I think this is the first time I got misty-eyed over this movie.

Yes it's tremendously sentimental and yes it's cheesy and yes it's overblown and yes there's at least one moment of astonishing racism, but I really think this is the first time I was hit with how powerful the film is.

I'm so prone to fits of melancholy (especially during the winter, which ironically enough is my favorite season -- perhaps because I'm so melancholy) that sometimes I need a good sucker punch of sweet-toothed optimism to remind me of the preciousness of life -- of all the ways in which one seemingly insignificant life can reach out and have consequences of which we, in our limited perspectives, could never conceive. Capra may not know much in the way of subtlety, but goddamn does he know how to pull at the heartstrings -- and Jimmy Stewart gives an effortlessly brilliant performance as always.

I won't lie -- where I am today isn't where I saw myself ending up, say, five years ago. A lot of dreams, a lot of hopes, a lot of expectations -- they've all fallen apart. The very value of dreams, I realize, is predicated upon the fact that they don't come true very often. If they did, the world would look very different; if they did, they wouldn't really have much value, either. We'd take them for granted as we take all things for granted. But even in spite of that, in spite of all the false hopes and deceits and all the disappointment, "It's a Wonderful Life" reminds me that life is exactly that -- wonderful. It reminds me of a poem I once read by Amy Clampitt, "A Hermit Thrush." It ends like this:

"From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive—
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human—there’s

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing."

I love those last few lines. "This botched, cumbersome, much-mended, not unsatisfactory thing." That, in a nutshell, *is* life. A big jumble of complications and imperfections, and yet there's something so compelling, so wonderful about it.

Thanks, Frank Capra. Thanks, Amy Clampitt.