It’s a Wonderful Knife

(Tyler MacIntyre, USA, 2023)

I have been intrigued, of late, by the frequency by which snap movie-evaluations – not to mention practical filmmaking advice – come wrapped in the lingo of stakes … and, especially, high stakes. The mantra sounds: a story must have high stakes, or it has nothing!

Now, I’m fully aware of what a narrative stake is and what function it serves, often well: it’s the central goal-orientation, conflict, or obstacle that powers a story, and usually signals the way that story will, can or should be resolved. It’s true, some movies (especially those subservient to genre templates and expectations) can seem drab or lifeless if they lack a convincing ‘something at stake’.

The high bit added to the magic word stakes, however, is a more recent, and dubious, affectation of mainstream movie culture. Personally, I’m fine with films that have low stakes – which is often the very definition of ‘art cinema’ – and even, at the limit, no stake whatsoever (what’s at stake in, say, Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit [1982]?). We should all be fine with them. ‘The stakes are just not high enough!’ has become an idiot’s way of dismissing and not thinking about whatever film they react adversely to, gut-wise. It’s a rationalisation that takes its place in a long line of such rhetorical showstoppers (such as, in recent memory, tonal problems … ).

Still, I have to admit that, in comparing It’s a Wonderful Knife to It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – and arriving at the same point of the hero/ine wishing to the sky they had never been born – I was struck by how low the stakes had fallen in 77 years.

What had George Bailey (James Stewart) lost in the original? Just about everything that mattered: money, security, stability, his dreams, his hopes, the ideals of home and family … So, suicide off the local bridge really did seem a plausible exit route for the poor guy. But young Winnie (Jane Widdop) in this televisual 2023? Basically: a bit of bad vibe from the family, a some social-peer freeze-out, and a ‘no one’s paying me any attention and believing me!’ whine. It’s hardly enough to turn reality inside-out on a dime.

It’s a Wonderful Knife delivers exactly what its title promises: a horror-comedy riff on Frank Capra’s Christmastime classic. It’s not a parody, and it hardly even sticks to the plot template of the original. It’s more a postmodern gloss in the manner of the intermittently inventive The Final Girls (2015), without that film’s blatantly artificial reflexivity: it darts in and out of explicit, knowing-winking references, especially in the dialogue (“Oh my god, you’re George Bailey!” – “And you’re Clarence!”; although even this gets its own twist).

Only in a few fleeting shots of Winnie rushing exuberantly past some milestones of the Angel Falls’ Main Street do director Tyler MacIntyre and writer Michael Kennedy aspire to recreate some specific, cinematic thrill of Capra’s film.

The Potter figure here is Henry Waters, played with hammy relish by Justin Long. Except that he’s already gone further in his redevelopment and gladhanding capitalist schemes than Potter ever went; he’s even managed to turn himself into a kind of civic hero, his face plastered on every billboard and TV screen. But there’s a sudden change in the narrative schema: Waters is unexpectedly killed by an obscure, raging maniac with a … wonderful knife.

The Final Girls also insists as the contemporary model for this exercise in its gentle but tenacious tilt to queerness; it is, ultimately, a tale of female bonding between Winnie and Bernie (Jess McLeod) – and only secondarily about the restoration of the happy-family status quo (the father’s role is a curiously vacillating one).

The one intriguing aspect of It’s a Wonderful Knife comes in the distance that it maintains between itself and any spectre of spirituality – even more substantially so than the comic wedge that Capra skilfully inserted between his cute band of angels (twinkling as stars in the sky) and anything resembling the Judeo-Christian God (the taboo on His direct or iconic representation still held good in ’46 Hollywood!).

Here and now, in the age of every time-travelling, destiny-stalking and multiverse conceit imaginable, the problem of this little Ms Bailey is not to square herself with the Divine Maker but to … align herself correctly with the semi-predictable opening and closing of the time-space continuum! What else did you expect?

© Adrian Martin 31 October–1 November 2024