act; otherwise, I might have bailed before I got to the good part.

Overall, I'd rate the movie a C+. In several senses, I think it could have been a lot better.