Parenthetical.net

A few weeks ago I saw It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time. I know the face you’re making right now, because every single person to whom I mentioned that I was doing this made a, “What? What kind of American are you?” face, followed by an “Awww, I love that movie; it’s the sweetest thing ever” face.

I was prepared to hate it.

Now, I can probably count the number of movies I’ve seen that were made before my birth on two hands. I know, I know, but really, I’m okay with that. So I was pleasantly surprised to find how contemporary this felt. Yes, the recent economic crisis had a lot to do with that, but I also found it genuinely funny in a modern-enough way.

So of course, I have to comment on the few things that did feel like ancient history:

• What’s Jimmy Stewart’s wife doing in the world in which he was never born? “You won’t like it… She’s an old maid. Right about now, she’s closing up the library.” GASP!
• Most of the characters were familiar-looking small-town residents. Sure, their clothes were from the ’40s, but they had cars and phones and jobs that aren’t totally out of place today. And then I saw the Italian families that Jimmy’s savings-and-loan is helping out, and they have goats living in their homes. They’re like Dorothea Lange photographs getting into those trucks. Oh right, that’s who the disenfranchised were in 1946.
• Those rows and rows of nice little houses Jimmy built for the Italian families and their goats? Those are the start of suburban sprawl. I wanted to cheer for Jimmy, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking that it was the start of so much of what I hate about how America looks now. It was a good reminder for me that the development that caused so many problems later was at the time housing people who might not have been living in such nice places otherwise.

I don’t know that I need to make it annual holiday viewing, but I admit that I enjoyed it tremendously. (I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I saw it on the big screen at the Brattle. Apparently this is an annual tradition.) Thanks for including me, Alison and Gareth!

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