Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) & It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

I somehow went 25 years without ever seeing two of the most beloved American films of all time. It's a Wonderful Life has long been the movie that folks can't believe I haven't seen, and I daresay if Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was only set at Christmastime, it wouldn't be far behind. Upon finally sitting down and putting myself through this Capra/Stewart double feature, I'm not surprised by the feeling that I had already seen them several times. They've both been ripped off, retread and lovingly copied more times than I can count.

What is surprising to me is the disappointment engendered in my cynical soul by It's a Wonderful Life. I can't believe this is the movie that America tunes in to watch every year at Christmas (someone asked me, when I told them what I was going to watch last night, "Isn't it a little early?"). For starters, it's only a Christmas movie for the final forty minutes, and the wintry setting, in fact, isn't really crucial to any of the morals or lessons imparted therein. I suppose Christmastime and moralizing make good bedfellows, but I'd honestly be more interested in some bedfellow relations for Officer Bert and Taxi Driver Ernie (or their muppet successors).

Don't get me wrong. This is by no means a bad movie, but in terms of storytelling, it's pretty on-the-nose in the end. And as for the beginning, I've never seen a movie take an hour and twenty minutes to reach its inciting incident. Prior to Uncle Billy's dumbassery at the bank that lands the Bailey fortune into Mr. Potter's sniveling (and apparently slimy, if his handshake with George is any indication) fists, we're treated to an episodic chronicle of the life of George Bailey. This is all well and good, and I don't think little Bobbie Anderson (young George) has been out-charisma'd by a child actor ever since. Given this as a set-up for George's realization that he's "worth more dead than alive" and eventual start down a new path, it occurs to me that Up did this kind of thing better and in ten minutes. What's It's a Wonderful Life about? It's about a man who's going to kill himself because his twit Uncle lost a ton of cash, and then an angel comes down to give him a Dickensian lesson on life being worth living and he changes his mind. Correct me if that's an improper summary, because it also reveals the film as hideously off-balance.


I think the biggest kick I got out of finally watching this is that I can finally completely appreciate Saturday Night Live's alternate ending, which is inarguably superior to the real one. I'd have to go back through fifty years of review to see if anyone agrees with me on this (the sketch comedy speaks for itself), but seriously: Evil Mr. Potter gets no comeupance whatsoever? That is completely unacceptable. It's bad enough the crotchety old cripple never recieves a fatal beating; he never even gets exposed as having swiped the Baileys' money. He never gets so much as a talking to. It's nice that the townsfolk are so willing to throw piles of cash at George in an overwhelming ejaculation of Christmas spirit, but haven't we previously been told that Mr. Potter owns like ninety percent of the town? How much money can they really have to toss around? Exacting a socialist state in the Bailey's living room is, again, a nice idea, but they can't keep it going much longer with Potter still around.

It's easy to assume that Potter will die before Bailey (although the man's mortality is questionable - he barely ages over forty years and spends the whole time in a wheelchair at no visible detriment to his overall health), leaving Bailey to take back the town (Is there an heir, by the way, to the Potter estate?), but what if something happens to George first? Without him, we are shown quite explicitly, Bedford Falls will become something like the alternate 1985 of Back to the Future, Part II, all gin joints and burlesque. The failure of Capra or any of his screenwriters to bring their villain down - or give any kind of closure between him and Bailey - is unacceptable. I take respite in the fact that the main drag in Pottersville looked like kind of a fun place, and that Donna Reed makes for one damn foxy librarian.

What impresses me most, however, about the structural disarray of It's a Wonderful Life is that seven years earlier, Capra and Stewart (not to mention Beulah Bondi, who plays Stewart's mother in both films) teamed up to make one of the most dramatically perfect films I've ever seen in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Boy, America, did you choose the wrong Capra movie to watch every year.


Stewart's eponymous Senator Jeff Smith is a small-town rube who runs the local boy scout troupe (the actual Scouts denied rights to use their name; on a similar note, the entire film manages to unspool without naming Smith's homestate or noting his political party affiliation) and prints a one-sheet newsletter. He is selected to replace a freshly deceased senator for two reasons: he's popular enough that his selection won't cause a revolution and he's dumb enough that he won't be able to stop a backroom deal for a dam that's been hidden in Article 40 of the Deficiency Bill solely to make a local newspaper tycoon a ton of money.

The selectors behind Smith's appointment are Governor Hopper and Senator Paine, both of whom answer to Jim Taylor, the rich civilian who for years has been running the state behind closed doors. Paine, it's established early on, knew Smith's father, and loved him. He loves Smith, too, and this will prove to be his fatal flaw.

Of course, Stewart does catch on to the plot and in trying to blow the whistle, ends up framed in a scandal of forgeries and hearsay. About to be expelled from the Senate after less than a week, and with a lot of assistance from his secretary/love interest Jean Arthur (easily besting Donna Reed in the personality category and matching her in the gauzy close-up), he pulls out the dramatist's favorite check to the balances of power written into our books: The Filibuster.

According to the film's IMDb trivia page, there was a much longer ending, depicting a friendly make-up session between Mr. Smith and his malleable nemesis Senator Paine, the collapse of the "Taylor Machine" and a ticker-tape parade for Smith upon his return home. This ending was cut, allegedly, due to a preview audience's response.

At the climax of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart passes out in the 24th hour of the filibuster intended to save his name, his state and the purity of American democracy, and in the next minute-and-a-half, his nemesis Paine admits the truth, the day is saved, our hero is revealed to be "okay!" (to the delight of his paramour), and the film is over. In a minute-and-a-half! Now that's how you fucking end a movie. Did it really take a focus group to tell this to Frank Capra? Where were they on Wonderful Life? Or The Return of the King, for that matter? Or any of a thousand bloated endings to Hollywood entertainments? Sheesh!

And let me also state that it's easy to be glib about these things, but I feel I should put on the record that, for that entire minute-and-a-half ending, I found tears welling in my eyes. You may blame this on whatever you like: mental instability, the power of Capra's arguably naïve paean to democracy, or just Stewart's brilliance with the climactic epiphany. I think maybe it's a combination of all three. Perhaps I am a crier: but whereas Wonderful Life left me cold, Mr. Smith had me from the start right through to the end.

Reality Bites (1994)

I must admit that a certain awe washed over me as I viewed Reality Bites, its iconography and soundtrack easily described as seminal, albeit dated. The story boils down to a simple love triangle (rendering sidekicks Janeane Garafalo and Steve Zahn somewhat moot - the latter especially), but it's a rare thing to see anew such a concrete relic of a time long gone by and still find it relevant.

Relevance, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. "The film," a great man once told me, "is extant, see." What changes over time is the viewer. A 2009 audience for Reality Bites will find itself giggling at the hair and dress (presumably we haven't yet distanced ourselves enough from the styles of the 90s to have found any affection for them), but we do have a recession to call our own, and I'm sure I'm not the only twentysomething currently engaging with bouts of unemployment, existential crisis and diseases du jour (not to compare the Swine Flu of '09 Chicago to the AIDS of '94 Houston, but panicking is as panicking does).

I have no choice but to view Ben Stiller's feature directorial debut as a misleading (but effective) tragedy (his subsequent work does have threads of darkness running through it, but perhaps after the unfortunate box office for The Cable Guy he has retreated to Reality's more swallowable mainstream facade). Stiller casts himself as Michael, the baxter of the triangle, stuttering and schmucking up his love affair with Winona Ryder's Lelaina like a good little Jewish boy. His obstacle to Lelaina's heart is Troy.


Troy is Ethan Hawke, the perpetually unshowered it-boy of 1994. He smokes (pot, tobacco), drinks (coffee, beer) and fucks (anyone). The only member of the gang who managed not to complete college by the opening credits (and to drop out of a BFA program no less - what a rebel!), Troy has been fired from twelve different jobs and hangs out in diners reading philosophy. All you need is coffee, cigarettes and conversation, he tells Lelaina before sticking his tongue down her throat at the beginning of the second act. Prior to this he has been crashing on the couch she shares with Garafalo's Vicky after losing his job and consequently his apartment. The only constant in his life is his post-Nirvana rock band, Hey, That's My Bike!.

This is the second movie I've encountered in my adult life where I found myself actively rooting against the intended romantic pairing. The first was Wicker Park (I blame this on Rose Byrne being infinitely more layered, interesting, sympathetic - choose your adjective - than Diane Kruger, even if she is a little crazy), and in neither case have I ended up faulting the movie as qualititavely bad. But I'm fascinated that Lelaina's triumphant dive into the arms of a deadbeat is posited here as a happy ending, even as her father is calling to deliver the punchline that she has driven him into almost a thousand dollars worth of debt.

The love triangle is mere allegory for the decisions Lelaina must make as she leaves college for the real world. While Troy is a glamorized modern bohemian (and let us not forget, in any discussion of Troy, the bohemian's tendency to gloss over the "starving" part of being an "artist"), Michael is the financially stable yuppie. He meets Lelaina after crashing his car into her's (his driving while talking on the phone clearly a novelty in '94 - but let's not forget she did throw her cigarette butt onto his passenger seat) and then wins her over by ignoring his lawyer's suggestion that he sue. As her relationship with Michael blossoms, her relationship with Troy withers, and soon both men are spouting one-liners at each other. They both make excellent points: Michael does look ridiculous in his tie, while Troy, alas, cannot survive for long on credoes and Snickers bars. Michael is poised to win Lelaina over by delivering her handmade documentary chronicle of her friends' post-grad struggles to his "In Your FACE" sub-MTV cable network.

Essentially, Lelaina is forced to choose between the déclassé life of being paid to perform the artistry that is her passion (selling out) or, y'know, making out with Ethan Hawke.

If there is any possibility that she could both have a career and find love, the film isn't interested in suggesting it. Her decision is made for her when Michael's network re-edits her documentary into a crass, drugged up Pizza Hut advert. The dramatic tidiness of this, however, is dissolved by Michael's insistence that he had no idea they were doing that to her art and his purchase of two plane tickets to New York, where they can fix the problem.

The variable we can't count on, I suppose, is "love", which Lainey apparently has for Troy in spades and carries her through a long montage in which we get to witness how expertly Winona Ryder can smoke a cigarette while staring at the wall and pouting. Michael makes one mistake, and if we are to accept Lelaina's affections for him as sincere, there is no reason for her not to choose him other than the 'L' word or the fact that Ethan Hawke is very, very good looking.

In the final shot of the movie, Lainey and Troy are packing up the apartment, and as neither has got any job to speak of, I can only read this as their having lost the lease. Reality does, in fact, bite quite hard, Lainey learns, and none of her problems (career, money, artistic ambition) are resolved in any way. All she has is Troy, and we've seen that he has trouble amounting to much of anything. What a downer.

An Education

Did you hear the one about how at this year’s Academy Awards, there will be ten Best Picture nominees instead of five? I make no secret of my disdain for the masturbatory political machinations of the Oscars. I get a morbid thrill when a development like this is announced – year after year, a hallowed tradition of my movie-loving youth manages to lower itself deeper into its slum (wink). You know what actual hallowed traditions and sacred institutions don’t need to do? Re-brand. But since fewer people are watching the Oscars every year, (and nobody wanted to host them, either, as you also may have heard) they’ll keep coming up with these desperate pleas for relevance and ratings.

It’s a fair bet that one of those ten slots will go to An Education, a ‘polite’ British Bildungsroman about a sweet and innocent sixteen-year-old girl and the creep in his thirties who wins her virginity. Carey Mulligan is the little-known but striking young actress who inhabits Jenny, our moppet protagonist. I’ll say it is rather fun to watch her dance around an ensemble of prestige actors.

The debate of this morality tale, as we’re told seven times in the trailer and several more in the film proper, is between Jenny’s application to Oxford (boring!) and her romance (fun!) with Peter Sarsgaard’s David, a charming man at least a decade older than she. It’s Mulligan’s precocious charisma that lends the film its spare moments of depth and ambiguity. It’s plainly obvious that this is a naïve girl making bad decisions despite the warnings of her Academy Award-nominated elders. But if Mulligan is so special and clever, maybe she should be allowed to make an unpopular decision. Perhaps she knows something we don’t.

Formulating a plot summary makes my skin crawl, but here I go (by the way, I’m gonna spoil this one). Her father is overbearing and expects her to get into Oxford. She’s the smartest girl in her class by a long shot, but she’s hot so she still has friends. She has an overbearing teacher and an overbearing headmistress. She meets David one day when he offers her a lift home from school in his fancy car. He lays on the charm pretty thick, and it’s not long before he’s sweet-talked her parents into letting her go to Paris with him for the weekend and he’s trying to pop her cherry in a dingy airport hotel room with a banana. (I can’t make this stuff up.)


It’s a profoundly unpleasant film. I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: the dramatically fascinating premise of borderline child abuse or the fact that nobody involved in making the thing seems to be aware of how creepy her situation is. The storytelling here is just a curtain held over what amounts to little more than a vaguely conservative “Stay In School” PSA. The choice between David, the lying con-artist thief who’ll break your heart and Oxford, the prestigious university, is a pretty obvious one to those of us playing Aesop in the audience. But here we sit, having our noses banged with it.

Jenny has four female role models: 1) her mother, who cowers at her father’s tantrums; 2) her teacher, who doesn’t want to see her throw her life away; 3) the headmistress, played by Emma Thompson, still kicking; and 4) David’s best friend’s blonde philistine idiot girlfriend, who asks why she reads books when she could read magazines. Surrounded by ciphers such as these, it’s easy to see why our young heroine is so confused. The only remotely interesting person in her life is holding fruit between her legs, calling her “Minnie” and asking if he can “just see them.”

A smidgen of dramatic tension comes from the slow leak of David’s secrets. First he’s charming, then he’s creepy, then he’s an art thief, then he’s perpetrating elaborate real estate fraud, then there’s the bit with the banana. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. He’s already married, of course, and Jenny won’t discover this until she’s dropped out of school for him. Poor, naïve girl should’ve listened to Emma Thompson.

It doesn’t matter, though, that he’s married, and after that revelation David is never seen again. There are no consequences to her juvenile hedonism. What matters is that she partakes in a final-act “studying montage” and gets into Oxford.

An Education is Oscar Bait. It’s mediocre filmmaking with a conservative heart and a British accent, a bit of lavish period detail and a tidy happy ending. It also has the secret ingredient of middlebrow morality with just enough distance from the actual issues to render the whole affair offensive to anybody who cares about what movies are actually capable of. The fact that Nick Hornby wrote the thing I must ascribe either to the increasingly-believable notion that High Fidelity and About a Boy were flukes or that he just doesn’t know anything about women. Either way, I don’t know why we put up with this tripe.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!