At the end of yet another week in a long year of snide political division, the small item of news that gave me most festive cheer was the project that has seen the script of It’s a Wonderful Life painted at 14 railway stations from London to Glasgow.
The lines from Frank Capra’s film – five miles of them in total – run along the yellow line at the edge of platforms, temporarily replacing “Mind the Gap” with some of the movie’s indelible messages about human connection. (I’m half-tempted, as I write, to go on a saver-return pilgrimage through Rugby and Crewe and Penrith to find the bit that says: “Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends.”)
The project is a Christmas collaboration between the mental health charity Rethink and Virgin Trains. It aims to act as a reminder, amid the festive busyness, that for people struggling with loneliness and depression this time of year can be the toughest of all – and of the effect that small acts of kindness can have in keeping the most vulnerable away from the edge. The project also, perhaps, offers a quiet, unspooling answer to the questions that currently nag at our fractured national psyche – how will we ever bring our country back together? What are the values that we might unite around?
It seems a lot to ask of a 72-year-old movie, but the message at the platform’s edge, stretching along the spine of the country, might be seen as a timely metaphor. One of the reasons It’s a Wonderful Life was chosen as the nation’s favourite Christmas film (pipping Elf and The Muppet Christmas Carol) in a Radio Times poll last week was that it continues to do what the best films always do: give those of us who are watching in the dark perspectives by which to understand our lives. We may go into it in one frame of mind but we emerge from it in another.
I would go further and suggest that this particular film has the capacity to help make emotional sense of passing time. If you are like me, you cry at different moments each year. I first remember watching it more than 30 years ago, with Lisa, then my girlfriend, now my wife. At that time, it was the great diffident and poetic romance between George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) and Mary (Donna Reed) that did it. Later, it was the way it makes you count the exhausting blessings of fatherhood. And then, as the years passed, and despair at not achieving all the things that I had hoped to achieve deepened, as it deepens for most of us, watching it offered a kind of recurring solace: you are not alone.
At the same time, the film never seemed to fail to dramatise the current political moment. There was no better rejoinder to the philosophy that created the financial crash than George’s defence of the mutual principle of the “savings and loan” against the vulture capitalism of his nemesis, Mr Potter. And no more heartfelt response to the politics of austerity and demonisation of the poor than his: “Just remember this, Mr Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about… they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”
The film doesn’t fail with a message for our current moment. Watching it last night with my now grownup family, I was struck more pointedly than ever by how George’s apparently justified anger in the face of Potter’s unwavering cynicism almost leads to his own destruction. The antidote to small acts of cruelty is proved to be not futile hostility but a generosity of spirit. We have to believe kindness is catching.
There was a trenchant little expression of this fact last week. It came among the daily tide of anonymised vitriol on my Twitter feed in a thread of tweets by the screenwriter and children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce. The thread, which might itself be written along the cliff edge we are all facing next year, was an explanation of why Cottrell Boyce had, the previous evening, walked out of a comedy show by Dylan Moran, a comic he had always enjoyed and admired.
“Great comedians turn audiences into temporary communities,” Cottrell Boyce wrote. “[But] Moran opened his Liverpool gig with Brexit gags. The gist was only stupid bigots voted Brexit. The Liverpool audience howled approval. He was making us a community not by mocking us but by inviting us to mock people who were too dim to be at the gig.”
Cottrell Boyce voted Remain, he noted, but with the understanding that “there might be good arguments and good people on both sides”. The past two years had made that belief increasingly impossible to voice, to all our detriment. “Now you have to believe either that the EU is Utopia and the UK is a bigot-ridden Dystopia. Or you think the EU is a fascist uber-state and England is making a brave last stand. Neither is true,” the novelist asserted, “because Truth and the World are complicated. Always.”
The binaries imposed by the referendum unleashed many demons, but the worst of them was the intransigence that has led to bitterness. On his way out of the theatre, Cottrell Boyce passed a church on which people had tied prayers to the railings: “Heart-breaking requests for help in illness, bereavement, debt or finding lost love ones. People who really have to work to hope.” The messages gave him a jolt of perspective. “I think it comes down to this,” he concluded. “When progressive voices start name-calling – ‘gammon’ etc – it’s a sign they’ve given up on making anything actually progress.”
Cottrell Boyce’s observations stuck with me and, inevitably, given their sentiment, came to mind as I was watching Frank Capra’s annual gospel of self-discovery. The lasting virtue of James Stewart’s character lies not in his conviction, but in his doubt, not in any self-righteousness, but in cheerful, hesitant duty and empathy. He is kind, decent, courteous. All of which is to say, as we face the coming three months that will shape our communities and our nation, we could all do worse than keep in mind that perennially useful question: what would George Bailey do? The answer might, just, bring us a little closer together.
• Tim Adams is an Observer writer
