Patrick Deneen is Wrong about 'It’s a Wonderful Life'

Frank Capra’s holiday classic is a beautiful story about America, Christmas, family, and God.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Flickr.

Before he was known for Why Liberalism Failed, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen published a contrarian article in First Things harshly criticizing It’s a Wonderful Life, most notably by accusing its protagonist, George Bailey, of destroying the community he grew up in and betraying the people he loved so dearly. He could not be more wrong. 

Deneen makes much of the fact that George Bailey hates Bedford Falls and wants to get out and do big things. In his telling, “I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world,” becomes not a young man’s expression of travel lust but evidence of deep ingratitude and oikophobia.

But this phrase is not meant ungratefully. George often expresses gratitude for the sacrifices of his father and mother and for the things he’s been given. While he wishes to leave, he is willing to put aside that wish in order to serve the people he loves. George’s quip about seeing the world shows viewers just how much he sacrificed. He had big dreams for his life, and he gave every last one of them up. Like his father, he was too determined to do the right thing to look out for himself, even when it cost him dearly. 

Actions speak louder than words, and George’s actions speak louder than words about a “crummy little town,” spoken in a moment of youthful overexuberance. While George never loses his desire for something more in life, over the course of the movie, he comes to see that his father was right when he said, “In our own small way, we are doing something important” at the Bailey Building and Loan. He comes to see the value in the things he’d overlooked. He comes to see that even though it wasn’t the life he’d wanted, life in Bedford Falls with a loving family is “a wonderful life.”

Deneen claims that George Bailey, by building Bailey Park, contributes to the destruction of his hometown. He argues that this subdivision, a precursor to the suburban neighborhoods which characterized the 1950s, is partially responsible for the hollowing out of the community and would lead to greater atomization (because people wouldn’t know their neighbors as well). 

This isn’t just an unfair attack upon George Bailey. It is an unfair attack on the American Dream and, by extension, on tens of millions of Americans like Giuseppe Martini, for whom subdivisions like Bailey Park are opportunities to own decent, clean, safe homes in which to raise happy families. Indeed, Deneen’s claim that “Bailey Park has no trees, no sidewalks, no porches” and that it’s “pedestrian hostile” is refuted by this scene. Anyone who grew up in a subdivision like Bailey Park knows it isn’t “pedestrian hostile,” and as another reviewer noted, the people who went to live in Bailey Park were not “former residents of downtown Bedford Falls, but former renters from the slums of Potter’s Field.” Deneen has stated publicly that he prefers a more impoverished world because he believes it would be more virtuous and communitarian, but if he is going to make that case, he needs to consider what that means for families like Giuseppe Martini’s.  

Steven D. Graydanus noted in refutation of Deneen:

“Strangely, these slums don’t figure in Deneen’s consideration of the social vitality of Bedford Falls absent George’s actions. The real dilemma is not Bedford Falls with or without Bailey Park, but Bedford Falls with a) more people “living like pigs” in teeming slums in Potter’s Field, or with b) more proud homeowners living in “dozens of the prettiest little homes you ever saw” in Bailey Park. George, in one of the film’s most famous monologues, argues for the latter; Deneen doesn’t engage this argument.”

-Steven D. Graydanus

Deneen tries to make the case that George Bailey, by embodying the American Dream, “destroys the town that saves him.” Knowing Deneen’s later work, perhaps it is not surprising that he would like to read this into an otherwise lovable holiday classic. Perhaps it is also not surprising that his contrarian take relies on a convenient narrative supported by cherry-picked facts and more than a few stretchers. Deneen’s case ultimately hinges upon a claim that the famous grave scene depicts an “unthinkable” horror: that George Bailey built Bailey Park on top of Bedford Falls’s old cemetery. 

When one makes a startling claim like this about one of the most-watched movies in America, a claim which multiple generations of moviegoers and critics have failed to notice, one needs some hard evidence. In many ways, it seems difficult to believe that this could have gone overlooked for so long, and it seems harder to believe that theatergoers in 1946 would not have walked out of the theater had they believed that George Bailey would raze his local cemetery to build a subdivision. 

And in fact, Deneen’s claim isn’t just wild-but-possibly-true. It’s a falsehood. Graydanus notes that maps shown to Mr. Potter by his rent collector—the one who says he used to hunt rabbits on the land where Bailey Park sits—indicate that Bailey Park “is some distance from the cemetery.” 

This is damning for Deneen’s case. Extreme conclusions require extreme evidence. If the linchpin of his dark narrative turns out to be false, what does that say about his argument? At first reading, his woeful tale appears sadly plausible. Perhaps we really should look at It’s a Wonderful Life differently. But when careful reviewers engage with the available facts and the intricacies of his argument, Deneen turns out to have made an argument he wanted to make, to have read into a film something which wasn’t there and which isn’t supported by the events on screen, to have constructed a narrative on the basis of a few pieces of information without considering alternative explanations or contradictory evidence, and to have either misinterpreted certain scenes or to have made false claims about them.

Before we conclude, it is worth saying a little more about the film in general in order to place Patrick Deneen’s argument in context. 

It's a Wonderful Life is an American movie without being a particularly political movie. There are things in it for conservatives to like and things in it for liberals to like. Some on the left might make much of the fact that the bad guy is a greedy, old, rich fellow who wants to own everything in town and who grows his wealth by screwing the poor. But if it is an anti-capitalist movie, it is very strange that the hero operates a profit-making, private lending institution and that the Baileys are businessmen in possession of big hearts.

Indeed, in the scene with a run on the bank, the day is saved not by the government stepping in and bailing out the bank but by private actors with cool heads. Even during the Depression, the government is hardly seen at all. And perhaps one of the most satisfying scenes in the movie is when the government bank examiner tears up his arrest warrant for George Bailey, merely on the basis of George’s friends having given him enough money to cover the missing funds on the Building and Loan’s balance sheet. George is rescued in the end by the charity of his friends, not by any state intervention, and one of those friends is the wildly successful Sam Wainwright, who hasn’t forgotten his childhood pal. 

To be sure, the movie isn’t a right-wing movie either. It is a celebration of the American working class and a story about an underdog hero standing up to the powerful on behalf of the powerless. But because Bedford Falls is in America, that underdog hero doesn’t appeal to any authority other than God, and his goal is nothing more than to ensure his fellow citizens can “live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath.” The equality of It’s a Wonderful Life is an equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. In that way, the film is a portrait of America in the first half of the twentieth century. 

Two of the most famous lines in the movie are, “All that you can take with you is that which you have given away,” and “No man is poor who has friends.” These two lines sum up George Bailey’s life, and in them lies the heart of the film. Critics like Patrick Deneen would like to overlook these two lines in order to condemn a man who, in the words of one of those friends, “never thinks of himself.” George Bailey does think of himself, of course, and the viewer knows very well what George wants. But the selfless man is not the man without self-interest, but the man who recognizes all too well his own self-interest and puts the interests of others first. 

George Bailey is one such man. He suffers much for his selflessness, although he is rewarded too. Is it too much to ask that he be left in peace by critics who would seek to use him as a foil for their own particular grievances about America in the twenty-first century?

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712