I also have to say, George's journey reminds me in some problematic ways of Dorothy's in the WIZARD OF OZ. Dorothy has this fantastic life in Oz, but all she wants is to go back to grey old Kansas. George actually has big dreams, and his conflict is that life keeps asking him to forgo those dreams to help others, and he keeps saying yes. (It's a really interesting problem to have; it sounds very passive, yet in fact each new yes is by its nature an active step.) But then in the end the thing he has to learn is that he was always meant to stay home, that it helped so many people. And no one asks, how many lives might he have affected if he'd pursued the life he wanted? Because like OZ, this is a movie that wants to celebrate and raise up the status quo, really. And yet again, it really really works.
There's lots of script-y stuff to talk about in LIFE, but the thing that really stood out to me watching it was the degree to which the story makes us privy to George's inner life in a way no one else is. We are often the only ones who fully appreciate the sacrifice he's making; others may have pieces of that same knowledge, but only we see it all. In fact there are moments, as when he stares into the camera after he's told he has to run the savings and loan, where quite literally we're the only ones allowed to see his reaction, the way his face falls.
It's an important tool for late in the story. By the time George goes off on everyone and decides to commit suicide, the audience really needs to be totally united with him.
But it's also a way of creating and keeping conflict alive in the story. George has a lot of happy things happen to him along the way, including moments that he himself values deeply. But because the writing and direction has given us this privy look into his dreams from the start, those good things always feel uncomfortable for us. Every good thing in fact is another thing keeping him from the journey we've been taught to want for him. It's a genius screenwriting move, that, and one I often need to remember. I think the success of the script is all about me, the writer (and of course the acting and production team as well).
But there's another group involved, and that's the audience. And it turns out, if you get the audience to identify with your protagonist's desire early on, they will fight to keep that desire alive all on their own.
Or put another way, in the case of LIFE, If you poison the well early, the audience is going to keep freaking out even if the characters themselves don't seem to be getting sick. It's just what we do.
An exercise you might try: Write a scene where you establish the character's desire and need strongly right away, and then don't talk about it for as long as you can in the scene, and see what you discover. What are the beats you need in that beginning to really cement the desire in the audience's mind? How late can you go back to it before the end without it losing its power? Is there any way in which not going back to it actually increases its strength in our minds?
