It’s A Wonderful Life, or Not…

It was an accidental juxtaposition of movies on the Casey DVD player tonight, two movies of different times, with utterly different messages. And it requires a dual-review. Spoilers within, so deal with that if you haven’t seen one or either of these movies; It’s A Wonderful Life and The Butterfly Effect.

And I’d find it hard to believe if you haven’t seen the first one. Since this film no longer plays around the clock in December as it once did, I do feel a responsibility to provide at least once annual force-feeding of George Bailey’s life-affirming adventure. And so, against the moans of my children, I insisted on starting with ‘It’s A Wonderful Life‘, Frank Capra’s holiday classic.

The story needs no re-telling here (if you really need a recap, try this 30-second version with bunnies). Suffice to say that George’s life doesn’t turn out the way he had planned, and despite having a beautiful wife, great kids, and many friends, he hits a low-point where his attempt at suicide is prevented by a guardian angel. Still convinced that everyone would be better off if he had never been born, George’s angel grants his wish, and introduces him to the people and places in his life as they would be if he had never existed. And of course, everyone and everything is worse off without George (although Pottersville looks like a fun town to me). George has an epiphany, begs his angel to take him back, and we have a happy ending with neighbors emptying their pockets, Clarence getting his wings, and some wine and Auld Lang Syne. The End.

The Butterfly Effect was one I added to my Netflix queue based on the preview. It looked like a nice horror/sci-fi/time travel type of thing, and I generally like that sort of stuff. In the movie, Evan Treborn is a young man with some issues. His father is in the nuthouse, and Evan has a bad habit of blacking out and missing critical events in his own life and the lives of his friends. On his doctors advice, he begins to keep journals, writing down his daily activities and thoughts in order to have a reference to check against when he later forgets what’s going on around him. He’s got some good reason to black stuff out; a crazy dad, pedophile neighbor, sadistic friends and a prank gone horribly bad. But only years later, when in college Evan is studying how memories work, does he discover a unique talent. By re-reading his own journals, Evan can project himself into the past. Once there, he can act to change events, and then come forward again to live with the end result of the change he has made.

Evan learns that his attempts to change history often bring unintended consequences, and repeat visits to the past to try and fix things again and again typically only make things worse. As he continues, you start to wonder if he’s really traveling through time, or if he’s just crazy like his father and all of this is in his own head. Ultimately, he decides that all of the problems in his friends lives are his own fault, and so Evan goes back one last time for an interesting final solution. I guess his guardian angel was on a coffee break or something.

I should note that we were watching the Director’s Cut, and not the Theatrical version. A posting on the IMDB message boards says that the version that played in theatres had a happy ending (it was supposedly on the flip side of the DVD disc, but our player wouldn’t cooperate in playing it). But I can tell you, the Director’s cut does not. It was my wife Jennifer who pointed out that The Butterfly Effect was essentially an exact opposite of It’s A Wonderful Life, in that unlike George Bailey, Evan finds that they only way he can make everything turn out well for his family and friends is to take himself completely out of the picture.

I guess it’s a common question for any of us. Is the world a better place with me in it? Am I having a positive or negative impact on my loved ones? Would my home town become a Pottersville without me living in it? We’ll never know the answers, but the questions themselves can help us strive to be more like George than Evan.

Thanks to Eric for sharing the Bunny version of It’s a Wonderful Life