The prospect of making It’s a Wonderful Life could scarcely have carried its later reassurance for the people trying to get it made. Jimmy is at its most interesting when it remembers that. James Stewart returns from service in the Second World War and has to consider whether he still knows how to do the work that made him visible to strangers. George Bailey gives him a role in which a man has to decide what his presence in a community has amounted to. The fit is suggestive enough to draw a film out of it. It is also neat enough to warrant some caution about treating the part as a resolution to the life.
KJ Apa has more to do than find the familiar Stewart sounds. The young man’s manner has to make sense before it becomes recognizable as part of a public character. Apa is strongest when he lets a hesitation sit for a moment without turning it into a sign of folksiness. There can be fatigue, judgment and a need to make a conversation easy for somebody else in the same pause. That is more revealing than an opportunity to congratulate the film on the exactness of an impression. An actor with experience of being looked at might take considerable trouble to keep his most unsettled reactions out of the expression other people know best.
Stewart’s status before the war gives the return a further complication. A public that already knows what kind of man it thinks he is can be surprisingly quick to decide that the person is back. The performer may find that he has to recover the means of making that assurance available before he can benefit from it. Apa is well suited to the separation between a face the room recognizes and a set of gestures the actor still has to choose. The biopic can trust that discrepancy to generate tension without having to provide a neat description of what he brought home.
The wartime passages have an obvious source of gravity. What matters to the story is how that experience changes the shape of ordinary contact after the war, when no one can assume that the people around Stewart have a useful understanding of the things he has been doing. Aaron Burns can give that discomfort room through a conversation or a piece of family business. The Bible sent by Stewart’s father is a particularly direct object to put into that account. It has a history between two people before the film can ask it to summarize a set of convictions.
The Hollywood material adds an attractive practical dimension. A director or a colleague can believe somebody is right for a role and have very little authority to tell him what the work will mean after he accepts it. A scene about finding a performance can make that difference visible. The film’s reverence for the finished It’s a Wonderful Life occasionally makes it harder to feel the labor that stood between accepting the role and discovering what could be done with it. George Bailey’s despair is powerful partly because the picture allowed Stewart to make it unsettling. Treating the part principally as a return to himself puts some of that strangeness out of reach.
Frank Capra’s role is more interesting when the film lets him have a problem of his own. He needs to make a picture about despair that can plausibly end with a man wanting to return to the life he once tried to leave. Stewart is an answer to a particular artistic question and also someone who could bring an unmanageable uncertainty into the answer. The trouble with working backward from the movie’s later holiday status is that the original difficulty becomes hard to feel. The more the biopic attends to the immediate work of acting, the less it has to rely on that later reception to give Stewart’s return a point.
Jimmy has a substantial story in the change of occupations it follows. A man familiar with one set of obligations comes home from another and has to learn how to stand in front of people again. Apa gives him enough private hesitation to make that change worth following. The framing around a film audiences love is most useful when it lets the work feel uncertain again for the people who had to show up and make it.
