IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Becky Lee Meadows considers questions of guilt, innocence, and despair in this classic Christmas movie.

- Becky Lee Meadows

Frank Capra’s 1946 masterpiece It’s A Wonderful Life is regularly included in lists of the best-ever Christmas films. Though its ending is heart-warming and life-affirming, it nonetheless deals with weighty issues of injustice, dishonesty and self-sacrifice.

Viewers of the film often regard Old Man Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore) with disgust as he listens to George Bailey (James Stewart) falsely confess to mishandling funds. After all, George is a good man who has spent his life aiding others, often to the detriment of his own dreams. And yet, even as we watch George’s friends line up at the end of the movie to help him out, we see the quintessentially evil Potter get away with the same $8,000, which had actually been mishandled by George’s Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell). We’re left unsettled even though we realize George will not go to jail and that Billy is safe: why was justice not complete? Surely a God of justice (who is referenced in the film) would see George rewarded appropriately for his actions, as well as punishing Potter? The works of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (19132005) will help us understand that George’s false confession and Uncle Billy’s lack of confession create a barrier to the achievement of complete justice.

It is important to first note that even though George confesses on at least two occasions to something he didn’t do, he obviously has superior moral values, and that the false confessions are the result of those values. Throughout the film, George pushes his own dreams into passivity as he helps fulfill the dreams of others. He gives his college money to his brother Harry instead because the board of directors for Bailey Building & Loan insists that George run the business after his father’s death. He purchases the dilapidated home that his wife Mary wants though he is not particularly fond of it, and invests in it to renovate it as their home.