Rarely do we come across films that manage to excite and entertain, while at the same time offering a message so powerful and universal that it escapes the erosion of time. Films like Life is Wonderfula masterpiece of cinema of all time directed by Frank Capra. At the end of the war, Capra signs his most vulnerable, personal work, a Christmas tale which is at the same time a spiritual testament entrusted to the intense and feverish face of James Stewart. It is no coincidence that the director has always considered Life is wonderful its artistic peak: a work embellished with a simple and dizzying plot, optimistic and tragic, naive and painful.
Behind the Christmas veneer lies a story that talks about frustration, failure, unfulfilled desires, and tells how the value of a life is not measurable in successes, triumphs, material achievements, but in the imperceptible universality of altruismin goodness, in friendship and in gestures made for others. A film that was initially rejected by the public and the market, as if the world was not yet ready to accept a truth as simple as it was disarming.
Taken from the story The Greatest Giftwritten in 1939 by Philip Van Doren Stern, the film starring James Stewart and Donna Reed takes us into the life of George Bailey. George is an honest man, a good man who since he was young has wanted to travel, he wants the world, but the world seems to lead him to stay in his hometown, Bedford Falls. His existence was always strewn with kindness, gestures of care, altruism, generosity, which pushed the community to rally around him and his profound morality.
No man is a failure
George runs a credit company with his uncle Billy whose only creed is give people trust and grant loans and mortgages without necessarily following the rigid dictates of financial realities. In 1929, following the stock market crash, the fear spread throughout the city that the money could disappear in the blink of an eye; so George and Mary use their money saved for their honeymoon to reimburse the members of the credit company, saving it from bankruptcy. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Uncle Billy loses sight of the money he has to pay to the bank, to prevent the company from falling into the hands of the evil Henry F. Pottergreedy, dishonest, despicable local banker. George, shocked by the imminent and unexpected failure, and one step away from suicide, meets his guardian angel, Clarence Oddbody.
Clarence comes to his rescue to console him, to show the man how much good he has accomplished in his life, his real importance for his loved ones, his friends and the entire town of Bedford Falls. And to do so, he transports it in a alternative reality in which George never existed, a reality in which, in his absence, Bedford Falls is called Pottersville, a particularly leaden city, in which Potter has absolute dominion and has crushed the lower classes, a world in which pomp and vice are the inverted masks of loneliness and misery. With that simple stratagem Clarence manages to convince George that every existence is important and worth living and that if a man has friends beside him he is never a failure.
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