David recommends . . . INVOLUNTARY and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Two films offering very differing opportunities to explore the same themes of great contemporary importance. The relationship of individuals to group, community, and society. Is there "no such thing as society", as Margaret Thatcher declared, "only individuals and their families"? Was Gordon Gekko correct that "greed is good" for all of us?  Or do we have reciprocal obligations to one another and for our own actions?

It's that time of year when IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE comes round again for its traditional Xmas slot.  But now with a more acute than usual exploration of differences between good and bad bankers. But more about that later.

Swedish movie INVOLUNTARY is a well-made and thoughtful offering for the World Cinema crowd.  Its Unique Selling Point is its 5 entirely separate stories. All told in parallel, not as a series of shorts - like the dreadful Night On Earth (Winona Ryder as a taxi driver?).  Nor interconnecting at times via shared characters, as Robert Altman used to do. Or in the more recent Crash.

No, INVOLUNTARY cuts between five different narratives which are linked only by the common tension of individual responsibility versus individual rights in the context of misbehaviour within a group.  This intercutting is confusing at the start, but gradually we begin to sort out who is who and which thread is which. Once that settles down we are left to compare and contrast the many characters' differing dilemmas.

Should a teacher intervene when she sees another act violently to a child? Is a teenage girl to blame for what happens to her when she is drunk? Should we confess to a wrongdoing or let others suffer? When do high spirits cross over into abuse? When we are damaged can we accept help or do we have to soldier on? Above all, what duty do we have to intervene when others are misbehaving?

No Swede will be left in any doubt of the political and historical context which necessitates these considerations. For decades after World War 2 Swedish politics was dominated by a stable consensus around the social democratic model. Which delivered high material standards of living combined with considerable collective provision of public services. 

But fiscal crisis in the 90s shattered voter confidence in this local version of the European Social Model. And after dominating national politics for 70 years the Social Democratic Party suddenly fell from power in 2006, after it received its lowest ever percentage of the votes.  Sweden entered the world of what the French call The Ango-Saxon model, with its free markets, low taxes, and reduced state role.

INVOLUNTARY invites Swedes to ask whether that violent change of philosophical direction is truly good for them, at the level of social cohesion. Questions that all of us are now asking in countries reacting to the 2008 banking crisis and facing stark choices over austerity versus economic stimulus.

For in each of INVOLUNTARY's  five stories we see interactions between two sorts of individuals.  Those who live their lives as if greed, or at least the relentless pursuit of one's own gratification, is, indeed, good. And those to whom it is important to consider the impact of one's behaviour on others, and who are willing to go further and intervene on behalf of those others.

But this is no simplistic division into good versus evil. All five stories feature genuine dilemmas. For none of the participants are the choices straightforward. Sometimes acting for the group can reflect one's very individual motives. When does defending the group cross over into authoritarianism? How do we reconcile conflicting wants and needs within communities? 

INVOLUNTARY explores these fundamental questions of political philsophy and social ethics by taking them down to the most concrete and personal of levels, situations which all of us encounter every day. In so doing it avoids the trap into which so many "message films" or "idea movies" fall. Which is to centre around only one message, or only one idea. Thus coming across as rather obvious one trick ponies.

It is precisely the narrative structure of the five different stories, each of them complex in its own way, which enables INVOLUNTARY to provide such a sophisticated exploration of its subject matter. And with no obvious answers or solutions. 

This is very much an intellectual film. Not quite an art movie, but slow-paced enough with its long uncut takes to put off the commercial movie fans. Typical, if you like, of the best of Scandinavian cinema (the GIRL WHO . . . franchise notwithstanding). Reviewed by many as a comedy, you are unlikely to laugh out loud. No thrills or spills. No edge of seat tension.

For these reasons there are many among us who would not find INVOLUNTARY entertaining in the wider sense of the word. Most suitable perhaps to kick off an A Level discussion on Citizenship, or an undergraduate sociology class. But for those with patience and an interest in contemporary socio-political dilemmas INVOLUNTARY is very much worth the detour.

Far more richly entertaining, though morally much more simplistic is IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. A relative flop when it came out in 1946, it has become regarded as one of the best ever US films. The American Film Institute placed it at Number One in its chart of the "most inspirational" American films of all time.

IAWL spent a few decades not getting a great amount of attention. Director Capra never saw it as a Christmas movie. But because of its Yuletide setting it became an annual fixture of seasonal TV schedules in the 1970s. Leading to increased popularity and new recognition as both an entertaining favourite and an officially worthy classic.  Hence its annual place in the TV schedules is now mirrored in the programming of film societies, art house cinemas, and bastions of the worthy like the BFI.

If you've already seen it countless times, no need for a plot resume - just enjoy it again. If you've not seen it, just go and do so and thus join the rest of humanity.

Like INVOLUNTARY, IAWL has serious issues beneath its feel-good plot. And a not dissimilar economic and political provenance. It originated in a short story which Philip Van Doren Stern began drafting in the 1930s. During which the socially disastrous effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression were being felt acutely in The Land of the Free Market. 

34 million people in families with no wage-earner. Industrial production down by 45%. Homebuilding by 80%.  One million families kicked off their farms.  Two million homeless people wandering the country.  A period which generated Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath of 1939, made by John Ford into a movie in 1940.

The Great Depression of the 30s was not America's first such experience. The so-called "Long Depression" kicked off in the US with the "Panic of 1873"  and lasted in various part of the globe into the 1890s. As millions were laid off, the 1870s saw a massive wave of industrial strikes across America. Smaller, briefer depressions occurred again in 1918 and 1920.

During these periods something happened in representations of banks and bankers in American popular culture. They became the bad guys. 


As far back as the 1870s the white supremacist murderer and bank robber Jesse James began to be represented in novels and songs as a Robin Hood style outlaw, robbing the rich and helping the poor. Representations which continued into Hollywood movies of the 1930s and early 1940s. 


As late as the 1940s, leftist folk singer Woody Guthrie was recording traditional Jesse songs with words changed to portray him as equivalent first to a union activist and then as a Christ figure.

Throughout the 1930s a series of real life, high profile bank robbers became similarly portrayed as outlaw heroes. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie (Parker) and Clyde (Barrow) were all without exception narcissistic psychopaths happy to kill anyone who stood in the way of their machine gun toting pursuit of Gordon Gekko's later materialistic ethos. 

It was the banks who kicked people off their farms and out of their houses. And it was the Police who assisted the banks in those tasks, in between breaking the heads of striking industrial workers. So it is less than surprising that popular culture came to lionise those who took from the banks and made fools of the Police with their daring get-aways. 


Life and art imitated each other in considerable working class community support for these Depression-era outlaws, enabling them to elude capture for so long. Like James before them, and Christ before him, the hoodlums of the 30s tended to meet bloody ends via denunciation by a member of their own circle followed by the lethal extra-judicial force of the State.

In both versions of The Grapes of Wrath economic depression is portrayed as something incomprehensible to its victims. Sometimes seen as an impersonal force of nature. Sometimes as vaguely involving the actions of a handful of brutal farm owners, bankers and police officers. The 30s gangsters were represented in a spirit of triumphal personal victory over the Establishment bad guys. 

Whereas in Grapes of Wrath we see a family struggling to find any source of hope in an almost overwhelmingly depressing situation. Economic depression luring its victims into a psychologically depressed state of powerlessness. The surviving remnants of the Joad family manage to keep hope alive, but this is far from the celebration of violent individual resistance present in the bank robber films.

And so, on to IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.  Written towards the end of the Great Depression and produced as a film just as the state interventionist policies of The New Deal were kicking in.

Reflecting the bad times of the 1930s IAWL continues the popular cultural tradition of the Bad Banker in the character of Mr Potter, who takes the Gekko greed principle even unto the stage of straightforward criminal theft.

Nobody in IAWL totes a machine gun or goes on the rampage. No bankers or Police are harmed in the plot of this film. IAWL organises itself around selfless to a fault Good Banker George Bailey's own confrontation with psychological depression, which takes him to the brink of suicide. Thereafter it's a long, long way from the gloomy search for hope in Grapes of Wrath. Pretty rapidly we are on the feel good up and up. 

How do we get there? This is where IAWL lacks the sophistication of either Grapes of Wrath or INVOLUNTARY. 

The antithesis between good George Bailey and bad Mr Potter reflects the simple division of humanity, typical of US evangelism's contribution to popular culture, into fundamentally good people and fundamentally bad people. 


In this ontological and individualist division out have gone the huge social and economic forces of Grapes of Wrath, as well as the interpersonal, psychological and moral uncertainties of INVOLUNTARY. 


Grapes and this new Swedish film represent, if you like, the two ends of a continuum of analysis about social responsibility in hard times: huge and impersonal forces at one end, and individual choices at the other.

By contrast, the struggle of good versus evil is pared down in IAWL to a depiction on film of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Some of us are destined for Heaven and some for Hell, and who is who is revealed by what happens in our lives.


As directed by Divine Intervention - here in the form of an Angel. In contrast to the alpha male violence of the 30s gangsters, or the arrival of State-funded public services of the New Deal.

Thus the spiritual takes the place of social forces or individual violence in IAWL. In 1946 Frank Capra told an interviewer that he made IAWL "to combat a modern trend towards atheism".

Now in 2010 economic depression is back at the top of all our agendas, How are we going to get out of it? Working together? Or by competing with each other? With machine guns? Or via state intervention?  Or thanks to angels?  

In the UK in 2008 and 2009 bankers had once again become the Bad Guys, objects of popular rage and violence as the greedy and selfish architects of our collective distress. As we near the end of 2010 it seems as though rage against bankers has been almost forgotten. 


New targets of blame and hate are being found. The greedy unemployed. The mercenary sick and disabled. Feckless recipients of Housing Benefit. Profligate occupants of social housing. And, perhaps above all, the selfish, gluttonous and outrageously affluent midwives, care assistants and dustmen of the Public Sector.

Which way will we go? IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE offers the best good time Christmas entertainment to take our minds off current financial anxieties. But INVOLUNTARY provides the better vehicle for sober reflection on what we all owe to our fellow beings. 


A clue is perhaps found in the title as seen on the film's posters. 

The letters "IN" and "VOLUNTARY" are in different colours, enabling the option of reading two words instead of one. Voluntary action, the Swedish film seems to be saying, can be so much more than just a Big Society smokescreen for dismantling the Welfare State. There IS such a thing as society, and it consists in how every one of us treats every other one of us in our every action, every day. 

IAWL turns on a crucial decision whether or not to jump into a river. This week in London a homeless black man dived into the freezing waters of the Thames to save a young woman from drowning. Thus himself winding up in hospital being treated for hypothermia. When he first emerged from the icy water, Adan Abobaker discovered that during his rescue mission thieves had stolen his jumper, coat, wooly hat and gloves, discarded in his unhesitating haste to assist another human being.   

More on that story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331311/Homeless-hero.html (copy and paste into your browser).