Mixed Nuts (1994)

Review Essay

I have a pretty broad taste in movies, but I’ll admit, I tend to be a bit less forgiving of mean-spirited fun — I think this is what sank my National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation viewing experience (at least, that’s what I think I perceived in the movie: I know opinions vary!), and I think it’s also at work here in my reaction to Mixed Nuts, a Nora Ephron comedy that for me almost entirely seems out of touch with a sense of humor, unusually for her.  There are a couple elements to this movie that I’m genuinely impressed by, and we’ll get there, but I figure I should show my cards up front in acknowledging that this is another holiday movie that really didn’t work for me.

So much of it — and this is surprising given the strength of the cast — comes down to the acting performances, but they’re so off nearly across the board that I think Ephron must have been giving some bad direction to the ensemble as a whole.  A lot of scenes devolve rapidly into “everyone shouts over each other while wildly waving their arms” in a way that suggests we’ll find this comedic.  But those elements are only the symptoms of a farce — they’re not its causes.  If we don’t understand a character’s motivations well enough — or if the gestures they’re wildly performing don’t feel legible enough in communicating their desire to do something (or get someone else to do it) — it’s just sound and fury, signifying nothing.  It only achieves the comic mania of a farce when we DO sympathize with the characters’ mindsets enough that we feel their urgency, their panic, and their embarrassment, and to do that means to get to know them as people.  For most of the running time here — running time that includes evictions and someone trapped in an elevator, theft and vandalism and suicide, and I haven’t even gotten to the bizarre violence/crime of the movie’s third act — the characters do not emerge as people to me, and therefore all of the events that seem like they ought to feel significant never really land.  Ephron’s no fool, and therefore she must know how a farce works, which is why the film in its final act presents the ensemble to us as though we’ve emotionally connected to them: it’s just that, honestly, I didn’t.  They come across as caricatures far more than as characters.  I understand very little about what drives almost any of them, including Steve Martin as Philip, who somehow is allegedly the center of this story despite feeling barely there.

What does work here?  Well, when doesn’t Madeline Kahn work?  She’s great in everything, and even in an underwritten role here as the acidic and sometimes shrewish Mrs. Munchnik, she makes both her quips and her quandaries funny enough and human enough that I did connect with her (even when — maybe especially when — she’s being really, really mean to Philip, who does after all seem to deserve it).  Astonishingly for any 1990s movie, the other character who really works for me here is a trans woman, Chris, played by a young Liev Schreiber.  Schreiber seems to have a big leg up on the rest of the movie here, in that he portrays Chris as a human with some inherent dignity, with a marginalized identity that deserves to show up in a way that respects her as a person.  To be clear, the script and the direction don’t really get it at all — more than once, the film tries to treat Chris’s trans identity as something humorous in a “can you believe it, this MAN is going to dance with this TRANS person” sort of way.  But Schreiber’s performance is so committed that to me, in those moments, we don’t get a joke — we just see Chris, absorbing or deflecting those moments, dealing with how she’s treated in ways that are sometimes funny but almost always compelling.  Even in her greater flights of fancy, she doesn’t come across as unmoored the way the other characters generally do, to me, because she feels real — really flustered, really exhilarated, really open to both her own novelty and the novelty of the people surrounding her.  Sure, today I’d want to see the role in the hands of an actual trans actress, but I can’t fault Liev for putting his energy fully into making the role work.  And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but my last praise goes to a young Adam Sandler of all people.  As naive young Louie, he’s initially attracted to Rita Wilson as Catherine (who is, alas, predestined by the screenplay to fall for Philip, as far as I can tell only because he’s the main character), but Louie shifts gears to Chris partway through the movie, and it’s undeniably sweet — he’s the one character who as far as I can tell always refers to her with a female pronoun, and who takes her feelings seriously.  A movie that had centered the two of them more could honestly have been something kind of special, and it’s wild that I’m arguing a 1994 comedy would have been more mature and thoughtful by focusing more on Adam Sandler’s romance with a trans woman, given both Sandler’s 90’s oeuvre and the horrifying transphobia of that era, but here we are.

I do get that the film is supposed to be ironic, but I just don’t really understand what the point of the irony is (or even, at times, whether there’s any irony at all).  The central characters run a terrible suicide hotline, because (as is evident from its opening scenes) the people who work there are absolutely not emotionally stable themselves, and Philip in particular is so incapable of compassion (until the script suddenly forces him to be) that it’s clear he’d be the last person you wanted to talk with in a crisis.  Is that really ironic as opposed to just being plausibly (if lamentably) true?  And half of these characters don’t work for the hotline at all — Juliette Lewis and Anthony LaPaglia, for instance, are insufferable as a young couple who absolutely should not be in love, let alone having a baby, and yet the movie treats their getting past their fundamental mismatch (and past threats of lethal domestic violence: ugh) as some kind of romantic triumph.  In general, the film seems to be more elated than unsettled by human cruelty and misery, and that’s a bizarre place to reside in a Christmas comedy. I don’t know, maybe I’m supposed to hate most of these characters?  I’m really baffled by Ephron’s intentions here.  In the end, the screenplay’s attempts to persuade me that this is all some big, inspiring message about Christmas and loneliness just leaves me feeling like this was either a first draft that needed a lot more work, or it’s one of those ideas that only makes sense as a pitch, but once you flesh it out, it’s just too hard to land an idea this complicated in a movie that’s both entertaining and moving.  Honestly, I wanted so badly to make this movie make sense that I re-watched it, figuring it would land differently once I knew what to expect….but nope.  It is what it is, even if I still can’t really tell you what it is.

I Know That Face: Well, as aforementioned, Steve Martin (here the protagonist director of the hotline, Philip) is of course well known to us as Neal Page from Planes, Trains & Automobiles.  Anthony La Paglia (who here is Felix, the deadbeat crooked artist with a gun and an attitude problem) played the role of a British Flyer in Kenny & Dolly: A Christmas to Remember.  Rita Wilson (here playing Catherine, the mousy love interest also working at the hotline) is Liz Langston in Jingle All the Way, and she’s also Suzy in Sleepless in Seattle, a much better Ephron movie which of course uses a Christmas Eve call-in show as the catalyst for its central romantic pairing.  Lastly, Adam Sandler (who in Mixed Nuts plays Louie, the guitar-playing sweetie of both Catherine and Chris) ultimately voices multiple roles in Eight Crazy Nights, his animated Hanukkah movie, which I really ought to put in the rotation next year (don’t you think?).

That Takes Me Back: It’s funny to realize this, but the idea of a fruitcake as an iconically unwelcome gift is such a ‘90s trope: like, at the time, it was just a joke everybody told, but looking back now, I’m realizing how incredibly tired a comedic setup it is?  It does still make me nostalgic, though, for the laugh-tracked holiday memories of my media environment as a kid.  Given the phone hotline as a setting, we get some fun phone stuff — one character tells another to “click the little phone thing like this” and I realized my kid may never understand those little switches on an old phone (or the reason we use the phrase “hang up” in the first place).  At another point, someone fires off as a semi-devastating verbal snipe that “I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone; I wanted to FAX you… but you don’t even HAVE a FAX.”  Imagine, not having a fax machine.  Oh, and while rollerblading still exists as a pastime, I think the hipness of rollerblading, especially as a way of signaling you’re in SoCal and things are cool and different here, is definitively a ‘90s feeling, and one I didn’t really know would hit me with nostalgia until it did.

I Understood That Reference: One character quotes the final lines of A Visit From St. Nicholas as a withering exit line, right before someone else stumbles through the door with a gun.  I know it sounds a little like I’m just describing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and actually, now that I’m noting that, maybe that’s a reference here also, if very subtly, to that film’s closing scenes?  It’s so hard to know.

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Holiday Vibes (4/10): There’s certainly some Christmas energy around the edges of this movie, and more than a little fussing about one particular item of holiday decor, but mostly the movie ends up being about the holiday things the characters aren’t doing and aren’t experiencing?  I might be a little too harsh here given that I also didn’t like this movie much, but I don’t know — I just think it wasn’t important to Ephron that the film depict Christmas experiences in particular, and in any case the cast is largely made up of characters who are dissociated from traditional Christmas festivities, which is the premise of much of the plot.

Actual Quality (3.5/10): I can’t emphasize enough — I’m really disappointed I can’t like this more.  I think Ephron’s usually a great writer, and between her screenplay and this cast, I went into my first viewing of this just certain I was going to at least admire something about it.  As I alluded to above, it was SO awful that I decided later I might have been in a weird mood, or set too many expectations on it, so I re-watched it end-to-end to see if I couldn’t salvage something.  And I think it was worse the second time.  If it wasn’t for Liev Schreiber and Adam Sandler, I think I might call this one worse than Jack Frost and I cannot believe that’s a phrase I’m capable of writing.  If you like this, I would genuinely, thoroughly love to hear why in the comments.

Party Mood-Setter? I mean, there’s no way.  The vibes of almost every scene are antithetical to whatever holiday mood you could be attempting to create, and the plot is weird enough that this is not a movie it’s easy to check in and out of.  If you’re going to put it on at all, I think you actually need to be watching it.

Plucked Heart Strings?  To me, all of the attempts at emotion at the end are basically doomed to failure by a script that had built zero of the bridges needed to get here, so no, I think this isn’t going to give you whatever goosebumps or tears or chills you might be seeking.  And I have to say, even though I’m defending some good acting work here from Liev, Chris as a character is written so that I can connect with her on some level, but there’s not enough here for me to feel her struggle since the movie doesn’t understand her really at all.  A film that took her seriously (and cast a trans actress in the role) might maybe have gotten me there, but as it is, it’s only me taking her seriously (and Liev, and, again, astonishingly, Adam Sandler as Louie). 

Recommended Frequency?  Gang, I’ve watched it twice and that’s enough for one lifetime.  I don’t really recommend watching it even once.  But it feels so much like a movie that SHOULD work that if anything I’m talking about here makes you think I’m missing it, I would absolutely welcome a counternarrative in the comments, if you decide to watch it yourself.  Don’t do it, though.  There’s way too much good holiday media available for you to waste an evening on Mixed Nuts.

Is it weird to transition straight from that appeal to telling you how to spend an evening watching Mixed Nuts?  It’s probably weird.  Anyway, for a change, this movie is only available on Peacock — I think that’s the first time I’ve linked to them (by the way folks, if it’s not obvious, my links in these paragraphs aren’t to the service in general, but they take you straight to the film itself).  You can pay to rent it if you want from literally all the places I would think of — Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, YouTube, and Fandango — and Amazon will sell you the DVD.  And this film somehow is everywhere on disc in the land of public libraries: Worldcat records well over 500 libraries with a copy.  So, somebody must like it…and maybe that somebody is you (if so, cheers to you and I’m sure Nora Ephron thanks you).