It's a Wonderful Life at the IFC Center

It's a Wonderful Life has had a bizarro afterlife. Years of holiday-season television airings have turned Frank Capra's masterful study of disappointment and resignation into a schmaltzy feel-good-a-thon. The IFC Center in Greenwich Village, where it's currently showing, rescues it from this tinselly fate. Seen on the big screen, its narrative and visual sophistication shine, while its philosophical darkness shocks: we must learn to accept that we won't get what we want or deserve from life, the movie says, and we have to take what comfort we can in the small victories chance allows us. And just as arresting, in a time when conservatives cry "socialism" at the idea of bumping up the marginal tax rate to half of what it was when the movie came out, is the film's wholehearted embrace of working class collectivism and socialized financial responsibility. In a talk before the screening, Mary Owen, Donna Reed's daughter, said that her mother always thought of this as the most demanding and best project she was involved in. It's impossible to disagree.

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spaece