As I sit down to write this column, the calendar is teetering on the edge of December. Thanksgiving may have been unseasonably balmy, but today was the first day all season that I left the house and immediately turned back to put on another layer. When I got back, I plugged in the tree and put on some holiday music, made a cup of tea, and curled up as tightly as I could in the softest chair in the house. And yet none of that signals the true start of the holiday season as definitively as screenings of a certain Jimmy Stewart chestnut.
I’m talking of course about It’s a Wonderful Life, director Frank Capra’s 1946 tale of near-suicide and holiday cheer, which screens on Sunday and Wednesday this week at Cinemark and Rave theaters in Hadley and West Springfield. In it, Stewart stars as George Bailey, the town’s favorite son and biggest booster, leader of the family Building & Loan business. After his absent-minded uncle misplaces an important bank deposit—leaving the business vulnerable to Henry Potter, who is the town’s resident Grinch—George finds himself drunk and on a bridge. But he’ll have to get in line: before he can do the deed, his guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers) jumps in himself. When George leaps to his rescue, the true story begins: like a Scrooge tale in reverse, Clarence (who needs to save Bailey to earn his wings) shows George what could have been if he decides to stop being the good man that he is.
If it sounds a bit dark for a holiday classic, it is. And yet there is something refreshing in the fact that, year in and year out, one of the mainstays of the season is something that hasn’t been plumped and polished within an inch of its life. Some people will still find it outdated, or corny (or, like me, they might just not be a particular fan of Stewart) but there’s no arguing that at the holiday feast it still has a place at the table.
Also at Cinemark this Thursday is the New York City Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker, beamed around the nation from its home in Lincoln Center. George Balanchine’s take on the ballet—with ornate costumes and over the top sets and visual effects that have made it another December icon—is paired here with a behind-the-scenes look at the ballet company that brings it all to life.
And at Amherst Cinema this week, director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) will present a screening of her film Stray Dog in a Thursday evening show. A documentary look at the life of Ron Hall—a tattooed, Harley-riding Vietnam vet whose nickname gives the film its title—it probes beyond the surface image that many might think they know to reveal a multilayered American, and multilayered American experience, that is all too rarely given time on our screens today. In an era when our officials and representatives are often quick to demonize the Other, Hall shows us a man who both served his country (proudly, even as he continues to struggle with some of his own actions overseas) and serves as patriarch to a growing multicultural family.
Granik met Hall during the filming of Winter’s Bone, the 2010 film starring Jennifer Lawrence as an Ozark teenager struggling against area traditions to save her family (see last week’s column for more on that film). Hall had a small role in Winter’s Bone, but his true life is much more a part of our modern age; he runs a trailer park in Missouri and works to support his new wife Alicia and her sons — he also travels to Mexico to help them emigrate. And while the many aspects of Hall’s life might have once seemed to belong to different people, the truth is that in today’s America the complex life is much more likely to be the rule than the exception. How nice to see it get a spotlight on the big screen.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com
