Joyeux Noel (2005)

Review Essay

I think of all the possible genres for a Christmas movie, a war movie in some respects seems least viable.  Christmas is a holiday that generally provokes Western society to a rare moment of pacifism, whether it’s John and Yoko singing “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” or Stevie Wonder singing the (to me) far superior “Someday at Christmas” or a choir singing the words of Longfellow’s lament in “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”.  And so, of course, the best holiday war movie I know presents a story about an unlikely truce, and what it tells us about both Christmas and ourselves.

The premise of Joyeux Noel (or, Merry Christmas, if we want to translate the title) takes us to a particular historical moment: Christmas, 1914, the first of these holidays to be observed in a war that was allegedly planned to be over by then, and which would of course extend over several more bloody years.  We follow the pathways to war of soldiers from three countries — a German tenor opera singer named Sprink, a Frenchman who is son of a major general named Audebert, a pair of Scottish brothers (Jonathan and William) and their parish priest, Father Palmer, and a handful more — as war is declared.  We watch an intense and violent sequence of trench warfare, as one of the Scotsmen (William) falls dead in no man’s land next to his weeping brother.  And then it’s Christmas Eve, and something wondrous happens.

The poster for Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) depicts the three commanding officers of the French, German, and Scottish units walking together through the snow, while in the background we see a huge tableau of soliers on both sides in front of a French farmstead in the distance. Above them appears the movie's tagline: "Christmas Eve. 1914. On a World War I battlefield, a Momentous Event changed the lives of soldiers from France, Germany, and England. Based on a true story."

The film’s opening, just to clarify, isn’t just about establishing characters — it’s about the cruelty of war, in which everyone is participating. The film’s very first scene is an intense, almost nightmarish sequence in which we hear one child after another reciting angry, violent propaganda, first in French, then in English, then in German.  Fear and hatred is inculcated from the youngest possible age.  We have seen angry old men on every side, too: a bitter old Frenchman whose home is occupied and who clearly thinks of the Germans as barely human.  A furious Scottish officer who wants to bark the compassion out of every last soldier in his unit since he’s convinced it’ll get them killed.  A series of German officers (and a crown prince) for whom the violence of this war is remote and tactical, a string of words on a page but not a reality to face.  The prospect of understanding here is so hard to believe in.  But the vehicle for overcoming that disbelief is here also, in the form of music.

Music is used to great effect throughout the film, but I want to focus on a couple of uses early in the movie that are among the most moving, I think.  Sprink, the tenor, has been sought out by his lover, the Danish opera singer Anna Sorensen — she has played every card at her disposal to be reunited with him for one night, Christmas Eve, so that they can sing for the crown prince.  As they do so, we see the agony here — her music is undimmed, but he is broken by his experiences at the front, and chokes at first on the words.  It’s only when she turns towards him, and he towards her, that all is resolved: he does not know how to find himself in this music any longer, but he can find himself in her.  And the song they sing, “Bist du bei mir”, is a song whose German lyrics say that death is welcome if we can face it hand in hand with the one we love.  It’s poignant and heartbreaking…and we see it move not just their German audience, but the French couple downstairs.  Music can cross such a boundary.  And then, in the film’s most indelibly beautiful sequence, music crosses the boundary of the war itself: Sprink takes Sorensen to the front with him to sing with his men.  The Germans hear the Scottish bagpipers playing some song they don’t know, and it connects with them somehow.  So, when the bagpipes silence for a moment, Sprink starts to sing the German carol he knows the men on both sides will know — Stille Nacht.  As he sings, suddenly there’s a sound drifting over to him — Father Palmer playing along with Sprink on the bagpipes, and Sprink rises like some kind of angel.  He climbs above the top of the trenches, risking sniper fire from the other side, because his heart is touched by the humanity of the music they are making.  And then the old parson plays Adeste Fideles, and Sprink with a candlelit Christmas tree in one hand and his other hand extended in brotherhood, comes singing across no man’s land.  Even though you know going in that the whole point of the movie is the depiction of the Christmas truces, honestly, the moment is still breathtaking.  We have seen the violence of this war, and we know the risks men on both sides are taking here.  Their shared celebration of Christmas, in whatever language, rises above the level of that conflict, and brings them together.  It’s astonishingly moving.

After a momentary halt, perhaps driven by unease, a deal is struck by the commanding officers on all sides.  The soldiers cross to greet one another with wine and chocolate, to look at each other’s photographs of wives and girlfriends, to use what little they know of German or French or English to connect with each other.  An amusingly brisk argument emerges over the name of the cat who has been slipping back and forth between the German and French lines — to the Germans’ insistence that he’s Felix, Ponchel, the French batman who literally grew up down the road, huffily declares that he’s known this cat for years and his name is NESTOR.  The German lieutenant Horstmayer returns to the French lieutenant Audebert a photograph of his wife, and shares a memory of his honeymoon spent in the town the Frenchman is from.  The symbolism is everywhere here, as they shake hands and smile at one another in a field crowded with the frozen dead, men from both sides who have fallen in recent assaults.  The bells ring in the distance and they realize that churches on either side of the lines are marking midnight: it is Christmas Day.  And Father Palmer, in the Latin that would have been familiar, at least, to Catholics from all three countries, leads the soldiers in a mass held right there in no man’s land, punctuated by Sorensen singing the Ave Maria she had been singing on a German stage the night the war broke out.  Not every man is interested in such things, to be sure, but we see men from every side (including one who, shortly thereafter, identifies himself as Jewish but still touched by the experience) in thoughtful, often tearful prayer.  They look back at one another, as they part afterwards, with glances that suggest real understanding.  They have found kinship where they did not expect to find it, mediated by a holiday all of them were feeling deeply in their hearts that night.

That might seem like I’m giving this whole movie away, but I promise, I’m not.  There’s a lot more to unfold here, both in terms of what kinds of understandings the soldiers on both sides try to arrive at, and in terms of the consequences for soldiers on both sides after the truce is done.  Some powerful moments, including at least one shocking act of violence, remain ahead of you after this midnight mass and the sense of brotherhood it awakens.  In all honesty, I’d fault the pacing here a little — the film struggles a bit with timing and with how much it needs to communicate what’s about to happen.  But the sentimentality of the film, which some reviewers find excessive, I think suits the occasion: these truces really happened.  Soldiers on both sides of the war, that first Christmas, found it easier to understand each other than to go on hating each other.  It didn’t last, sadly.  By 1916 and 1917, no one was interested in such “understandings” any longer.  But I think that doesn’t invalidate the meaning of those connections made in 1914.  We’re capable of better things than we often display.

In all honesty, one of my complaints about the film is that it is too grim about humanity: a fair chunk of the final act consists of every unit’s superior officers imposing some fierce punishments on the men for their having betrayed their cause by having this truce.  Father Palmer, in particular, is excoriated by a furious bishop who puts the exclamation point on his castigation of Palmer by forcing him to listen to a bloodthirsty sermon to a new Scottish regiment that the bishop wants to make sure is ready to go out there and kill Germans without compunction.  But as a matter of fact, this isn’t at all the context of the Christmas truces: no unit or soldier, that I know of, was reprimanded for their participation in the truces, and tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides had participated.  The Pope himself had called for a truce (though neither side listened, not at a national level).  Yes, following that Christmas, clearer lines were drawn about the potential consequences for “fraternizing with the enemy”, but they postdated the truces.  In real life, these men were better understood by their commanding officers than the film shows us — perhaps because the film’s argument, about the gap between combatants who know the violence of war and the leaders for whom it is a game or an abstraction, needs things to be different.  And I have to share one detail that shows how the film’s director was thwarted from making it even more grisly: the aforementioned trench cat was based on a real cat who was caught carrying some papers that had been tied to it (sending messages across the lines).  That real cat was executed by firing squad for treason, in what I can only assume was one of the stupidest and most senselessly violent acts in a war notable for stupidity and senselessness — this occurring, by the way, not at all in connection with the Christmas truces.  Anyway, the director had planned to recreate this scene, but when the time came to film it, literally every extra on the “firing squad” flatly refused to take even pretend shots at the cat.  He was forced to rewrite the script, declaring that the cat had been imprisoned for treason.  So, animal lovers, you can watch this movie with that much comfort on board, at least.

I do have to emphasize, though — this is still an intense movie.  The violence and sexuality (in one scene between Sprink and Sorensen) are on the end of PG-13 that’s much closer to R.  It’s well made — it was, in fact, an Oscar nominee for Foreign Language Film — but I should make a particular note of the language, since the film is shot in the languages these folks would have spoken, and more than half of it is in French or German (with subtitles).  It’s a more challenging watch, then, than a lot of the films I’ve screened for this project.  But I think it’s one that deserves a wider audience than perhaps it gets, and I’m glad I’ve been able to share it with you here as the penultimate film in the 2024 Film for the Holidays season.

I Know That Face: Gary Lewis, who plays the Scottish priest, Father Palmer, here, also appears as the father in Billy Elliot, a film that would just qualify for this blog given a pivotal scene taking place at Christmas time.  And Sir Ian Richardson, who here plays the cruel bishop that sends Palmer out of the church with his lust for war and death, plays the actual character of Death (much nicer than this bishop) as well as voicing the narrator in the TV movie Hogfather, which is set in the Christmas-equivalent-feast of Hogswatch in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a film I really should watch next year to see how “holiday” it feels.

That Takes Me Back: There’s not much, thankfully, that here reminds me of anything from my own past, but I was taken back, surprisingly, by Ponchel’s windup alarm clock.  I had a clock that was probably very similar in technology on my nightstand as a kid, and the ringing of the bell that reminds him of coffee with his mother served to remind me of my own family home, growing up.  

I Understood That Reference: I had a slight sense of anticipation that there would be something here about Santa Claus, etc., but as I reflected on it, really the things that tied Christmas celebrations together across these countries were not shared media (if the Scots were thinking of Dickens, the Germans wouldn’t have been…and Pere Noel wasn’t the same person as Father Christmas or Sankt Nikolaus), but shared belief and a shared sense that Christmas ought to find them at home with loved ones.

Holiday Vibes (7/10): So, the trench warfare couldn’t possibly feel less like the holidays.  But I’m hard-pressed to identify a more powerfully evocative celebration of Christmas on film than the ways that music and prayer call these folks together across lines of nationality and hostility: if you want a reminder that, at least in some places and at some times, Christmas has genuinely called humans to remember that we ought to live at peace with one another, in defiance of a world that seeks to divide us, this movie hits it out of the park, and maintains a sense of optimism and brotherhood far longer than other approaches to the Christmas truces might have managed.  No offense to Bing and Danny celebrating Christmas Eve in a war zone at the start of White Christmas, but this one is both more believable and more moving.

Actual Quality (8.5/10): Yes, it’s a sentimental film, and in trying to get its messages across, it plays fast and loose (to take but one example, I’m not clear as to how the majority of German and Scottish Protestants in their ranks would have participated as comfortably in a Latin mass as that scene suggests), but the moments of transcendence are genuinely captivating.  The cast is talented, and the production’s setting is richly realized: we know they’re fighting through French farmland because we can see the remnants of a peacetime life around us everywhere, slowly being ground to dust by the machinery of war.  As I mention in the review, as it goes on, I think it struggles a little to maintain momentum, since the peaks it hits mid-film are so high, but the overall effect is still successful: this is a good movie.

Party Mood-Setter? If you’re doing last minute Christmas wrapping, this is not your jam: even when it’s uplifting or light-hearted, it’s by no means a casual watch.

Plucked Heart Strings? I mean, I am absolutely tearful at the scene where Sprink is singing as he crosses to the Scottish soldiers, Christmas tree in hand.  It’s gorgeous and hopeful and sad.  If you’re watching this and you’re remotely engaging with it, I can’t help but feel you’ll be moved, emotionally.

Recommended Frequency: Even the best holiday war movie is still, of course, a war movie.  I couldn’t watch this every year, and I wouldn’t plan to do so.  I think I’ve seen it three times in the last decade and that feels about right to me: often enough that I remember its message, and not so often that it’s grown too stale or comfortable.  It’s powerful any time of year, of course, so you wouldn’t have to rush to it, but if it didn’t make your list this December, I would certainly suggest you give it a try next year — in the right context and right frame of mind.

If you’re a Paramount+ subscriber — and this is, I think, the first time all December I’ve mentioned that platform — you’re in luck: this is your moment.  For the rest of us, it looks like this film comes with some premium add-on subscriptions on some platforms, and is widely rentable as a streaming title.  In fact, if you have access to a university library, check their streaming offerings: my own university has a streaming license for this movie via an academic film package we subscribe to.  There may be a Blu-ray version, but I’m not sure it’s available for North America: we do definitely have a DVD version, though, which in these times of picket lines at Amazon facilities I am suggesting you acquire via Barnes & Noble (or your preferred disc retailer).  And Worldcat knows of copies in at least 1,500 library systems: it’s well worth a look in your library catalog, then, if you’re interested in it but not enough to pay for it (which I understand).

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Review Essay

There was a time, I think, when it was countercultural to argue that the best adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was a version presented by the Muppets, but I see it often enough now that I think it’s become a kind of shared wisdom, at least among the Xennial generation I’m a part of.  Some of you arrive at this post already persuaded, but for the rest of you, I hope I can bring you at least closer to that perspective, since I fully agree with it.  In fact, I’d go a step further and say that anytime I meet someone who unabashedly loves this film, they’re always someone I feel an immediate kinship with, and I’ve not yet been disappointed — indeed, I’ve got a couple of friendships that were essentially cemented by the existence of this movie and our love for it.

There are some widely held and expressed sentiments about this film that I’m going to note as givens at the outset.  It is largely agreed that the genius of this film is located in Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge, and specifically his consistently treating every Muppet on screen seriously — there is never a wink at us, or a sense that he’s hamming it up for the sake of an imagined children’s audience.  The songs in this musical version of the story are all written by the great Paul Williams, already beloved by Muppet fans for his composition of “Rainbow Connection” that provided the soaring emotional finale to The Muppet Movie and well established as a gifted songwriter for many films and bands in the 1970s and 1980s.  What’s more, Williams himself had undergone a redemptive awakening perhaps not that different from Scrooge’s — overcoming profound struggles with substance abuse in the years immediately before writing the songs for this film.  I think there’s no question that the maturity of adult experience people like Caine and Williams are bringing to a movie underpinned by the ageless antics of the Muppets creates the blend that those of us who love the film are looking for.  We want the fun of Rizzo shrieking “Light the lamp, not the rat! Light the LAMP, NOT THE RAT!!!” but we also want to hear the haunted fear in Scrooge’s voice as Christmas Past is about to show him a painful memory he doesn’t want to face.  We want a movie that trusts the child in us with adult regrets and adult redemption.

The poster for The Muppet Christmas Carol depicts Ebenezer Scrooge in a top hat with a cane, walking towards us down the middle of an empty snowy street, while above him in the snowy sky we can see multiple members of the Muppet cast, including Gonzo, Kermit, Fozzie, and Miss Piggy, smiling and looking in our direction.

I think an underrated element in this movie’s success is the decision to present the story via the medium of Gonzo as Charles Dickens.  Everyone has a favorite Muppet (other than Kermit, whom we all adore), and mine’s Gonzo, that delightful eccentric, so I’ll admit to some bias.  But the advantage of Gonzo’s Dickens, first of all, is the preservation of the narration in the original — he can address the audience directly, saying that Scrooge is as solitary as an oyster, or that as he enters the vision of his childhood he is conscious of a thousand odors.  These aren’t lines you hear in any other adaptation that I know of, but the script trusts that Gonzo’s evocative delivery (and the visuals on screen) will help convey the story’s original strangeness and lyricism even to an audience younger than it was ever intended to speak to.  I mean, look at that opening — after a little comic patter with Rizzo, when his friend tells him to tell the story, Gonzo looks right at us and says, “The Marleys were dead, to begin with.  As dead as a door-nail.”  Sure, we’ve doubled the Marleys for the sake of our Muppet casting.  But otherwise, this is where the original story begins — before we even hear that there’s such a person as Ebenezer Scrooge, we understand that this is a story about the dead….well, people who are dead, to begin with.  The resurrections in this story are at first ghostly, of course, when we meet Jacob and Robert Marley, but ultimately it is the person inside Ebenezer Scrooge who will be restored to life.

Another thing that allows the movie to hew closer to the original than you would expect is that the Muppets can leaven the harshness of some moments with comedy — I bet this drives some people crazy, but to me, it’s a wonderful balancing act.  When the rat bookkeepers respond to Scrooge’s threats about the coal by singing “Heat wave! This is my island, in the sun!”, sure, it’s an element of goofiness Dickens didn’t depict (and a line my family quotes to each other all through the year).  But it also lightens the mood enough that when Scrooge tells his “dear nephew” Fred that he thinks people who celebrate Christmas should be buried with a stake of holly through their hearts, Caine can play the vicious language of the novella straight.  Rizzo will comment on this occasionally, even, when it’s getting intense — I love the moment where he asks Gonzo, “Hey, that’s scary stuff, should we be worried about the kids in the audience?” only to be answered with, “Nah, this is culture.”  There’s where the winks belong — not in Scrooge’s performance, as Caine was wise enough to understand, but with the wisecracking Muppets, always a bit childlike to adults and always a bit adult to children, who are reassuring us that we can handle this.  And we can.

I know this is going to be too long, but I feel like I have to gush about how they present every element here.  The reveals of the Spirits are, at each turn, handled basically perfectly: the burst of divine light that terrifies Scrooge as Past appears, then the warmer, gentler light from the next room that lures and invites him to join the feast with Present, and lastly the overwhelming of the fog as it envelopes him and pulls him into the future he doesn’t want to face with Yet to Come.  The film does a lot with Dutch angles — presenting certain shots as askew or out of balance to convey the mood — that I think are really effective.  Scrooge is at a precarious angle as the Marleys arrive, but their distance shots are presented as flat and even: they are grounded, even as ethereal spirits, in a way he is not.  There’s a little bit askew in the initial visit to the Cratchits with Present, but the return to that street with Yet to Come is astonishingly out of balance, as befits a scene where Scrooge is about to confront the painful truths he’ll find there.

Ultimately this is an adaptation interested in love’s power.  Thankfully Disney finally fixed a long-standing problem, giving us back the film’s original cut with Belle’s sad song, “The Love is Gone”…sure, you can only watch it if you’re one of the people who know you need to go to Disney+ and then into “Extras” to pick the actual full version, but I know it and now so do you.  For so many years, Disney had shied away from the power of that song — it was seen as too sad, too heavy for a kids movie starring puppets.  Again, though, that’s its power: the song convicts Scrooge to a depth we might not have expected, and can be moved by.  He had love and he turned away from it — not just love, but generosity, given that Belle’s lyrics suggest that she’s releasing him to pursue the “adventure” that calls Scrooge with an “unknown voice”.  But Scrooge knows the truth — no adventure pulled him away from Belle, only the black hole of selfishness and greed that has pulled him away from all human contact.  When the young Scrooge turns and abandons her there on the bridge, Caine’s older Scrooge steps in his place, and it’s heartbreaking to hear him doubling her vocals in that final verse — is he saying the things he knew even then?  Or is he finally discovering who she was, and who he was, in listening to her at last?  Regardless, it seems to unlock something in him that the movie explores more deeply thereafter: if, as Present tells him, wherever you find love it feels like Christmas, perhaps this explains why Scrooge has not been able to understand Christmas (or love) all these years.  He’s cut himself off from that kind of experience, and he’s awakened to it most by Tiny Tim, a child laboring under heavier burdens than Scrooge has known, but someone who has a peace Scrooge has never found before.  Tim sings about the love he sees around him, and his openness to that loving world, and it makes Scrooge aware of the path he’s finally able to choose.  And Scrooge’s ultimate acceptance of love, and willingness to show love, is why we need “The Love is Gone” in the movie, because when in the final scene it is reimagined and offered to us in a new light, we hear “The Love We’ve Found” sung by the whole cast — the melody that had been an expression of loss and grief is now also the melody of light and peace.

I Know That Face: Steven Mackintosh, who plays Scrooge’s “dear nephew” Fred here, plays the supporting role of Henry in Lost Christmas, a film in which Eddie Izzard portrays a mysterious man who has some kind of quasi-magical power to find missing things.  Michael Caine, who of course is this movie’s Ebenezer Scrooge, plays quite a different role as Elliot, an unfaithful husband, in Hannah and Her Sisters, a film that is deeply tied to two Thanksgiving celebrations.  And you may be familiar with a number of members of our main cast from other holiday media: Kermit the Frog who here plays Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy who plays his wife Emily Cratchit, Fozzie Bear who here plays Fozziwig, and many of the other Muppet supporting cast members, have appeared in such works of holiday media as John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together, It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, and Lady Gaga & the Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: Again, what I find enriching about this adaptation of the original novella is how much of the language it preserves, including turns of phrase that you’d think would be too archaic to work for a modern audience.  But from Gonzo’s opening lines about the Marleys to his final comment about Scrooge having become “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew,” the production commits to it.  And I’ll call out one very particular element present here that you might not expect from the novella — it is in fact true to the original that, when Christmas Past leaps from one point early in Scrooge’s schooling to a later Christmas, Scrooge literally watches the room crumble and decay around him at high speed, so the comical entropy bursting around Gonzo and Rizzo (including the loss of Shakespeare’s nose) is in fact totally on point.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: I appreciate the emotion this production applies to Scrooge’s encounter with his younger self, but I do wish it had kept in his conversation with Fan, his sister, since I do think that adds a lot to the importance of his relationship to Fred.  And while I love the Christmas Present sequences we do get, I do think there’s something lost in the production skipping the more aggressive travelogue as Scrooge is taken to all sorts of heartwarming Christmas scenes.  

Christmas Carol Vibes (9.5/10): I know, I know, Charles Dickens didn’t envision Bob Cratchit as a talking frog, but let’s face it, this film does an impressive job of presenting us a more-vivid-than-life Victorian London, with some pretty incredible costuming for all cast members (I love Rizzo’s outfit, and frankly, young adult Scrooge is a cad to Belle but that coat he’s wearing is phenomenal).  The commitment to the use of Dickens’s language is high, and Caine’s performance as Scrooge in particular is so committed that I think there’s no question that the themes Dickens wanted to explore are largely present here.  It’s very hard to get a 10 here just because the original novella is so distinctive — I don’t think I can imagine the Muppets successfully portraying Ignorance and Want at the end of the Christmas Present sequence, and I don’t blame them therefore for not attempting it — but this makes me think about the Dickens story at great length.

Actual Quality (10/10): Look, this is subjective, but I promise, I’ve at least been systematic about it.  There’s a website called Flickchart that just shows you two movies and asks you to pick which one you prefer, and it keeps track over time.  Over the years, I have rated my preferences for 1,085 movies at Flickchart.  The Muppet Christmas Carol ranks 4th on my all time list.  So, I can’t possibly imagine what it’s like not to love this movie.  Every inch of it fills me with positive emotions, I love every single casting decision, I can sing along with every word on the soundtrack album (which has a couple of songs that didn’t make the film), and I and my wife quote this film at each other basically all year long.  I think it’s the best Muppet movie ever made and it might also be the best holiday movie ever made, and it’s certainly such a good combination of the two that I love it unrelentingly.  If you don’t feel the same way, well, I’m glad you came along for the ride anyway!

Scrooge? There are a lot of successful versions of Ebenezer Scrooge, but I do feel like Michael Caine is probably my favorite.  When we first meet him, he’s largely filmed from a Muppet eye level, which makes Scrooge loom — he’s ominous here, and imposing.  Caine is just old enough to feel like a man full of regrets but still young enough to have a great deal of vitality.  He’s talked in interviews about trying to base his portrayal in Wall Street tycoon types, and that’s the right energy: he reminds us of the kind of rich man we see at work in society around us, and that’s what Scrooge is meant to do.  And I have to emphasize how sensitively I think the production draws out the emotions in Scrooge’s story.  For instance, it might be easy to miss it, but in the sequence at his countinghouse, Scrooge really loses it at one point.  Fred’s talk of falling in love seems to have awoken Scrooge’s most desperate anger — an acting/directing decision that makes perfect sense given Scrooge’s painful memories of all he lost with Belle — and Scrooge tries to rip Fred’s wreath apart before throwing it violently at the little caroler.  Watch Caine’s expression and body language in the moment just afterwards: his Scrooge seems to feel awkward about having lost control, even regretful, as though he is becoming aware that there’s this rage in him he doesn’t really understand.  Shortly afterwards, when he extends the tiny generosity to his staff of giving them Christmas Day off, they burst forth in gratitude to him, and it makes him so angry he shouts furiously at them to stop it.  He’s someone who is pained by love, not comforted by it, and his only way to handle it is to lash out to keep the world at bay.  It’s a lovely level of nuance to add to the arc Scrooge takes in this story, giving us this insight into his character from early on.

Supporting Cast? Gosh, I love this film.  Okay, so, to be more precise, I think Kermit as Cratchit is such perfect casting: it was inevitable, sure, but that doesn’t diminish how well it works.  The “One More Sleep Til Christmas” number (paired with the penguins’ skating party) is so perfect, pairing the childllike enthusiasm and the childlike innocent hope of Cratchit in a way that really warms the film after Scrooge’s relentless bitterness.  Kermit singing that last verse and then the beautiful shot of him at full height, looking up at the night sky, makes me misty-eyed every time.  I’ve already talked about Gonzo, but let’s give it up for Rizzo — it’s hard to be comic relief for Gonzo the Great, who is already comedy gold, but Rizzo takes the chaos up to the next level, eating apples to drive up scarcity, screaming in terror as they arc through the sky (and through the timespace continuum), cracking wise to Mr. Dickens about literature.  If I had a nickel for every time my wife or I said the phrase, “well, hoity-toity Mr. Godlike Smartypants,” I wouldn’t be rich but I’d be surprisingly well off.  And the humans are no slouches here: I love the good cheer and the cheeky grin of Steven Mackintosh as Fred, and his young wife Clara as portrayed by Robin Weaver does a lot in a little time.  I am always astonished to be reminded that the actress playing Belle, Meredith Braun, had essentially no screen acting career (one TV movie and four individual episodes in television series over the course of 26 years).  She was an accomplished stage actress, with several notable credits on the West End, so it’s not shocking that she’s great, but again, much like Robin Weaver’s performance, I think what’s remarkable here is just how much she does with almost no time at all.  She and Caine, between them, make us believe he’s still haunted by her, and that’s a real achievement.  And because if I don’t mention her she would karate chop me through a brick wall, let me just say that while Miss Piggy’s Emily Cratchit is, assuredly, more aggro and sassy than anything envisioned by Charles Dickens, that energy brings a lot of helpful spice to a household that might (between Bob’s essential sweetness and Tiny Tim’s near saintly demeanor) be otherwise too cloying.

Recommended Frequency? If my family watches only two films between Thanksgiving and Christmas, The Muppet Christmas Carol is going to be one of them…and honestly, we might watch it twice before watching most other holiday films once.  I think if you’ve never seen it you have to try it, and if it’s been a while you should give it another go.  It’s a wonderful adaptation and well worth your time.

Okay, so, again, the way you’re going to watch this is to go to Disney+, but you’re not playing the standard version there: you’ve got to select “Extras” and pick the full-length version from that menu, since otherwise you miss out on Belle’s big song.  There are people getting ready to write comments right now about how the movie in fact works better without the song, and I know who you are, folks, and you are wrong about this.  Lovely people, but wrong.  You can rent the movie from lots of places online if you’re not a Disney+ subscriber, but I’ve got to warn you: as far as I know, you will be renting the version of the movie without Belle’s song.  The only way to get the full version of the movie on disc is to buy the DVD from 2005 (“Kermit’s 50th Anniversary Edition”) and NOT the Blu-ray from 2012, which is a real failure on Disney’s part — come on, folks, re-release the Blu-ray with the complete version and take my money.  Anyway, Barnes & Noble will sell you the 50th Anniversary Edition on DVD, which is good, but it’s not remastered like the Disney+ version is.  And of course it’ll be a real crapshoot with library copies to see what you get, but any version of this movie is better than not seeing it at all: Worldcat says over 2,000 libraries carry a copy.  Good luck!

It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947)

Review Essay

There’s a way in which It Happened on 5th Avenue is just about the perfect distillation of so many elements in the holiday genre I’ve been thinking about all month long (as have you, if you’ve been along for the ride here, and thank you for your readership if so).  This is a midcentury movie set in bustling New York City (like Remember the Night or Beyond Tomorrow) featuring a romance with a semi-painful age gap (like Bell, Book and Candle or, let’s face it folks, White Christmas if we think too long about Bing and Rosemary).  The acting is generally hammy (see half the films I’ve covered) and the actual amount of Christmas content is surprisingly small for a movie that shows up this often on lists of forgotten holiday “classics” (again, see half the films I’ve covered).  What’s distinctive, here, then — distinctive enough that I would want to write about it?  Well, to me, this may be one of the movies that has the most capacity for moral conscience…but it loses its nerve a little bit, and I think that’s interesting.  In that way, I think It Happened sidles up next to works like Tokyo Godfathers or any good adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and I am interested in the ways it can’t quite pull off those moves.

I’ll start by laying out the movie’s essential premise: everything revolves around the fact that Michael O’Connor, “the second richest man in the world”, every year leaves his opulent New York mansion behind for an estate in the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia for a solid four months and everyone in the world knows it.  This means that an enterprising yet sweet-tempered old street bum named McKeever can slip in with his adorable dog via the coal chute and live like a king for four months, as long as he’s not caught by the nightly patrolmen.  It means that when McKeever meets a down-on-his-luck veteran, Jim Bullock, he can afford the compassion of taking him in and lending him one of the house’s umpteen bedrooms.  It means that when O’Connor’s scallywag daughter Trudy runs away from her finishing school, she can expect to slip into an empty mansion to get her things…and that, when caught by McKeever and Jim, she can pretend to be an innocent farm girl all alone in a big city and in need of lodging (in part to see if she can win Jim’s affections).  It means that when Jim meets some old friends from his Army days…well, maybe you get the picture.  We can pack a LOT of humans into this mansion, and since Michael isn’t coming home, we’re gonna.  Except that Michael does come home.

The poster for the movie "It Happened on 5th Avenue" offers two vignettes with taglines: on the left, Jim hugs Trudy while she kisses his cheek beneath the tag "A guy with 50 bucks meets a gal with 50 million!" And on the right, McKeever stands proudly in a top hat and long underwear next to a scowling "Mike" holding a dog, under the tag "The world's second richest man changes places with a hobo!"

When I say that this movie has the capacity for moral conscience, I mean it — I think the underlying ideas here are honestly a lot deeper than the Jim and Trudy rom-com the film leans into becoming.  This movie was nominated for an Oscar for its story, an award they only handed out for a few years in the 1940s — actually, it loses out to another holiday film in Miracle on 34th Street — which I honestly think it halfway deserves.  The politics of the story it’s telling are pretty stark — Jim’s a veteran but he’s being made homeless by the wealthy O’Connor.  It’s nothing personal — O’Connor is just tearing down old, cheap housing to build some incredible skyscraper that won’t have any room in it for the likes of Jim.  The movie’s pretty clear about the dire straits here, too — Jim’s terrible apartment, which he attempts to defend from the Bekins movers and the cops, is a testament to how little he has.  He winds up sleeping on a park bench.  Later on, but still early in the story, Jim runs into two old Army buddies — their wives and children are traveling with them as they sleep in their station wagon on the streets of New York City.  The only apartment they can find refuses to rent to anyone with children, which is an astonishing policy to have here, two years into the baby boom, but I bet it wasn’t unheard of in the 1940s, which is not exactly a decade known for its progressive civil rights.  All of these people are scrambling to find a home for themselves while billionaire Michael O’Connor leaves a huge piece of New York real estate, full of enough bedrooms to house a hundred people, totally empty through the bitter cold of a New York winter.  In the hands of a Satoshi Kon or a Todd Haynes, I think this could have become a really searing look at the values of a society that creates such profound inequalities and treats them as normal.

The way the film loses its nerve, unfortunately, is by bringing Michael O’Connor into the romantic comedy as a potential foil — his return home (in disguise) allows us to watch him sputter as a young woman hangs her baby’s laundry in the parlor to dry or as McKeever doles out food from O’Connor’s pantry with lavish generosity.  Michael, as “Mike”, is treated pretty discourteously by most of the main cast, generally because they can’t understand why this old drifter is so sour-faced and grim about the prospect of free lodging and therefore treat him as someone who needs a bit of riling up.  I can’t deny that there’s a laugh or two to be had in all this, but it totally defangs the situation — O’Connor won’t ever be confronted about the injustice of leaving these people on the street because he’s too busy getting embroiled in more than one kind of romantic subplot.  The movie ultimately, I think, believes it can tell a Scrooge story here with O’Connor, and to the extent it does, I do like it — there’s a sense in which his heart grows three sizes in close proximity to Christmas, and ultimately he decides to look with kindness on the folks we’ve met.  I just rankle a little at the fact that O’Connor’s open heart seems limited to things like letting his daughter run her own life or being gracious to McKeever — New York City is full of McKeevers, not to mention full of young women down on their luck in the real ways that rich, spoiled Trudy O’Connor was only pretending to be.  A more fully rehabilitated Michael O’Connor could have taken responsibility on a larger scale for them — Scrooge was a wealthy moneylender, but he wasn’t richer than God, as O’Connor is presented as being here.  If you’ve decided to write a script featuring Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg as a character who’s about to reform, I think you’re obligated to talk about what someone that incredibly, astoundingly moneyed could really do for the sake of humanity.

I should move away from criticizing the film for what it doesn’t do, though, and address what it does.  There are some fun and sweet moments in the movie, but I have to say, I spend a little too much time rolling my eyes: a lot of the actors are a little overmatched by what’s being asked of them, and the result is that they recite the script more than they act it.  When a character actor as experienced as Victor Moore (McKeever) is reduced to saying things like, “Well, I feel I must admit the truth to you although I had hoped to avoid it,” I become conscious, at least, of how a movie with more confidence in its cast would have simply had him admit the truth in a way that conveyed reluctance.  You know, by acting?  With apologies to Moore and the rest of the cast, I find their fumbling takes me out of the experience a little.  And while I’ve critiqued plenty of midcentury films for their gender politics, it does feel particularly rough here, with a lot of weird off-hand remarks from Jim especially that grate more than a little — I’m not sure if it felt clever in 1947 to make jokes about domestic abuse to the teenage girl you’ve just met, but it does not feel clever to me now.  His relationship to Trudy, too, feels odd — in real life, Don DeFore is only about 33-34 here, and Gale Storm is about 24-25.  But Don looks and acts like he’s easily 40, an impression reinforced by some of the writing for his lines, and Gale’s being made up and costumed to look a lot closer to 17 — the net effect is weird, and when the script keeps having Jim put his arm around Trudy while Trudy complains to other characters that “he barely knows I exist” and asking “how can I get him to notice me” the whole enterprise feels a lot creepier than I’d like it to.

I watch this movie, though — for lots of reasons.  For McKeever and his little dog.  For the admittedly funny reactions of “Mike” as he watches his swank New York society house descend into tenement-style chaos.  For the optimism and energy of immediately post-war New York, and the sense from basically everybody on screen that big things are possible and that America may figure out every problem the world has without too much trouble.  Even the corny writing and slightly hammy acting feels safe and inviting (when it’s not weird about gender issues), like I’m sitting with my grandparents watching some old TV program they like.  The Christmas Eve celebration we get on screen really does feel like a found family, even if most of the characters in attendance are paper thin.  It Happened on 5th Avenue disappeared from the public eye for a long stretch of my childhood and early adulthood, so I didn’t know it at all until a few years ago, but I’m glad it’s resurfaced.  I just think the collection of ideas this script contained from the beginning is deserving of a stronger film and a better guiding principle to help this particular plane land.

I Know That Face:  Edward Brophy, who plays Patrolman Felton, had previously appeared as Morelli in The Thin Man, another one of those movies that’s got enough Christmas in it to make a list of holiday films but is also not really a holiday film by a lot of people’s standards.  Florence Auer, who’s briefly on screen as Miss Parker, the headmistress at the school Trudy runs away from, later appears as the unimaginatively named Third Lady in The Bishop’s Wife, a better late 1940s holiday movie than this one, in my opinion, though it’s probably no less weird.  And Charles Ruggles (who here plays the industrial titan, Michael O’Connor and whom we’re likeliest to know as the crusty yet twinkly-eyed grandfather in The Parent Trap) appears in a couple of holiday TV movies in the 1950s; he’s the Mayor in Once Upon a Christmas Time, and he’s Horace Bogardus in The Bells of St. Mary’s (the TV movie version, though, as I said), neither of which I can find anywhere to view, on stream or on disc.

That Takes Me Back: The idea that a music store would hire an enthusiastic and attractive young person to play the piano and sing in order to help sell sheet music is so fantastically old-fashioned, I can hardly believe it was a job even in 1947.  This movie also takes place in an era when outrageously rich people still had consciences, if you can imagine such a world.

I Understood That Reference: If there’s a reference here to another work of holiday media, it slipped by me.

Holiday Vibes (5/10): There’s a lot of busy energy in this movie as the various layers overlap, and it’s hard for me to gauge afterwards how much of the holidays we really got.  I think the movie’s reputation in this category is bolstered by having a couple of big moments take place at the mansion’s Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve celebrations — there’s no question that the gaggle of people living there by that point in the story adds to the sense of festivity, too.  And I never know how much to lean on the “vibes” part of this section, but as I noted initially, this movie feels a lot like a lot of other movies in the loosely understood holiday genre: it will make you think of them often, and that boosts this score a point or two, I think.

Actual Quality (6/10): It Happened on 5th Avenue is an expensive bid for respectability from a low-budget film studio that wanted to rebrand itself, and I think it kind of shows.  Despite their dropping about ten times as much cash on this motion picture as they’d been accustomed to spending, I think there are limits to what everyone involved here could really pull off, artistically — the two romantic leads, DeFore and Storm, would go on to find their particular talents a lot better suited to the small screen than the silver screen, and everything else about the film is, to me, suggestive of a production team that was hoping to mimic the holiday classics of this decade rather than say something authentic of their own.  There are whole scenes I couldn’t tell you the point of, and the longer the movie runs, the less invested I become in many of its characters and their lives, which is the opposite of what ought to happen.  Maybe that’s too harsh: I do enjoy some key performances and themes in this film.  It’s no Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (or Jack Frost, for that matter).  Ultimately, though, I want to spend my 1940s holiday rom-com time with other films more than with this one…your mileage may, of course, vary!

Party Mood-Setter? The complicated plot here doesn’t really lend itself to inattentiveness, but I do think that if you’re in some cookie baking or wrapping marathon and you’ve already gone to a couple of ‘40s classics and just want to maintain that feeling in the background, it would accomplish that.  I’d steer you elsewhere, though.

Plucked Heart Strings? The only person who really gets my emotional investment here is McKeever, the best reason to watch this film.  Victor Moore, who plays the role of the aging hobo taking occupancy of the O’Connor estate, had been a comic star on the Broadway stage in the 1920s and 1930s (as well as getting at least a little screen time with some big stars in both the silent and talkie eras), and he imbues McKeever with a sweetness and an optimism that saves the movie for me from some of its less successful dialogue and plot contrivances.  I’m still not getting choked up about anything related to him in particular, but he’ll put a smile on your face, I can almost guarantee it.

Recommended Frequency: As you can by now tell from the roster here at Film for the Holidays, I’m a sucker for 1940s holiday movies, both classic and less-so.  If you’re in that same boat with me, yes, you should watch this at least once: good and bad, it evokes that historical moment and the beats of that particular kind of romantic comedy enough that it’s interesting to connect it to whichever others are your favorites.  Beyond that, I really can’t project how often you would return — I think I’ve watched it three times in six years, and at this point I’ve gotten about all the fun out of it I want to have.  I will come back to it someday for McKeever, but maybe not for many years, I suspect.

If you’re someone who wants to see the unimaginatively titled It Happened on 5th Avenue for yourself, Tubi and Plex are happy to give you ad-supported free access to the film, as is Sling TV, allegedly. Hulu and YouTube both identify it as available via some premium add-on subscription tier, and it’s rentable from all the places you might think to rent a streaming movie.  Barnes & Noble will gladly sell you the film on Blu-ray or DVD (as will Amazon, but this union household wouldn’t recommend crossing a picket line, and it’s looking like there are quite a few of those around Amazon facilities this December).  And Worldcat, of course, will remind you to check your public library for this movie on disc, since it’s available from several hundred library systems, according to their records.

Carol (2015)

Review Essay

One thing I’ve enjoyed about this blog project this year — along with getting to share things with you, and hear some of your comments back — is that I’ve tried to push myself to watch a wider range of movies than I normally would have watched.  Sure, there’s lots of romantic comedies in the list, since that’s such a dominant element in the holiday genre (such as it is), but it’s been interesting to see the other uses Christmas can be put to.  That’s certainly true of Carol, which I think is arguably the best film I watched for this project on an artistic level while also not being the kind of movie I normally think of this time of year at all.

Carol begins in medias res: we know that a slightly older woman named Carol is at a table with a young woman named Therese, and that there’s something between them that feels tightly wound, and somehow also fragile.  A young man disrupts whatever their conversation had been, and they part, but the camera work and the editing helps emphasize for us that Therese is in a reverie, pulling her attention away from those around her and into the memories of meeting and knowing Carol.  There’s no easy way to summarize this, so I’m going to miss a lot in this initial stage setting in saying simply that Therese is a shopgirl who met Carol, a wealthy mother looking for a Christmas gift for her child.  It’s the 1950s — Christmas 1952, if I’m not mistaken — and for that reason it’s hard at first to know….are these women flirting with each other, or is this just awkward small talk?  But then the film pursues their relationship and slowly opens up to us that these are in fact two lesbians — one of them out to a handful of people in her life, the other maybe not even fully out to herself yet.  And, in that historical moment, this is incredibly precarious — Therese risks the relationships she has already built in her life (including a boyfriend).  Carol risks her ability to even see her child, let alone act as her child’s parent.  They run the risks anyway.

The poster for the movie "Carol" primarily features the two major actors -- in the top half, we see a partial view of Cate Blanchett's head and face in profile as Carol, and in the bottom half, we see a partial view of Rooney Mara's head and face in profile as Therese.

So much of the movie is about the question of whether a woman gets to have an identity that is her own: from the beginning, we watch Therese disappearing, whether under an obligatory Santa hat at work or into the vacant stare of dissociation I see as she tries to reckon with a boyfriend, Richard, who has big plans for her that don’t inspire her at all.  Carol lives a little larger, but she’s constantly forced to push back — when her estranged husband, Harge, makes a reference to “Cy Harrison’s wife” she almost instinctively mutters “Jeannette” as if to say, “she doesn’t belong to Cy, or anybody else, you know”.  Speaking of names, Therese is almost always referred to by her boyfriend as “Terry” — it’s only with Carol that she can count on hearing her real name, almost as though she’s not herself unless she’s with Carol.

And the film is also about the journey to find a space where you can be yourself.  The journey is internal, sure, but there’s a pretty substantial journey undertaken in the film’s second act, as Carol and Therese drive west, escaping into the American interior like so many people in fact and in fiction, over the years.  As they travel — initially as innocently as any two friends, but gradually opening up to the possibility of intimacy — the world slips by them and it’s maybe a little reminiscent of Remember the Night, except here both women are running away from their homes and not towards them.  What will redefine them is not the loving context of family and community, but individuality and agency.  The scene in which they finally have sex — and to be totally clear with you, dear reader, this is very explicit sex as you would expect from an R-rated drama, in case that’s not your holiday movie style — comes as a relief because you get the sense that you’re finally watching these people be authentic and unguarded.  It’s a haunted sex scene, to be clear, because even as they’re in each other’s arms, we know that neither the 1950s nor the legal system adjudicating whether or not Carol gets to have contact with her daughter are going to let this be as easy as it feels in that moment.  The relief they’re feeling is impermanent, and they know it; so do we.

The journey takes place at Christmas, and that’s where this film intersects with this blog.  Sure, it qualifies the moment Therese puts on a Santa hat at Frankenberg’s, but there’s more than that in the use of this holiday.  Carol and Therese’s first conversation deals with Christmas, at least a little — Carol loves it but also feels incapable, referencing how she always overcooks the turkey.  I think the movie, as it unfolds, makes it clear that the turkey line is just cover for Carol’s fears of being inadequate as a mother (and perhaps as a wife): that the reason Christmas doesn’t achieve that looked-for perfection is because of something she’s getting wrong as a homemaker.  Later, Carol fends off multiple invitations to friends at Christmas, as it becomes clearer that she needs her own space…a space into which she’s going to bring Therese, though.  Christmas works here as a catalyst for action — Harge and Carol, for instance, fight about Christmas but it’s not about Christmas, of course, any more than most fights at Christmas are about the holiday.  Christmas, meanwhile, threatens Therese a little, since she realizes she’s about to be treated as “family” by Richard’s family, and she doesn’t want to feel the inevitability of that — not yet and maybe not ever.  She’d probably have run off with Carol any day of any week, but it being Christmas is even more of an inducement for her.

So much depends, in a film this contained and zoomed in, on the performances of the primary actors, since there are no huge set pieces here, no sweeping plot devices, to distract us.  And the film has been wisely entrusted to Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as Therese.  Carol is the most impossible of the roles — a woman established enough in a comfortable life to be proud and also wounded enough by the confines of that life to be vulnerable.  We have to believe her when, on more than one occasion, she chooses someone else’s happiness over her own, whether or not she’s right about them — whether or not they deserve it.  That Blanchett manages it is no surprise to anyone who’s ever seen her in anything, of course: I remember being blown away by her performance in Elizabeth, watching that movie on VHS from a Canadian video store back in grad school (talk about nostalgia), and the many times I’ve seen her since, she’s been uniformly wonderful (even in otherwise mediocre material).  But I think there’s still something especially wonderful about her work in Carol, since there’s absolutely no special effects here to enhance her performance, and she has to face some tough emotions pretty directly on screen: it works.  Mara’s task as Therese is to be believable as a young woman discovering that her ambiguity about her life isn’t some fundamental personality trait, but rather a reaction to trying to live as someone other than who she is.  Her awakening to herself and to Carol is a liberation, but it’s navigated in the slow and sometimes difficult way that such journeys of self-discovery often take.  And Mara’s really successful, I think, at not letting her portrayal become too cloying — really, both she and Blanchett give us characters who have sides that are not easy to warm up to.  They’re not afraid to be human, and to invite our empathy without having to be saintly enough to earn it.

A lot happens in this film, and particularly in its final act, that I just have to leave to you as a viewer.  It’s too nuanced and powerful a movie to spoil, even though it’s also not really a movie with a plot that’s relying on twists or tricks to keep you hooked.  A lot of careful choices are made here by the director, by the actors, and by the screenwriter, that wring every drop of potential intensity out of the smallest interactions.  When characters are betrayed, it hits hard.  When they suffer or submit, it burdens me as an audience member.  And the ending I get is not at all what I expected or had thought I was hoping for, but the way it resolves ultimately feels perfect to me, almost inevitable.  There’s a sense of hope and of possibility, for me, that rounds out the subtle Christmastide feelings of the film into something that strikes the right emotional note.

I Know That Face: Jake Lacy, who here plays Therese’s unfortunate boyfriend Richard, appears as Joe in Love the Coopers, a film about a massive Christmas family reunion that was released the same fall as Carol.  Kevin Crowley, here playing Fred Haymes, Carol’s lawyer, appears as Liam in the TV movie Country Christmas Album which is exactly what it sounds like, and has a bit part as Dr. Franklin in another TV movie, The Christmas Spirit, about a woman in a coma who appears in spirit form to persuade her community to something something look there’s a lot of holiday movies and I have definitely not seen them all.  Sarah Paulson, here playing Carol’s devoted ex, Abby, has several holiday flicks under her belt: she stars as Emily in the Lifetime movie A Christmas Wedding, she plays Beth, the mother of a terminally ill 8 year old, in Hallmark’s November Christmas, and she is Grace Schwab in one of the segments of the anthology film New Year’s Eve.  And Cate Blanchett, starring here in the title role, was once the uncredited voice of a “Mysterious Woman” in Eyes Wide Shut, which is also a critically acclaimed adaptation of a mid-20th century written work that takes us to a series of New York City gatherings at Christmas time, and is far, far more sexually explicit than even Carol is.  I’m not saying it’ll never make the blog, but it’s not on the list for this year (or next, I think).

That Takes Me Back: I know this kind of shopping does still exist, but it’s been years since I engaged in the bustle of department store shopping at Christmas.  I enjoyed the throwback feeling of a big decorated showcase space and the busy energy of the retail floor.  Less appealing but certainly just as indicative of a bygone era was all the smoking indoors, all over the place, often in furs — the look and feel of the movie works with those 1950s symbols pretty successfully.  I am too young to really feel a connection to the idea of a shared phone in the apartment hallway, but it sure reminds me of shows and books I encountered, growing up, and just the idea of a phone being in a place, and needing to go to that place to use the phone, is nostalgic.  Oh, and in further technological notes, I’ll say that I do love a cash register that goes “ding” when the cashier pulls a lever, and I love anything called an “icebox,” especially one operated by a handle in the door.  

I Understood That Reference: There’s very little sense of holiday media here, but Carol promises her daughter at one point that she won’t let Santa’s elf give her daughter’s presents away to another girl.

Holiday Vibes (5/10): In the movie’s first half, there’s a fair amount of this — as mentioned, Santa hats on the department store employees and discussions about turkeys, and then there’s handwritten note tags on gifts and home decorations.  The use of seasonal colors, especially red, in the costuming is not at all subtle, and conveys a little about how the characters change (or don’t). By comparison with some films that are much more widely considered to be Christmas classics, honestly, this one holds up pretty well as committing to Christmas as a relevant setting for at least the movie’s initial work, even if the holiday recedes from view over time.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): This is a very, very good movie — Haynes is a gifted director and I love a Carter Burwell score, and the underlying story comes from an underappreciated and notable midcentury talent in the author Patricia Highsmith.  As I’ve mentioned, too, the acting performances are really extraordinarily good: the movie earned every Oscar nomination it got, and was probably robbed of more than one statuette.  Now, is it for you?  Dear reader, I can’t know that: some of us are up for intense, often sad R-rated romantic dramas at this time of year and others of us wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.  But if you think you might be in the former category, I really can’t say enough about how good a movie this is artistically.  It’s worth your time.

Party Mood-Setter?  If you’ve brought a shop clerk home and are hoping to take things “to the next level” then I guess so, but otherwise, haha, no of course not, this is an incredibly moody, melancholy, and sexual movie that isn’t going to pair very well with decorating the Christmas tree.

Plucked Heart Strings? You can’t help but feel emotionally connected to both Carol and Therese, even though the film’s management of itself is such that every emotion is somewhat muted, and I’d expect that most viewers won’t be reduced to tears.  I found myself still feeling the movie’s emotional landscape after it was over, but it never caught me so by surprise that I was choked up, except perhaps for a single moment near the very end.

Recommended Frequency: It’s a great movie and it has some really vivid holiday moments, but it’s also such an intense viewing experience that I don’t think I’ll be rushing back to it every year.  This is great film-making, though, with thoughtful acting and direction and writing and outstanding costuming by Sandy Powell (who has multiple Oscars) and a wonderful score by Carter Burwell (who SHOULD have multiple Oscars), and if anything I’ve said about it here makes it seem like something you’d enjoy, I think you should go for it.  Just go in knowing this isn’t about hot chocolate and mistletoe and Santa laughing like a bowl full of jelly — both the movie’s highs and lows are just working in an entirely different register than the typical holiday movie.

If you’d like to watch Carol, Netflix will show it to subscribers for free.  You can rent the title via streaming service from basically all the big ones, as usual, and Amazon will gladly sell it to you on disc (though if you’re anywhere that there are striking workers in its path, I encourage you not to cross those lines digitally, and to find the disc elsewhere, such as Barnes & Noble).  And I don’t know what it is about Carol, but this film is available in even more libraries than White Christmas — over two thousand of them, according to Worldcat, so check this one out on disc from your local library for free, and enjoy it with my compliments.

White Christmas (1954)

Review Essay

Some of my favorite holiday movies make the list because of the depth of their ideas: they make me think the way I want to think at this time of year.  But others make the grade purely because of the power of their feelings: they just evoke an emotional response in me that feels like the holidays, regardless of what the underlying film intends to convey.  The latter category is, I think, the best way for me to broadly characterize White Christmas, a motion picture that surely most if not all of you are very familiar with: I love this movie, I watch it every Christmas, and if I think about it too much, I start to wonder why I have such a deep connection to it.  Let’s try to unpack both sides of that, shall we?

First, the basic premise, in case somehow this movie’s missed you in the past: the movie opens on Christmas Eve, 1944, with two soldiers (one an already-famous entertainer named Bob Wallace; the other an ambitious but green up-and-comer named Phil Davis) putting on a show in honor of their general and Christmas (seemingly in that order) before an artillery assault breaks out and Davis saves Wallace’s life.  Having done so, he extracts a series of promises from Wallace — to sing a duet together, to become partners, to start producing big musical revues — before they cross paths with the singing Haynes sisters, Betty and Judy, and find themselves (through a mishap or two) following the girls to Pine Tree, Vermont.  There, they discover their old general is a down-on-his-luck hotel owner in a snowless and therefore guestless December, and the boys spring into action to come to his aid (while Phil and Judy try to steer Betty and Bob into each other’s arms).  Along the way, there’s a lot of singing and dancing from some of the most talented folks in Hollywood at midcentury: there’s a reason this film endures.

The poster for "White Christmas" announces boldly that it is in VistaVision with color by Technicolor. The background scene is a snowy wooded landscape, where two white horses pull a sleigh: in the foreground, painted versions of the four principal cast members, dressed in red and white Santa outfits, gesture towards the viewer invitingly.

One of the things I noticed on this latest viewing is how the film repeatedly has these men make a promise with mostly good intentions but lacking in a little sincerity…and then that promise turns out to be really meaningful to them in unexpected ways.  Wallace promises Davis to sing a song with him out of guilt more than enthusiasm, and his whole life changes.  The two of them decide to keep faith with a weird dude they knew in the Army out of obligation, and that’s how they meet the Haynes sisters.  Davis’s promise to find Wallace a girl is motivated by a selfish desire for a little leisure time, but, well, other good things come of it for him.  I don’t think the film’s message is “do the right thing for the wrong reasons and you’ll succeed” but there’s definitely something going on there, under the surface.

Another element that’s definitely going on under the surface is social and cultural conservatism — this movie is fully locked into the moral landscape of mainstream America in the 1950s, and the “boy, girl, boy, girl” lineup of romance and matrimony fits a little too neatly.  The implication that marriage is the most central meaning in life is pretty clear.  The valorizing of the army is understandable for the era, but it’s over the top nevertheless: the movie’s absolutely not interested in a depiction of war or its aftermath that feels genuine (unlike say, The Holly and the Ivy, which I wrote about here just two days ago).  And not one but two musical numbers take swings at modern entertainment — “Choreography” memorably parodies modern dance (I think specifically the Martha Graham Dance Company) in making an argument that the old tap dancers and soft-shoers were obviously superior.  And, of course, the medley that ends with “Mandy” repeatedly reminds us that the performers REALLY miss those old-fashioned minstrel shows — weren’t those the good days?  For my part, I think MGDC is fine as a target — yes, there’s something a little sneering about that number, but it’s also pretty funny, and I am unaware of any weird bigotry associated with Martha Graham’s particular style of modern dance.  Minstrel shows, on the other hand, were a real blight on American entertainment — Bing Crosby, of course (who plays Wallace here), had appeared in blackface in a minstrel number in an earlier film, Holiday Inn, so he’s only thinking back about a decade as he yearns in song.  And of course the thing that’s ridiculous about both numbers here in White Christmas is that they are self-refuting — sure, the modern dance in “Choreography” is intentionally goofy in ways that make me laugh, but doesn’t that suggest that in fact the new modern dance style was capable of pretty evocative communication and therefore artistry?  And more importantly, doesn’t the fact that Clooney and Kaye and Crosby can joke around in song on stage, before Vera-Ellen comes out and dazzles us all with her skill as a dancer, prove that you can have all the old vaudeville fun you want on stage or screen without burdening it with awful racist caricatures?  We do not need “Georgie Primrose”, as the song here suggests, to have a good time: far from it, in fact.

I know, I know — none of this sounds like me being in love with this movie enough to watch it every Christmas.  Well, I haven’t really dealt yet with the four stars of this movie, and I have to say, each one of them is basically ideal casting, simply ideal.  Bing Crosby is just coming down from his apex of fame and talent here in the early 1950s: the film needs a proud but affable crooner and that fits Bing to a T.  His ability to work as a straight man had been pretty carefully honed, and for my money he is JUST young enough to still be playing a romantic lead in this film.  His comic foil, Danny Kaye, is a personal favorite of mine — Danny’s effortless and energetic presence on screen really never fails to make me laugh or hold my attention.  Everyone’s tastes are different of course — I complained back in my review of The Holiday about Jack Black dialing it up to 11 a little too often, and I’m sure there are folks who would feel the same about some of Kaye’s goofiness here, but for my money he can dial it up as high as he likes, I’m here for it.  As young Judy Haynes, Vera-Ellen is startlingly talented in every kind of dance she’s asked to perform — so good, in fact, that Kaye couldn’t keep up with her (if you’ve ever wondered why that one semi-anonymous dude is suddenly dancing with Judy in a couple of big numbers, it’s because he was a top-tier studio dancer covering the parts that Kaye, despite all his talent, just couldn’t do himself).  And I love the way she very subtly breaks the fourth wall — the next time you watch this film, pay attention to how many times Vera-Ellen makes direct eye contact with the camera, and flashes us a little conspiratorial smile as if to say, “God, I’m good.  Watch this next bit.”  Finally, Rosemary Clooney as Betty Haynes is, in my purely subjective opinion, just about perfect: she takes a role that, on the page, might be a bit stiff or stick-in-the-mud, and presents a woman who’s warm and guarded and winning.  Plus she’s got the voice of an angel and she’s a vision in Technicolor in basically every perfectly chosen Edith Head costume — maybe you can take your eyes off her, but I can’t.  And the end result of all four of them basically firing on every cylinder in every scene means that the film is always bursting with charisma, no matter how I feel about the writing or the pacing or the underlying message of any given moment.

And White Christmas is such a lush viewing experience too: I don’t know if any film’s color is more saturated than the reds and greens of this movie’s opening titles, and it’s paired with a really effusive orchestral overture.  The heightened theatricality of everything about the film somehow works to its advantage, for me: there’s no question that every outdoor setting looks like a sound stage, from the “war zone” in 1944 to the “boat dock” where Davis and Judy first dance to the “parking lot” outside the Pine Tree Inn.  But something about the artificial quality of those spaces just makes the whole thing feel slightly dreamlike to me in a way that’s really calming and satisfying.  Add in a few incredibly catchy Irving Berlin songs and some scintillating Robert Alton choreography and I just fall in love with the film every time.

Am I falling in love with a holiday movie, though?  For a film that opens and closes with two stirring renditions of “White Christmas”, the best selling single song of all time, I think there’s no question that this film is not all that connected to the holidays as far as its running time goes.  We get about 10 minutes at Christmas Eve in 1944 (more than half of it about General Waverly and not the holiday at all).  Then, while there’s some talk about the Christmas Eve looming at the film’s end, it’s not until the very last segment of the film that we get the holiday tableau you might remember, full of children in costume and Santa hats and the world’s largest Christmas tree.  But what a tableau it is.  Thematically…well, I’ve talked about this movie’s theme already, a little.  The more I think about what I think this film wants to say, the less comfortable I am with it — I don’t think it’s a harmful film, to be clear, but I think it just has a different sense of what’s important and in need of defense than what I believe in.  I have a hard time connecting most of the themes I do see to anything I would associate with Christmas in particular.  In the end, though, I can’t deny that the power of the movie’s full force being directed at the Christmas holiday really connects for those brief stretches where it’s doing that.  I come away fully washed in the VistaVision spectacle of the idealized midcentury holiday.  There’s a reason a ton of us watch this film every year and feel Christmassy about it.

I Know That Face: Mary Wickes, who plays Emma here (the hotel’s housekeeper and professional busybody), has a couple of other holiday turns under her belt: she plays Henrietta Sawyer in The Christmas Gift, a TV movie starring John Denver and Jane Kaczmarek (what an eclectic cast, eh?), and near the end of her career, she plays Aunt March in the 1994 edition of Little Women, another one of those movies that feels like Christmas far more than it is actually set at Christmas.  And Bing Crosby, here playing the seasoned entertainer and mogul Bob Wallace, is Father Chuck O’Malley in The Bells of St. Mary’s, a film that has a long enough sequence set at Christmas that it tends to make lists of holiday movies (and would certainly be eligible for this blog).  Bing, too, sang in that famous televised “Little Drummer Boy” duet with David Bowie that I alluded to when I reviewed Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

That Takes Me Back: Man, as a long-time happy Amtrak traveler (in the days when I could sleep sitting up overnight in coach: ah, youth), the vision of trains full of sleeper cars rolling through the night is nearly irresistible.  I loved, too, that in their conversation about whether to take the train or the plane, it’s clear that the train is luxury travel (since you can sleep), whereas on the airplane you’ll wind up sitting up all night.  No kidding, Bing.  It is fun to see the Haynes sisters have to fuss about their phonograph records (and phonograph) they travel with: technology has changed our relationship to music in so many ways.  And I know that I will never in my life get to say, as Bob Wallace does, “Young lady, get me the New York operator.”  And that’s okay, you know?  But I do kind of wish I’d gotten to do it.  

I Understood That Reference: The only Christmas story I heard them alluding to was a quick throwaway line when Ed Harrison tells Wallace he wants to show them off “playing Santa Claus to the old man,” right before Bob says to knock it off…though not in time to keep Emma from getting entirely the wrong idea about the situation.

Holiday Vibes (5.5/10): There is absolutely no way to score this film.  For those of us who watch this with religious attention every single year, it would seem ridiculous to set this any lower than a 9.5: when I hear the conductor calling out “Pine Tree” and the gang starts riffing on how they must be in California and not Vermont, it feels like Christmas to me and a few million other people, but that’s pretty silly, isn’t it?  And for those of you new to the film, I can easily imagine you, ⅔ of the way through, wondering if Christmas will matter to it at all other than that one opening scene you’ve already forgotten.  5.5 feels like the most honest middle ground I can offer to a movie that’s not about Christmas at all for all but about a half an hour, but those 30 minutes (distributed around the film a little) are incredibly evocative.

Actual Quality (9/10): Again, this is not a measure of how much I love it, but of how good the film is in my opinion.  And I would say that I think the screenplay’s pretty wobbly here, in terms of actually pacing things out, delivering the scenes characters need, etc.  But everything else — the aforementioned costumes and music and choreography and acting, and I didn’t even mention the really successful direction (from my perspective) by Michael Curtiz whose name you may recognize from little films like Yankee Doodle Dandy and something called Casablanca?  There’s a reason the film works despite having a plot that’s kind of barely there, and it’s because the creatives in every other capacity are bringing their A game.

Party Mood-Setter? You mean, is this a perfect background for your holiday festivities?  100%, as long as you don’t find the minstrel number too weird — again, my only quibbles here are with the writing, but if you want to be baking or decorating or hanging with family while occasionally tuning into a fun song or a sweet dance number or just marveling at a perfect outfit, this movie has your back.  

Plucked Heart Strings? I’ll be honest: I find Betty and Bob’s connection emotionally investing, but I definitely don’t get choked up here.  I get a smile out of seeing the positive resolutions later in the movie for multiple characters, but there are never tears in my eyes.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t tell you it has to be in your annual rotation, but it’s sure in mine and permanently.  And honestly, if you’re an appreciater of the genre of holiday movie (to the extent that there’s a good definition of such a genre), I just think this is going to be on your list already.  It’s too beautiful to look at, with too much talent to watch and listen to.  If somehow you’ve never seen it, I sure think watching it these holidays would be the right thing to do: I hope you enjoy it, if so.

To watch this holiday classic on streaming, Amazon Prime members have access via that subscription; it looks like if you’ve got some premium add-on subscription at places like Sling or Roku or AMC+, you might have access also.  You can rent it, also, from all the usual places.  Amazon will sell you the movie on disc — and with this year being the 60th “diamond” anniversary, let me tell you, there’s a sweet deal on a three disc combo pack that adds in some TV appearances by cast members, along with commentaries, etc.  Worldcat says every library on the planet has this movie on DVD (okay, they say it’s close to 1,500 libraries, but that’s huge when compared with literally every other movie I’ve checked there for this blog).

Christmas in the Clouds (2001)

Review Essay

I try not to make these reviews especially academic — I’d rather talk here just as a fan of holiday movies.  But I think I should probably acknowledge that, as someone who researches representation in media (children’s picture books, specifically) and who also is working on a long-running research project into the lives of indigenous people (students at a boarding school in the 1890s-1900s, specifically), I probably come to this particular movie just a little more likely to want to say something about what this work means, separate from how fun or engaging it is as a work of media on its own.  In all honesty, I’m sure my first encounter with this film, a couple of years ago, was motivated by my wanting to find authentic representation of Native American lives in a holiday movie, and it was one of the first titles I added to the list when I decided to attempt this blog project this year.  But enough about James’s context as a viewer: what, exactly, is Christmas in the Clouds?

The thing about this movie is, it’s hard to answer that question.  Like, this is a movie about Ray and Tina’s confused relationship, in which Tina thinks she’s falling for the man who’s been her unseen long-distance flirty pen pal for the last few months, while Ray thinks he’s falling for the undercover travel guide writer whose rating might determine the survival of the ski resort he’s managing on his reservation.  But it’s also a movie about Joe, Ray’s dad, who badly wants to replace his dilapidated old Chevrolet Apache with a brand new Jeep Cherokee, if he can manage to win the reservation’s big bingo contest the night before Christmas Eve.  And it’s also a movie about O’Malley, the drunk white curmudgeon who is the ACTUAL travel guide writer and wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter, and about Phil who’s chasing snow bunnies, and about a little kid who’s lost the mouse she decorated with colorful war paint, and, and, and.  It’s a LOT.

The poster for "Christmas in the Clouds" depicts a Christmas tree covered in large bauble ornaments, each of which displays one or two actors from one of the movie's many subplots. In the foreground, Graham Greene as Earl the chef has his feet up as he leans back to read a Native American romance novel.

At its best, the film is a celebration of native identity and diversity — the opening narration tells us bluntly that “this story’s about now-a-days Indians” and those are the threads in this movie I really love.  I love Ray’s pride in his work, which at one point spills into a pep talk to his employees about how their nation built the place, and the people who own and run it are native, and they deserve the best — which includes getting a better rating in the travel guide than some white corporate ski resort down the road.  I love all the glimpses of what life is like on the rez — the front desk manager’s immersion in ridiculously over the top romance novels starring a kind of indigenous Fabio, and the scenes of multi-generational families gathering at the bingo hall, and the ways in which children and families intersect with the business of running a resort because there’s a sense that the whole community is invested in this place.  I’m grateful that the film doesn’t present stereotypes to us like I’ve seen in other works about native people – we don’t get any stoic warriors or alluring princesses here, and the only person struggling with alcohol addiction is a flabby old white guy.  It feels like a fun space to be in.  I wish it was a little more precise about the native nation we’re working with — I have never felt it was specific enough, though I’ve seen other reviewers claim the characters are supposed to be Apache (I think they may be getting confused by Joe’s old truck).  Given the setting, though, and the fact that the credits thank the people of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, I think the most plausible in-fiction answer is that these people are connected with one of the bands of the Ute nation — it was great to see from the credits, at least, how engaged the production was with native organizations, since again, it often felt successful to me on that front.

Where it struggles…well, let’s start with the inexperienced writer/director, Kate Montgomery.  Kate’s a white woman, and though she obviously approached this work with a desire to be supportive of native stories and performers (almost the entire cast, as far as I can tell, is Native American) she’s also an outsider.  More importantly, as far as I can tell, this is the one screenplay she ever wrote — at least the only one that was ever produced — and I think that just limits how well she’s actually going to evoke the world she’s trying to portray.  The actual plot feels borrowed from so many other movies — secret pen pals from The Shop Around the Corner, and a ski resort with no snow as the holidays approach from White Christmas, and a misidentified undercover VIP at the hotel from an admittedly very funny episode of Fawlty Towers, and an unlikely buddies in bed together scene from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, etc.  There are flashes of funny insight here — writing a role for the incredibly talented Graham Greene to play Earl, the vegetarian native chef who’s a wizard with eggplant but absolutely does not want to cook buffalo or venison no matter how much they need to impress a travel guide, for instance, was an amusing idea.  But often the writing feels just a little forced.  I think there’s some inexperience in the cast, also, and there are times when there’s just not a lot of energy on screen — the people talking are generally nice people and you’re rooting for them, but some combo of the camera work and the editing and the writing and the performance is leaving it a little flat.

Another result of her inexperience, I’d argue, is just that some scenes needed one more take — I’m sure this was a movie put together on a shoestring budget, but virtually every line by M. Emmet Walsh, the white travel writer and by far the most experienced actor in the cast, is so hammy that either he was refusing to take her corrections or she didn’t realize how odd the contrast would be between his cartoonish expressions and gestures and the much more composed, natural performances of basically every other actor she’s got.  Maybe I shouldn’t blame Montgomery — I just feel a bit disappointed, sometimes, when I can feel the movie losing my engagement a little while I’m leaning in and ready to enjoy it.  And I don’t know who’s responsible for casting here, but I’ll admit, I was seriously bummed to find out that the leading lady here, the character of Kristina Littlehawk (a Mohawk woman, in the script), is being played by Mariana Tosca, a woman of Greek descent.  I mean, Mariana’s pretty and charismatic, but the whole point here is representation: come on, you know?  Irene Bedard is right there.  Or Kimberly Norris-Guerrero?  And heck, it could have been any number of other native actors whose names I wouldn’t know — this is a tiny indie film and there’s no way Mariana Tosca was a name they needed on the poster.  Again, I’m not criticizing her performance at all: I just wish that in a movie whose biggest raison d’etre is presenting native holiday movie stories with a native cast, the romantic lead was part of that experience.

But don’t let me talk you out of trying this movie, especially if you’re the kind of person who enjoys the Hallmark/Netflix/Lifetime holiday movie experiences — I think this film is working in that TV world of giving us some attractive people and a goofy but charming setup and a lovely setting.  Nobody watching The Christmas Prince 6 is there to see Oscar-nominated acting performances — you’re there to get the same joys folks get out of all sorts of other media we usually call “guilty pleasures” but I’d argue there’s no need for us to feel guilty (and hopefully we don’t).  There are more than a few scenes in this movie where we know exactly what’s going to happen — like, when an employee asks “are all the guests out of their rooms, because I need to turn off the hot water for a second”, we know that a guest is, unbeknownst to the staff, slipping back into their room for a shower, right?  And you’re either going to roll your eyes at it or you’re going to giggle with delight — in the same way that some people love the moment in every James Bond movie when someone asks him his name or what he wants to drink and we already know the answer, and some people don’t.

The rom-com premise here mostly holds together, I think — it could have gotten very weird when Tina learns late in the film that her flirty pen pal wasn’t Ray at all, but his father Joe (I promise, this is no spoiler, the audience has been in on this since the movie’s opening scenes), but it just doesn’t, and I think the characters have convinced me that that’s how it would actually happen.  Truthfully, in a film that’s tying up a few too many bows neatly for my taste, the ways in which the Tina and Ray misunderstandings unfold in the final act are in fact surprisingly successful: I criticized Montgomery’s writing enough earlier that I should be direct here in saying she definitely didn’t choose the easy or obvious moments in the end, and I was really pleased by it.  There’s a lot of tension in the middle portion of the movie, though, and at times it does feel mostly like narrative contrivance that’s keeping everyone from saying the words that would actually fix things.  My experience with the film is definitely a roller coaster, with plenty of ups and downs.

One more element that I think is important to mention is the music, because it’s great.  From the opening moments, we’re hearing music by native artists — it helps establish a sense of place really effectively.  Even later in the film, when we’re hearing instrumental adaptations of more familiar holiday music, the arrangements are noticeably unfamiliar — all of them composed and performed by a native musician.  And when the end credits roll and I hear Keith Secola singing NDN Karz (a song I discovered a couple of years ago when I was assisting a friend with a native music playlist for a history course he was teaching), well, I’m smiling pretty wide.  I love the ways this movie takes me somewhere new, while delivering something pretty standard in terms of the actual dot-to-dot details of its primary plot.

I Know That Face: Well, to dispose of him reasonably quickly, we will all recognize the face of the white alcoholic travel writer: M. Emmet Walsh, who’s playing Stewart O’Malley, has been in so many things I’ve seen, and as far as holiday media go, you might recognize him as Walt Scheel from Christmas with the Kranks.  The native cast members have seemingly had fewer holiday media opportunities — native performers get fewer opportunities in general, based on all I’ve read and seen about Hollywood’s interactions with them — but I was delighted to learn that Rita Coolidge (who plays Ramona, the front desk person, here) is the voice of Melissa Raccoon in The Christmas Raccoons. (If you did not grow up on The Raccoons on CBC like I did, well, you missed something.)  And speaking of Canadian television, we cannot fail to note that Graham Greene (the pained but proud vegetarian chef named Earl), among his many roles on screens large and small, appears in 27 episodes of The Red Green Show as Edgar K. B. Montrose, including “It’s a Wonderful Red Green Christmas”, and appears as Colin Reid in the TV movie, A Beachcombers Christmas.  I dimly remember the Beachcombers from my Canadian TV-watching youth, and I have a much more comprehensive knowledge of (and affection for) Red Green and his crew — if you don’t know it, well, I’m pulling for you.  We’re all in this together.  Keep your stick on the ice.

That Takes Me Back: I liked that at check-in for the hotel, the desk attendants were handling paper reservation cards, and handing over an actual physical key for the hotel room: sure, it’s handy to use my phone as a key these days, but it was fun to remember what a hotel was like when I was young.  I did think that pen pals who actually write each other letters in the mail in 2001 was pretty wild — this wasn’t that long ago, and it feels to me like even a few years later, it would have seemed totally implausible.  After all, this movie is already a couple of years after the AOL conversations in You’ve Got Mail.  And I had to smile at the use of the “funny papers” as simple Christmas wrapping for presents, in one scene, since these days most people would be far more likely to have wrapping paper around their house than they would have access to the comics section of a physical newspaper.  Times really do change.

I Understood That Reference: The movie has a lot going for it, but I didn’t notice any references to Christmas stories or characters: Christmas in general, as you’ll see immediately below, was downplayed a bit by this script.

Holiday Vibes (3.5/10): It only really begins to feel like Christmas in the final half hour, though it does really ramp up that energy abruptly then to include gifts and carols and gatherings that boosted this rating substantially.  Prior to that point, we get some good background hotel decor at times, but not much else.  The movie’s many plots are already busy enough without trying to add too much Christmas pressure to them, I think.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): It’s hard to separate the pleasant quality of a representative native cast and setting from the moderately hackish quality of a lot of the screenplay and direction.  This is a film made with great intentions and not quite enough skill to land the plane they’ve decided to fly in.  I feel like a 7.5 is about right in terms of me being honest with myself — much better than the worst stuff I’ve watched for this blog, but not as strong as the good rom-coms I’ve watched.  I’ve seen this film called “a Lifetime holiday movie but with a bigger production budget” and that doesn’t feel inaccurate — and as I noted earlier, I think that what it’s actually offering is going to be plenty appealing to an audience that’s looking for it.

Party Mood-Setter? Honestly I think this might be great for this kind of situation — the strengths of the setting and the music will still come across well if you’re slightly distracted while it’s on, and you can lean in or tune out as you like to the various plots as they appear and disappear.  The film’s a pretty solid PG, too, so I think for most families it would be fine in the background (just one scene where Ray and Tina are waking up together, and it’s still coming across as pretty demure even then).

Plucked Heart Strings? I mean, honestly, no.  The stakes are pretty low here — the resort isn’t about to close unless things work out, Tina and Ray are looking for love but not in dire straits, etc. — and therefore any happy endings we get are pleasant but not exactly material that makes you tearful with joy.  That’s no criticism, either — the film set out to be pleasant company and I think it does achieve that goal.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t really imagine making this an annual holiday tradition unless something about the reservation setting really grabs you, but I have gotten enough good things out of it the two times I’ve seen it that I would certainly watch it again some day.  For me I think it’ll be one I turn to now and again as a change-of-pace movie that reminds me there are a lot more stories to tell about the holidays.  But I hope that, in the long run, enough native artists get the chance to make something in this cultural space that I can spend my time watching newer (and better) movies than this at the holidays that still achieve the kind of representation that matters, to me.

You can pretty easily watch Christmas in the Clouds if you’re so inclined: it’s available on ad-supported streamers like Tubi and Pluto and The Roku Channel.  It’s also available on Amazon Prime, but only with ads for some reason, so being a subscriber won’t help you dodge those (if you follow that link, the movie description’s in Spanish for some reason, at least on my screen, but I checked and the audio track appears to be in English).  If you’d like it on DVD, Amazon will sell you one for less than $6, and Worldcat tells me over 400 libraries worldwide have one to lend you.  If you’re like millions of Americans and you go in for TV movie romantic comedies each December, I really think this one could be your thing, and I hope you give it a try if so!

The Holly and the Ivy (1952)

Review Essay

It probably is no surprise that I, a fairly committed Anglophile and devotee of choral music, would count among my favorite pieces of holiday music the English carol, “The Holly and the Ivy” — indeed, I have a tendency to start singing it (to myself) at almost any time of year.  Given that reality, it’s a little strange that this film was one I only finally watched for the first time a few days ago, the last of this year’s 26 films to be screened by me.  I’ve heard there was this sort of somber, thoughtful Christmas movie set in the rectory of a country village Anglican priest for years, and it sounded so on brand for me that I’d long meant to watch it.  Although I’ll have both praise and criticism to offer in what follows, I can certainly begin by saying with emphasis, I’m so glad I did finally watch it.

The premise of the film is simple enough: an extended family is converging in a small town in Norfolk for its first Christmas after the death of the mother/wife who, it seems, was a sort of social glue holding them together.  Father Martin and his devoted daughter, Jenny, who keeps house for him and basically minds him as though he were her child, will be joined by her siblings, David and Margaret, whom we first encounter as, respectively, a soldier fooling around with a local girl past curfew and an unseen but apparently vivacious young fashionista (one man refers to her as “a streamlined bit of work” which I can’t quite interpret, but also feel I understand all the same).  Tensions would be high, then, and higher for the presence of their father’s sister Bridget (a forbidding, resentful old maid), their mother’s sister Lydia (a fussy but gentle woman who has been a widow for decades), and a distant cousin Dick Wyndham (a polished, somewhat austere aging bachelor), all of whom seem to consider the comforts of a country Christmas a kind of family inheritance owed to them (and none of whom seem to have thought at all about how changed the emotional landscape will be in the wake of a death).

The poster for "The Holly and the Ivy" shows images of the priest and his three children, and offers the tagline, "A love story of rare quality, flavored with delightful characterizations and priceless humor." I don't think I would describe the movie that way at all, but it's what this poster says.

The pressure that threatens to blow the lid off of this cozy Christmas has to do with secrets — and specifically, the kind of secrets children keep from their parents, no matter how old they get.  These are the kind of secrets kept in a so-called “good family” — there is pressure on the younger generation (they think) to be upright and dutiful, especially as their father is a priest.  Jenny’s secret is in our hands first — we learn almost immediately that her ambitious boyfriend wants to marry her and bring her with him to a multi-year contract for work in Brazil, but she feels she cannot leave her father untended.  She knows he would tell her to go if she asked, and that’s why she cannot ask — Jenny’s the good child, and imposing on his indulgence even that much is more than she can stand.  The only outlet she can envision is her flashy big city sister Margaret coming home to take her place, but Margaret (as we also learn early on) won’t even bring herself to actually come home for Christmas.  When Margaret finally appears, in the movie’s second act, we learn early on that she has secrets of her own –secrets she is sure her father’s rigid moral code could never understand, let alone forgive.  Both of them are trapped by love, then — a sense of a father’s love that either imposes too heavy a burden to be free from, or is hemmed in by so many conditions it cannot be relied upon.

And the film is the unwinding of all of this — the structure of Christmas observation (both secular and sacred) holds all these people in proximity to each other long enough that truths are spoken because they must be, though maybe not always by the people who ought to be spilling the secrets they’re spilling.  We’re solidly in post-war Britain — the pleasures available are measured, even meager.  The sense of a canyon between the lives of the older generation and the younger, between the people whose lives were shaped by a first world war and those altered instead by the second, is profound.  A new world may be dawning, but here in this aging rectory, the questions look backward more than forward — what good is the faith of the past to the people living in the present?  What good is humanity in the age of the engineer?  At one point, when they’ve found a space to be alone in conversation, Jenny says to Margaret, “You’re not happy, are you?”  And Margaret replies, “Who is?”  That’s perhaps the most prevalent tension the film wants to examine and resolve — the idea that the younger generation either cannot find happiness, or cannot share it with elders whom they do not trust to accept them as they are when they’re happy.  

I don’t want to tell you that everything works about this film, because it doesn’t — the supporting cast of extended relatives have their moments, but often come across as stiff, even unpractised, like stage actors still adjusting to the screen or retired actors hustled out of mothballs for a return to work.  Jenny and Margaret may have serious concerns and secrets to hold and work through, but their brother Mick (played pretty effectively by Dernholm Elliott) just isn’t given much by the script — he seems just as resentful and guarded as his sisters, but with far less reason and therefore far fewer meaningful conversations or resolutions over the course of the movie.  Some of the attitudes and opinions of a conservative English family in the early ‘50s grate on me a little, as they go past.

But mostly it works for me — it feels like a real family working through real grief together.  Every few minutes, we’re in a new Christmas context that offers both relief and new potential for tension.  And the Christmas narratives here are almost too obvious — Jenny and Margaret assume they’re dealing with a father too holy to make sense of their humanity, and the possibility of love and acceptance is therefore as miraculous and potentially moving as the story of the Incarnation at the heart of the holiday is meant to be.  And Martin, their father, who has developed a comfortable sense of himself as a model priest in a society that no longer needs him, has to confront the opposite reality that he has not in fact found a way to be the messenger of love he hoped to be, and that he and his love are badly needed not just by society but by his closest family members.  In a sense, everything hinges on the question posed by one character — what is the point of love, if those we love die?  Especially if we deny ourselves the potential comfort of an afterlife, how can we bridge the chasm of that grief successfully enough to have made the love worthwhile?  Whether or not you can accept the answers that are given, most of these characters get resolutions that make sense to them — Christmas has done something to them or around them that’s made them ready to meet each other and hear each other.  And given that the film takes place next door to this 14th century church where Martin serves, basically every scene of the final act unfolds with the peal of Christmas bells in the background as local worshippers engage in the observation of a feast so old it feels timeless (as the characters comment, at one point) — it’s as though the movie understands the ways that this is a celebration and a triumph long before most of the characters (or us in the audience) do.  Ultimately this is a movie about how the connection a family makes at the holidays — at this particular holiday of Christmas, maybe especially — is both strained and life-giving.  We can feel the stresses of family without denying the restorative power family can and does bring to so many of us.  

I Know That Face: Dernholm Elliott, here playing the rakish soldier son Mick (and better known to most of us, much later in his career, as Dr. Marcus Brody in two Indiana Jones films), is The Signalman in one episode of a BBC short film series entitled A Ghost Story for Christmas, and is Old Geraint in a TV movie version of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.  John Gregson, who here plays David Patterson, the Scottish engineer boyfriend to Jenny, appears as Mijnheer Brinker in a TV movie version of Hans Brinker, a Dutch story that has so much Christmas content in it, I’m always a little surprised it’s not treated as a holiday classic.  William Hartnell, who here plays the Sergeant Major (and who is far better known to most of us, later in his career, as the original Doctor in Doctor Who), is a credited cast member for a 1957 television movie called A Santa for Christmas, though even IMDB knows so little about it that I can’t tell you what role he played.  And lastly, Ralph Richardson, who here was the Reverend Martin Gregory, appears in one episode of the television miniseries Jesus of Nazareth: I might not have counted it as a holiday appearance, but Richardson plays the role of Simeon, the aged man who had received a prophecy that he would live to see the Messiah, and who holds the eight-day-old infant Jesus in his arms briefly while asking God to let him depart this world in peace, having received his promise.  That’s pretty dang Christmassy, and therefore I had to include it.  Richardson seems to have spent a lot of time in and around religious roles, in fact: I first saw him playing the Supreme Being in a movie you might know called Time Bandits, which is not much at all like Jesus of Nazareth or The Holly and the Ivy.

That Takes Me Back: There’s plenty of nostalgia to go around in this immersive ‘50s film — I suppose the days are long gone where a parent has to call a bunch of places because they can’t find a child and wonder where they’ve gotten to.  I felt nostalgic, certainly, at the sight and sound of young people caroling at people’s doors: I remember doing that a lot in my childhood and teens, and I haven’t seen it or heard reference to it in a long time — which is a shame, since choral singing and outdoor exercise are both good for the human body and spirit, I feel like, especially in the dark weeks surrounding Christmas Day.  It was fun to realize that for Martin, writing a sermon involves actually writing one by hand: I don’t think I had ever really thought about that?

I Understood That Reference: Shockingly, I think we get fewer direct references to the original Christmas story here than I got out of Tokyo Godfathers — certainly in a very formally written movie with plenty of scope for literary reference, etc., I might have expected a lot more careful allusion to other Christmas tales, but I didn’t hear anything.

Holiday Vibes (9.5/10): This is such a hard category to rate, but I think it has to be very, very high: the whole premise of the film is about a Christmas family gathering, and basically everything that happens is, to me, fully believable and immersive as part of a both tense and festive holiday celebration.  After a couple of early scenes, we are really locked into events at the house itself that made me feel like I was there for Christmas, as surely as if I was cousin Dick, driving down from Peterborough or wherever Dick’s driving from.  Add in the talk about church business at Christmas — which I know is not everybody’s Christmas experience but it’s a big part of my time with the holiday — and I have to rate this very high, even though I wouldn’t call this the movie that puts me in the most festive mood?  I think it’s that, by the end, it’s both reminded me of the discomfort we can feel at Christmas but also of what comfort it brings, too.

Actual Quality (8/10): I wish I could set it a little higher, but the production does feel a bit threadbare at times: as I mentioned, the supporting cast’s performances are often stiff or stagey, and honestly there are scenes where I think the writing just isn’t as sharp.  Still, the central themes of the story, and the ways I am dragged along by events, make this a solid viewing experience — not a great film, I think, but at least a good one.

Party Mood-Setter? I can’t see it working in this context — it’s talky, it’s a little slow, and the things it has to give will probably come across least well if you’re only half paying attention to it.  It could work if you just want a midcentury period feeling in the background while you address envelopes or whatever, but I think there’s a lot of superior choices in that regard (including a couple of films on the roster here on the blog).

Plucked Heart Strings? You know, it’s not exactly tear-inducing for me, but the emotional impact of the final act, much like Happiest Season, hits a little harder than maybe it’s earned?  Though I can’t say what “earns” a movie its impact — all I can say is that the family’s griefs had felt a little more remote to me initially, but then they came home in a way I felt.  I think it might do the same for you.

Recommended Frequency: This was only my first viewing of the movie, but right now I feel sure that I would be really glad to watch it again.  And based on my reaction to it, I can imagine that, once I’ve seen it another time or two, it would become something I schedule for myself every single year.  I think it’s more than good enough for you to give it a try if anything about the premise suggests to you that you’d enjoy it.

This is the first film I’ve run into where I know it’s streamable but you can only get it via the library, as far as I can tell — I used my public library’s Hoopla service to borrow and stream it, and if you instead have access to Kanopy via your local or university library, I think it’s available on that platform also.  The movie’s available for purchase on Blu-ray or DVD from Amazon, of course, and if your library doesn’t have Hoopla or Kanopy (or you just prefer movies on disc), Worldcat tells me it’s in nearly 200 library systems, so hopefully it’s a simple interlibrary loan away, at most.

Happiest Season (2020)

Review Essay

I’ve tried my best to avoid spoiling the final acts of movies here at Film for the Holidays, but it’s going to be tougher than usual in this review, since so much of what I think works best about this film happens in its final third.  I’m committed to not giving up all this movie’s secrets, though, so if you come away from it thinking, “I still don’t get why he likes this movie,” I hope you can trust that there’s some depths in its final minutes that I couldn’t talk about.  Happiest Season is uneven, like many of the romantic comedies I’ve watched for this year, but when it’s on its game, it has an incredible power.

I’m not even sure, honestly, if this is a “rom-com” — our central couple in Happiest Season are already comfortably paired up when the story opens as they visit a “candy cane lane”, with Christmas enthusiast Harper trying hard to hype up the holiday to a somewhat guarded Abby, though it’s clear from the beginning that Abby at least loves how much Harper loves it.  It only really becomes a comedy about relationships as the film progresses, and it becomes clear that all was not as happy here as it at first seemed — or maybe rather, all was happy once, but the act of going home for Christmas unravels to some extent a relationship that had once been closely knit.  Because, of course, Harper and Abby are a sweet young lesbian couple…and Harper, who wants Abby home with her for Christmas, is (unbeknownst to Abby, initially) still in the closet at home.  So, this isn’t a story about falling in love.  This is a story about whether your love is something you can be open about…and about the somewhat funny but more frustrating and sad experience of having to pretend to be someone you’re not in order to win the chance to be the person you’ve always been.  Is that confusing?  Well, Happiest Season is a little confusing, at times.

The poster for "Happiest Season" features the main cast members, posed in a photo inside a picture frame which is hanging slightly askew. All of them are smiling except for Mackenzie Davis as Harper, who looks glassy-eyed and worried. Underneath the title, the tagline appears: "This holiday, come out and meet the family."

I think part of the confusion, for me, is that the film is trying to sandwich together really painful (if sometimes painful and funny) realities about life as a closeted adult with the kind of over-the-top goofball comedy of the agonies of being around your partner’s weird family and childhood friends for the holidays.  The realities about the closet really work: it’s so clear from the beginning that Harper both thinks she can earn her parents’ acceptance and love if she closets herself just a little longer and understands that in fact that’s not really true at all and that the idea of being who she is at home terrifies her almost as much as it would terrify her parents if they ever figured it out.  Abby’s road is so hard to walk — as someone who clearly hasn’t hidden herself from anyone in years, the act of hiding becomes exhausting fast.  She has to start asking herself if Harper’s so good at hiding from her family that maybe she’s been hiding from Abby too….maybe, even, that she’s more hidden around Abby than around her family?  This is a bittersweet movie, then, but one that’s got my attention.  The problem is that it is grafted onto the broadest possible comedy: this family isn’t just performatively happy at Christmas (like many families are), the dad is running for office and it is in fact imperative that everyone self-consciously perform happiness this Christmas at an endless string of semi-public social engagements.  Harper’s sisters aren’t just weird and competitive: one is so weird it feels like she only is allowed to speak to other humans for a week at Christmas, and the other is so competitive that she can grab Harper in a WWE wrestling move and we don’t find it surprising.  It’s not just awkward being back around your partner’s childhood friends who know stories you don’t: Harper literally has not one ex in her orbit but two, one her secret lesbian soulmate from high school and the other the boy her parents always figured their straight daughter would marry someday, and she ends up hanging out with the latter at the world’s most garishly overbearing sportsbar that’s literally called “Fratty’s”.  The script is worried we won’t get it and therefore piles on the awkward until the situation can barely hold up underneath it.

The way I survive the movie’s long second act as a viewer, then, is by latching on to some really good acting work that’s showing up on screen. Kristen Stewart was much maligned back when everyone thought she was just the awkward vampire girl in the Twilight movies, but I think by now most folks know she’s a real talent: in Happiest Season, she owns the screen with incredible poise and calm, almost like a young Jodie Foster (speaking of folks who had to stay closeted publicly into their adult years).  Another incredibly successful performance is Abby’s best friend John, a flamboyantly gay man played by Dan Levy — on the page, he really shouldn’t work, since he switches back and forth so freely between acts of outrageous stupidity/goofiness and moments of incredible candor and insight, but I don’t know what to tell you.  Levy is really, really good at both sides of this, ultimately selling me on John as a gay man who masks the pain of his past with comedic patter that feels like something out of a Will & Grace episode, but who is ready at any moment to draw back the curtain and reveal enough of the truths he’s earned by living to help pull somebody else (in this case, Abby) out of the flames.  I wish the film established his depth a little earlier, but there’s no question he comes into his own as it progresses.  And the other brilliant light in the supporting cast is, as should come as no surprise, the effortlessly deadpan Aubrey Plaza playing Riley, Harper’s high school lesbian girlfriend who got not just dumped but outed by Harper in a desperate but selfish act of self-preservation.  Plaza is always wry and compelling, in my experience, as a performer — she knows how to be both cool and genuine in the same moment, which is hard to achieve — and as Riley she is given a part that somehow isn’t a corny caricature, unlike literally everyone else from Harper’s hometown.  Instead, she gets to play this nuanced, wounded but still walking young woman who’s never fully escaped the social ostracism she faced as a teenager but also has never fully achieved the kind of exit velocity she’d need to exit the gravity well of this Stepford town with its white elephant gift exchanges and ladies who lunch and a single, lively drag bar that seems like the only place to have any fun at all.  The movie could definitely use some more of Riley and John at the expense of Harper’s weird family, whose screentime seems to mostly consist of flailing attempts at humor that land only intermittently, for me.

As I said up front, there’s a lot I want to say about the final third of this movie, but I’m going to try to steer around most of it so you can experience this film on your own terms.  In the end, the tug of war I’m describing above, which kept pulling me into this film and then knocking me back out again, is finally and powerfully resolved by the movie pushing in all its chips on being honest and authentic and a little painful in facing what it’s like to come out (and what it’s like to bear the burden of being kept in the closet by the person you love).  Characters start to get a handle on themselves, a handle on how the things they’ve been saying or doing have affected other people without them knowing it, and a handle on the question of what it means to be a part of a family (whether that’s a couple in love or a collection of parents and kids sharing a holiday together).  Not everyone grows up in the ways or at the speeds you want them to, and not every resolution is satisfying, but I have to be honest — I cry at Happiest Season, every time I watch it, because it does achieve the agonizing truth of all of these things at once in a couple of powerfully written and delivered speeches by characters who are finally opening the doors to themselves.  The movie’s ultimate commitment to saying what it means rather than trying to fit into some imagined Hollywood formula is maybe a bit too late for this to be a great motion picture, but that doesn’t mean that the moment itself isn’t great.  Because it is, every time, for me.

As is often the case here at FFTH, I’m left pondering what a Christmas movie is about, and what it’s supposed to be about.  Here, I think the movie is about the second chances in life — those we give and those we get, even when we’re giving them to the undeserving or getting them while being undeserving ourselves.  It’s about the ways in which we apologize inadequately because we can’t understand the harm we’ve done, and how even an inadequate apology builds enough of a bridge for understanding to cross it.  It’s about love — and the difference between love as an exhibition for the audience you think is watching and love as the desperate and daring act of selfless devotion that it has to be if it’s going to do anything worthwhile in our hearts.  Those things resonate, for me, as Christmas messages — tied to the best Christmas stories I know, and to the underlying power of the feast I celebrate at Christmas — and therefore Happiest Season, in the end, sticks its landing, no matter how many minor deductions it received from the judges while it was spinning in mid-air.

I Know That Face: Aubrey Plaza, who here plays Riley Johnson, Harper’s first girlfriend, previously voiced the role of Grumpy Cat in Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever — a movie that, I am informed by a relative, may be one of the most unsuccessful things ever committed to film, but surely we can’t blame Aubrey for that: the project is astoundingly ill-conceived at takeoff.  Mary Steenburgen, here playing Harper’s painfully superficial and tightly-wound mother, Tipper, is a veteran of television and movies: for the holidays, she’s been Maggie in Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas (a Roku Channel movie, I am informed), she played Marilyn (one of the quartet of divorced parents being visited) in Four Christmases, and back in the 1980s, she was Ginny Grainger, a cynical mother learning the meaning of the holiday in Disney’s One Magic Christmas.  And Victor Garber, who here plays Harper’s ambitious politician father, Ted, has been in everything, of course: in terms of holiday fare, he voices Fluffy in Bob’s Broken Sleigh, he’s Taylor in Call Me Claus (a TV movie in which somehow Whoopi Goldberg has to become Santa Claus), he is the voice of the never-seen “Irate Neighbor” in the painful “comedy” Mixed Nuts, about which I have already probably written too much, and lastly he is Greg (Tom Hanks’s brother-in-law) in Sleepless in Seattle, a film whose inciting incident, of course, is a long appearance by a widowed father on a nationally syndicated radio call-in show on Christmas Eve.

That Takes Me Back: There’s not much here to be taken back to, it’s so recent.  My guess, though, is that a lot of the suburban sheen of Harper’s hometown is going to feel more and more painfully “early 2020s” over the years ahead.

I Understood That Reference: It’s a Wonderful Life is playing at the Guthrie Theater downtown — seemingly every year, which seems both plausible and like a nice tip of the cap from this film to a movie that was even more interested in second chances, etc.  And Santa Claus is making multiple appearances here, including references in conversation with the twins, a mention in the crowd participation song from the drag queens, and a plastic Santa being wielded as a blunt implement in a sister fistfight.  Oh, and Abby, very early in the story, accidentally bodyslams an inflatable Frosty the Snowman by falling off the roof onto him.  The film is a lot of things, but it’s never subtle.

—

Holiday Vibes (9.5/10): This movie really hits almost all the notes I could expect it to, from the glitter of a competitively decorated neighborhood to the agony of gift exchange, from the strain of trying to cooperate in the taking of the perfect family group photo to the cringe-inducing tedium of finding yourself at a holiday party with your partner where you know no one and are almost instantly abandoned.  The only reason I’m not stacking it up at a 10 is that Harper’s family are so over the top bizarre in some scenes that I think it takes me out of the moment a little and diminishes the reality I’m otherwise feeling.

Actual Quality (8/10): It is so hard to rate this film — the scenes involving Harper’s sisters (or, to a lesser extent, her parents) are excruciating enough often enough that I fidget while sitting through them.  But then I’m back in a scene showing me Kristen Stewart and Dan Levy or Aubrey Plaza, and everything is firing on all cylinders.  Enduring the movie’s roughest middle patches ends up being worthwhile, since the finish connects for me.  But what does that mean, in score terms?  I could argue this up a little and down a little, and I ended up trying to split the difference.

Party Mood-Setter? The tonal shifts would make this impossible, I think — at its goofiest it could be on in the background while you did something else, but you’d feel weird and sad trying to go on with mundane Christmas activities when characters start opening themselves up to each other tearfully as the film progresses.

Plucked Heart Strings? As I’ve already said, I can’t deny what this movie does to me.  It hits like a truck.

Recommended Frequency: I don’t think I would watch it every year, but I’m glad I’ve seen it, and I know I will watch it again.  I do think it’s strained a little by needing to break new ground here, though, and to some extent I’d rather hope for more inclusive Christmas movies that are a little better managed in terms of tone and intention.  I think this one opens the door for other kinds of storytelling that trust the audience just a touch more, but regardless of the films that follow it, there’s no question it achieves some moments that stick with you, and for that reason alone I would encourage you to make it a film you visit at least now and then at Christmas time.

Happiest Season is easily streamed if you’re a subscriber to Disney+ or Hulu. Sadly, though, that’s about the only way to view it, that I know of — it doesn’t appear to be rentable from any other service, and I can’t find a DVD of it in the English language that’s not an Australian regional disc that won’t play on most American setups.  Worldcat claims to know of disc copies in 90ish libraries, but I’m not sure those are any more playable in most systems in the United States.  If you don’t have Disney+ or Hulu, I think it’s worth a try geting a hold of one, though, if you can!

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

Review Essay

I want to acknowledge up front that of all the films on the blog this year, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is going to be the biggest stretch as a “holiday film” of any kind — other than a handful of snowy scenes establishing that it’s wintertime and a single shouted reference to Christmas, this movie really does nothing at all to position itself for the holidays.  But it’s undeniably a film that’s adapting A Christmas Carol, and for this segment, I knew that I wanted one of the Carol adaptations I reviewed to be something really radical in trying to reinvent the story.  The basic structure of Dickens’s novella is so classic and yet so easy to riff on that Wikipedia has an article dedicated just to its adaptations, and it’s enormous: everything from an experimental theatrical production called Fellow Passengers which stages the whole story with just three actors to The Passions of Carol which is apparently an adult film version of the story (um, “adult”, but you know what I mean) to the 1994 TV movie A Flintstones Christmas Carol in which Fred and Barney and Wilma and Betty present the whole story, though how on earth they make that work…well, maybe I’ll watch it someday.  Anyway, I wanted to try something interesting out for the blog that I hadn’t seen before — not The Passions of Carol interesting, but interesting all the same — so I picked Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.  All I knew about it was that it had a really talented cast (three Oscar winners plus Jennifer Garner, and it’s kind of astonishing she hasn’t picked up at least one nomination over the years) and the premise struck me as potentially viable — a cad is transformed by confrontations with the women he’s wronged — so I committed myself to watching it and writing it up.  I, uh, I have made some mistakes in this blogging project, folks, and boy howdy was this one of them.

So, I want to talk about why Ghosts of Girlfriends Past doesn’t really work in any way, but particularly through the lens of thinking about it as an adaptation of A Christmas Carol — like, I do think it’s also a bad romantic comedy and work of art in general, but primarily I think it’s clarifying for me as a lens for thinking about Dickens’s novella and the reasons it endures and continues to resonate with us.  At first, I struggled to understand why elements that I think work in the other versions of this story weren’t working here, but over time, I feel like I learned some things about where the magic in the original tale lies.

The poster for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past shows a smiling Matthew McConaughey facing left while a smirking Jennifer Garner facing right pulls on his scarf, as if to spin him around to follow her. Framed photos of three attractive women hang on the wall behind them, each one ogling Matthew as if he is God's gift to women. In front of them, the movie's tagline appears: "You can't always run from your past."

Before I do that, let’s just be up front about some things about this movie that are so gross, many of you would probably tap out of it immediately, since I nearly did.  The movie’s homophobia and transphobia are depressingly prevalent for a major Hollywood release in the 21st Century — it’s not just characters casually using slurs (though they do) but it’s also a script that thinks it’s super funny to allude, not once but twice, to the idea that you might accidentally have sex with a trans person who tricked you.  It’s not funny either time, but it’s also exhausting enough to me as a cishet person that I have to imagine it would be really grating for someone more personally touched by that kind of joke.  There’s also just so much rampant sexism, including more than a few really gross moments where a man’s abusing a position of power to degrade or objectify a woman — this is the kind of movie that would have been much harder to release after #MeToo, and in the wake of that movement this movie plays even rougher than it probably came across when it was first in theaters.  Furthermore, as I’ll explore later in the review, I think this sexism isn’t just gross as an attitude but it’s also really artistically backwards in a way that damages whatever mileage they were hoping to get out of adapting A Christmas Carol in the first place.

First of all, let’s tackle the movie’s biggest problem — Matthew McConaughey’s Scrooge analogue, Connor Meade, just isn’t Scroogeish in ways that will work for this story structure.  Scrooge is fundamentally miserable in a way that anyone can see: there’s nothing about his life that seems appealing or worthy of someone’s envy.  And I think that’s what makes it possible for us to empathize with his growth as a person in the story — he has absolutely committed acts of really vicious cruelty, but he’s done so much harm to himself in the process that the possibility of healing for everybody involved is a welcome relief.  Connor Meade, on the other hand, is this smiling sleazeball whose whole world (as we are immediately made aware) consists of being good at degrading and objectifying women for fun and profit, in that order.  As the movie presents it, every man wants to be him and every woman wants to do him — every woman but one, of course, the perfect woman and therefore his unattainable heart’s desire.  A movie structured around THAT arc, in which Meade has to give up all his fun and wild times in order to get the one thing the world won’t give him, is an almost perfect inverse of Scrooge’s horrified and awestruck realization that he has been clinging to wounds and woundedness, and that there will be a release of joy in his life by unburdening himself from wanting literally anything more than to see other people made happy.  Sure, the screenplay attempts to make the connection — at one point, while Meade is breaking up with three women simultaneously on one Skype call (I can’t believe it either, folks, and I saw it with my own two eyes), he is accused by them of having taken their love without returning it, “hoarding love like a miser”.  Yeah, it makes no sense in context either.  Also, this film absolutely does not present women in general as offering Connor Meade anything other than casual, gleeful sex, and as the screenplay makes repeatedly and tediously obvious, he’s been more than happy to return the favor, no hoarding whatsoever.

Nearly as huge a problem, though, is Michael Douglas’s Jacob Marley analogue, Uncle Wayne — in fact, Uncle Wayne’s an even bigger swing and miss by the screenplay, but as a secondary character he perhaps does a little less damage.  Here’s the problem with Uncle Wayne in a single phrase: he’s not repentant.  Like, not even a little.  He was a grade A slimeball whose toxic attitudes about women he instilled in an impressionable young Connor — now that he’s dead, you might think he’s come to terms with how disgusting he was being, but no, he just has some vague hand-waving to do about how Connor, he’s got this special connection to Jenny (poor, poor Jennifer Garner in yet another thankless role) and that’s real special now, you don’t want to keep having fun with thousands of hot younger women, you want to settle down.  The screenplay might as well have him say “I had my kicks, Connor, but you shouldn’t have yours”.  He keeps reappearing throughout the movie, too, but only because the movie seems to think we will find him a charming jerk, I guess — also because he looms large in the “Ghost of Girlfriends Past” sequence as Connor’s surrogate father after being orphaned.  Regardless, though, he’s so consistently awful: he makes a joke to Connor in middle school that alleges that Connor’s middle school girlfriend has an STD, and even at the end of the movie after Connor’s “redemption” there’s Uncle Wayne in the corner, hitting on a ghost who reminds him she’s underage.  Jacob Marley’s power in the original comes from his hauntedness — he is burdened by the gravity of his own harms, and he is panicked for the safety of his dear old friend who is blithely continuing to forge an ever-longer chain.  Scrooge is genuinely rattled by Marley up front, begging him to “speak comfort” to him — before even the first Spirit’s arrival, Scrooge has already come into contact with real fear.  Without that context, we are just cruising into Connor’s past as though it might be fun to revisit all these “conquests” — language I cringe to use but it’s definitely how this film treats sexual interactions between men and women, at least.

And then, though I think Emma Stone’s Ghost is probably the best performance in the movie, we hit a Past segment that just sucks.  It sucks to have Connor hero-worshipping sleazeball Uncle Wayne — didn’t the screenwriters recognize that what Scrooge found to admire in his own past was the warm and friendly Fezziwig whose generosity stood in stark contrast to Scrooge’s adult life, and not some cruel miser who had inspired Scrooge’s life of misdeeds?  It sucks to see Emma Stone’s good work undermined by such stupid writing — when she (Connor’s first intimate partner) takes him to the scene of their first and only time, she starts hyping herself up like she was Neal Armstrong landing on the Moon.  Watching a 20 year old actress playing a 15 year old girl dancing next to 40 year old Matthew McConaughey about how pumped she is that she got to be the first person to sleep with Connor Meade, King of Sex….  Wait, what was the point of this sequence?  Oh right, how sad and empty all this action makes him.  I guess.  Honestly, half of the movie’s problem, everywhere and at all times, is how little it ascribes agency to Connor and how much it treats women in the aggregate and in specific as a problem for him.  In a memorably awful scene, we see Connor confronted en masse by every woman he’s ever slept with — they descend on him like some rabid horde, desperate for him, and he emerges from the vision terrified.  But here’s the thing — what’s terrifying Connor is the women and their insatiable lusts.  Not his own greed and harm.  It would be like Scrooge having a vision of the money at the bank trying to drown him and then waking up, scared of the bad, bad gold for making him foreclose on all those mortgages.

The real world sequences into which Connor keeps being reinserted between Ghost segments — another notable departure from the Christmas Carol outline — are bad in another way, and again it has to do with the film’s relentless misogyny.  Connor’s at a wedding, the wedding of his brother in fact, and so we keep seeing various elements and characters of the wedding appear on screen — a lunatic bridezilla who, as presented, seems like someone who would be awful for Connor’s brother to marry.  Three horndog bridesmaids who seem to have made a bet with each other over who can first “land” Connor Meade if you know what I mean and honestly, dear reader, I hope you don’t.  I hope by this point you’ve dissociated and are in a happier mental place.  About the only non-awful people at the wedding are Connor’s brother Paul who still believes in him — the story’s Fred analogue — and then Jenny (the prize for becoming Good Connor) and Brad, a kind, empathetic, professional dude who’s hitting it off with Jenny and therefore is treated purely as an obstacle / plot device by the screenplay and not, you know, a real person who has his own journey to make.  I’d complain about Jenny not getting to be a real person either but by now I’m figuring we’re all clear on how all female characters are treated here — it’s just interesting, I guess, to notice that the only men who treat women as having agency are also being brushed aside.

I think the underlying challenge here is that the movie has no real thesis.  Dickens, goodness knows, had a thesis about the cruelty and inhumanity of early Victorian England — we can be as critical as we like of the ways Dickens’s treatment of social harm presents it too much as individual sinfulness and not enough as systemic and systematic harm imposed on a large scale, but the guy had identified an actual problem and wanted to awaken some kind of human response to address it.  What is the problem here, in this film?  At one point, Connor goes on a rant about how “these days” we’ve made being single a crime…dear reader, you are living in the 21st Century.  If you had to make a list of the problems we face “these days,” would that have made your top 100?  It would not have made mine.  Are we expected to believe that men like Uncle Wayne and Connor would have found happiness and joy in faithful monogamy had the women of America not been uniformly sexually predatory (except for Jenny and I guess whoever Uncle Wayne’s Jenny was)?  The film seems to kind of believe that Connor screwed up by not “going for it” with Jenny when they were about 11 years old and she had a crush on him, but what exactly is that argument?  The one time in his life Connor didn’t treat a woman like a scratch-off lottery ticket, it was somehow the wrong thing to do?  There’s a hint at times of a much more unsettlingly awful thesis — namely, that negging and other forms of cruel game playing “work” on women to an almost universal extent and that therefore this is, from a certain perspective, kind of their fault.  But the less said about that kind of garbage the better — that particular element really pinpoints this movie as having been made in the late 2000s, in the years immediately after Neil Strauss’s deplorable but then-ubiquitous pickup artist advice book, The Game, hit shelves.

Fundamentally, the structure of A Christmas Carol isn’t working in this movie because the Ghosts aren’t really there to do what the Ghosts do in Dickens’s novella.  The original version is designed to make Scrooge mindful of humanity — to connect him empathetically with human caring and human concern, and to give him a perspective on his own life as it might appear to others around him.  The Ghosts in this version seem primarily to be working to convince him that he would be happier with Jenny than he is chasing an endless parade of hot women around hotel rooms — I’m not saying that’s bad advice, to be clear, especially given that I much prefer my own domestic situation to Connor Meade’s life as presented in the film’s opening act.  But it’s so selfishly focused: the Ghosts’ advice is rarely about the harm Connor’s done to others or the good he might have done, and instead is on trying to persuade this scoundrel that he’s more miserable than he lets on, but he can fix it all with the right woman, who fortunately for him has had the undying hots for him since sixth grade.  I feel like in the end the only thing Connor’s learned is that he should have been willing to make the personal sacrifice of staying in bed and snuggling Jennifer Garner, a sacrifice I imagine millions of American men (heck, people of any gender) would find it pretty darn easy to make, themselves, without having paranormal visitation on the subject.

I haven’t gotten much into the movie’s later developments — honestly, I think it gets more depressing as it goes.  I could have gone all my life without hearing Connor Meade — post-two-ghosts, by the way, this guy should be on the verge of personal realization and redemption — saying the phrase “your little estrogen lynch mob.”  He then meets the Ghost of Girlfriends Yet to Come and starts hitting on her, at which point, folks, I just started laughing.  Not at the film, but just at the fact that I had decided to watch this thing.  I mean, come on.  Imagine if Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and the first words out of his mouth were “oh great, you’re here, let’s go imprison a debtor together, shall we?”  The movie doesn’t even believe in its own half-assed redemption arc.  Why should we?  And yet, I guess I’ll say this — this stretch of the film, before the finale, is probably the best, most Christmas Carol-like it gets.  Yet to Come is mute, Connor faces his own death and is panicked, there’s something happening for him even if it’s not particularly inspiring.  And then there’s a car chase and an ex-Marine gets punched out and Connor Meade gets to deliver a preachy, heavy-handed message about the power of love and happiness and why am I still writing about this film.  Seriously, folks — if you can’t get that Scrooge ought to spend the final sequence of A Christmas Carol doing good for others (and not lecturing others while doing some good for himself/his boys), you should not have undertaken the work of writing an adaptation of A Christmas Carol in any medium, let alone an expensive Hollywood motion picture.  The End.

I Know That Face: Breckin Meyer, who plays Connor’s optimistic but increasingly frustrated brother Paul, appears in Go, a 1999 black comedy thriller that is not at all a holiday film but is also absolutely set at Christmas: in other words, it’s probably as much a holiday movie as Die Hard is, and therefore a movie I’ll cover here at some point, I assume.  In Go, Meyer plays “Tiny”, a supporting role as the buddy of Simon, the guy who was supposed to sell ecstasy to his co-worker before he left for Vegas, and oh boy I just cannot summarize this movie: it’s a trip.  Paul’s bridezilla fiancée Sandra is played by Lacey Chabert, who is Dana, one of many bodies to hit the floor in the horror flick Black Christmas (the 2006 version, for those who know there are more than one).  Chabert then gets into the world of Hallmark Channel acting so successfully that there’s no way I can name all of the many Christmas TV movies she appears in, but if you’re thinking “hey, wasn’t she in that one cheesy holiday movie,” you are absolutely correct.  Most recently and memorably, she plays the leading lady role in Hot Frosty, Netflix’s “let’s say a grieving widow found a snowman so attractive he became her real life lover” answer to the question “what if we made Jack Frost but way, way weirder?”.  At this point, I hope Ms. Chabert is at least having a chat with her agent about which scripts she gets shown, but maybe she’s having fun and if so more power to her.  And Daniel Sunjata, who plays the perfect potential boyfriend Brad (whom Jenny really should end up with instead of Connor), has one other holiday appearance, in a Disney TV movie entitled Christmas…Again?! as Mike Clybourne, the single father of a 12 year old who turns Christmas into Groundhog Day with an errant wish.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: There’s so little of A Christmas Carol here in any kind of genuine fashion, but I guess I’ll give it to them that ultimately our “Scrooge” figure is ushered by a mute spirit of Yet to Come to his own gravesite, only to wake up and sprint to his window and shout to a boy below “What day is it?  Is it Christmas Day?”  That’s not just the most Christmas Carol moment in the script, but it’s one of the few that I would argue seems to actually work.  

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: <insert full text of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens>  I mean, there’s no point trying to make a list this time around.  There are Ghosts and a put-upon personal employee and a sad childhood memory but even in those cases this is missing so much of what makes the original special, and the list of things they’re not even attempting is vast.

Christmas Carol Vibes (2.5/10): Let’s put this as charitably as possible: I’ll admit that this is, fundamentally, a story about how an awful person is changed by an encounter with a bad and deceased former role model, followed by three spirits who represent the harm he has done, is doing, and is gonna do.  He seems happier in the end.  That’s about as far as I can take it.  Otherwise, this is just a version of the story that is out of touch with the novella’s moral universe — it does not understand what’s wrong with Scrooge, or what Marley hopes to awaken in him, or why the Ghosts and their visitations get through to Scrooge, or what it is that Scrooge has learned in the end.  It is more like A Christmas Carol than Die Hard is, or Home Alone, but not by much.

Actual Quality (2/10): I cannot believe there’s a movie bad enough to make me long for my experience watching some of my earlier panned movies, but I would gladly watch Jack Frost twice if it meant I never had to watch this movie once.  Everything about the screenplay (and direction) in this film works against what few strengths the performers brought to the film, so that even when they’re successful, it’s upsetting.  I’m slightly afraid that one of you will turn out to be a huge fan of this one, but I guess if you do, we’ll see what you have to tell me.  I really can’t imagine coming to like this film, though, regardless of what I hear about it!

Scrooge?  Oy.  I mean, McConaughey’s doing a serviceable job bringing Connor Meade to life — as noted above, though, what’s frustrating about this portrayal is that it has so little to do with Scrooge in A Christmas Carol that I don’t think I got anything new or helpful out of it.  The highest praise I can give this performance is that the character as written is pretty insufferably awful, and Matthew must have acted it well, since I really, really dislike Connor Meade even when he’s reformed at the movie’s end.  

Supporting Cast?  The cast as a whole is under-served by the material, which I’ll acknowledge up front: we can’t possibly hold all these actors accountable for the mess they’re inhabiting.  And yet I’d also say that at least most of them are not doing the script any favors, much of the time.  For praise, I’ll single out Emma Stone in certain scenes (in the Girlfriend Past role), and Jennifer Garner at least some of the time (acting as this film’s Belle, I guess, maybe mixed with Tiny Tim but what am I even saying anymore) persuades me that there’s a real character on her side of this broken relationship.  Otherwise, this cast mostly consists of performances I wish I could forget (and I bet they wish it also).

Recommended Frequency?  I have no idea why anyone would watch this even once.  I am absolutely never going to watch it again.  I would promise to do better research in the future, but I do expect that at least one side benefit of a blogging project like this one is occasionally getting to watch the blogger suffer for our own amusement.  If so, I hope you’ve enjoyed this with my compliments, and I’m sure I’ll walk into a fence post again for your entertainment sometime again, either this season or next year.

What are you doing here?  Go watch something else.  Okay, fine, if you’re saying “there’s no way this is as gross and unendurable as James is saying, I’ve got to see it”, Max will show it to you if you’re a subscriber. You can rent it from every streaming service that rents movies, as far as I can tell, and if you want it on DVD for a white elephant gift exchange with people you don’t like that much, Amazon will sell it to you for less than $5.00 because in this case, at least, the free market is accurately assessing the supply and demand curves for this film.  This thing is on disc in over 1,400 Worldcat libraries — a huge increase over basically every other film I’ve yet checked in Worldcat — because we live in an unjust universe.  If you check it out of the library, that circulation data may convince them to keep the DVD on their shelves, so I advise against it strongly.  And if you do love this movie, friend, I am sorry for being this hard on it, but it’s one of the worst things I’ve watched as an adult: I guess I would invite you to change my mind, but honestly we should both probably just save our time for other things.

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Review Essay

So much great art arises from a confrontation with our deepest fears and senses of unease about being human, and I feel like that’s the force that propels The Shop Around the Corner every year into being a film where the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.  When I try to sketch out the plot, it feels like a simple (if clever) premise for a film I would watch and smile at but quickly forget.  And yet, it’s more than that for me.  In watching it multiple times in the last year, with this blog in the back of my mind and beginning to loom larger, I think what I’ve worked out is that this is a film about how hard it is to know yourself or other people — how easy it is to mistake and misdiagnose matters of human interaction — and yet how thrilling it is to finally see someone else or be seen.

Again, the premise of this movie, if you don’t know it, is simple enough: we are concerned with the people who work at Matuschek & Co., a leather goods retailer trying to keep afloat in Budapest amid the Great Depression.  Specifically, we’re most concerned with Matuschek’s star employee, the brilliant if brittle Alfred Kralik, and the young woman who slips through the door early in the movie’s first act hoping for a job at Matuschek, the effervescent Klara Novak who seems never to have had an unexpressed thought.  Sparks fly immediately and Novak’s success in securing a position via her moxie don’t reduce the tension — he’s bothered by her frankness and she by his reserve.  And what neither of them know is that, by an extraordinary chance, they’ve come into contact with their secret, romantic pen pal, since Kralik and Novak have been sending impassioned, elaborately written letters to each other via a postal box with pseudonyms, along with an express agreement not to sully the intellectual beauty of their conversation with such mundane details as where they live and work.  Yeah, yeah, it feels like a premise cooked up in a lab to support a romantic comedy — if the movie wasn’t working well, I guarantee it would feel creaky.  Yet, to me, it never does.

The poster for "The Shop Around the Corner" features the main characters twice -- in the top left, Margareet Sullavan and James Stewart are looking directly at us, their heads close to each other in a loving way, and in the bottom left, we see a more cartoonish sketch of the two of them, seated high on a stepladder with their elbows on their knees and their hands under their chins.

One reason this secret pen pal structure survives scrutiny, I think, is that the movie is about other things too — for instance, a major subplot involves the strange and steady rise in tensions between Kralik and his employer, Mr. Matuschek, for no reason Kralik can fully understand.  And in almost every conversation, we hear the backdrop hum of these people clawing their way towards what they think of as stability or respectability — the right living situation, the right clothes, the right opinion from the boss.  There are moments that can feel almost like an Austen or a Wharton novel, as the rigid formalities of conversation among genteel shop clerks threaten to bubble over with the tensions that characters feel under the surface.  As a result, watching Kralik and Novak’s romance progressing feels less like a singular event about which I need full understanding, and more like another chess piece in an elaborate game: what will become of any of these people when they finally start speaking plainly to each other?  How safe is it to say what you mean — or to have someone else understand what you mean when you say it?

So much of how it works, too, is in the incredible performances of the whole cast: sure, a lot of this hangs on Jimmy Stewart, who in the 1940s was at a peak few performers achieve of knowing just how far he could take an audience without losing its affection.  That charisma enables him to exhibit anger or pride or any number of other destabilizing emotions on screen and remain the film’s comfortable protagonist — he creates depth in a character that wasn’t going to have it automatically.  And opposite his frosty Kralik, Margaret Sullavan is the perfect Novak: Sullavan had brought Stewart into the limelight, requesting him as a lead opposite herself in the mid-30s and coaching Stewart (then more of a character actor) into stardom, and there’s a kind of music in every dialogue between them.  Sullavan, too, knows how to deploy her charisma perfectly, so that no matter how many abrupt and slightly cruel things Novak says in her filterless monologues, we never find ourselves turning away from her.  

So much of the film is interested in the balance between bravado and insecurity.  In the leads, we get to see both sides — Kralik’s assured manner in assessing the value of a cigarette box that plays Ochi Chërnye (almost zero) is juxtaposed against his fretting about his intellect as he discusses with a coworker the acquiring and reading of an encyclopedia volume.  Novak’s brassy sales pitch for that terrible cigarette box before she’s even secured a job for Matuschek stands in contrast against the nearly immobilizing despair she feels when she thinks her beau took one look at her and skipped their dinner without introducing himself.  Among the secondary cast, we get types — the self-effacing but sweet-tempered loveliness of Pirovitch; the self-promoting, cheeky chutzpah of Pepi Katona, the delivery boy — that build out these ways of responding to the fundamentally unsettling challenge of being a human who both wants and does not want to be seen, who both wants and does not want to see.

Christmas, James, I hear you say: what the heck does this have to do with Christmas?  Well, as the film progresses through its year, we approach the busy shopping season of Christmas and all the pressures descend even more severely on the shop’s employees.  More than that, Christmas itself as a festival having some connections with marriage — at least in this era, Christmastime engagements and weddings were pretty common, in my experience researching family histories anyway — means that the pressure rises on Kralik and Novak’s pen pal romance.  Will the truth be revealed?  Is an engagement in the offing?  Especially once we reach the point where one of them knows the truth (and isn’t revealing it) while the other is in the dark, there’s a way in which we as an audience know that Christmas will raise the final curtain and at last allow us to exhale with relief and delight.

This is a strange film to try to classify — for a romantic comedy, there’s very little romance (at least, very little romance where both characters on screen know they are romancing each other) and not a lot of comedy (though the moments that are funny are, to me, very funny).  Instead, it pulls as much as it can out of the tensions that build before the release that either a successful romance or a good joke brings — out of conversations where one thing is said and another meant, or where a character stops a phrase short of actually bringing the clarity they could supply.  It’s strange that this is one of two ‘40s Christmas movies starring Jimmy Stewart that involve a thwarted suicide, but at least I’ll note that this suicide has nothing to do with Kralik and Novak’s romance — the film isn’t interested in the overwrought tragedy of love, only in the tragicomedy of trying to know one’s self, and to know what one actually thinks about the people around them.  

I find a lot of delight, too, in the fact that this is by definition a romantic comedy that’s not about falling in love with someone because you have the hots for them.  I mean, Margaret Sullavan is an attractive woman, no question, but also, we know that Kralik doesn’t get hung up on Novak’s looks — to the contrary, he barely thinks about her at all, at first.  What appeals to him are the quick and lively thoughts of the woman he corresponds with compulsively, the woman who fills his dreams.  Similarly, if Novak’s attention is caught at all by Kralik (who, as a youngish Jimmy Stewart, is no slouch in the looks department either), we don’t learn much about it up front.  Sure, both parties are evidently a little anxious about whether or not they’ll be attracted to their pen pals when they meet, but I think the movie really hits its stride in exploring how delightful it is to love someone’s mind, and to discover how beautiful the mind of a person standing right next to you has been, this whole time.  It’s sure helped, I think, by the fact that maybe nobody’s voice in 20th Century film is more evocatively intimate and passionate than Jimmy Stewart when he’s just slightly hushed — reading a letter aloud to Pirovitch, say, or talking with Novak about what a wallet can mean to a man in love.

The movie, too, says so much by not saying things — it is a movie in 1940 set in Budapest but Europe’s rising political and military tensions don’t take the stage.  The closest we get to a mention of the Depression is when, at one point, someone says “that’s the biggest day since ‘28!” about the store’s one day profit total.  And the ending — which I have, I hope you’ve noticed, been rigorous in avoiding anything that might spoil you — is fast and understated, too.  I think Lubitsch, the film’s director, knows that we can fill in the gaps around and between these people very capably, if he makes them human enough.  Even when they’re playing games with each other, or devastating each other with little comments (both harsh truths and devious lies), they feel like people — heightened, brilliant people with screenwriters composing their dialogue, maybe, but people — and they’re people I love to watch every Christmas.  I hope you do too.

I Know That Face: It’s wild how many performers from It’s a Wonderful Life show up in this fairly small cast, six years earlier — Jimmy Stewart, of course, is Alfred Kralik here and George Bailey in that film.  But we can add in Charles Halton, who is the police detective in this film and Mr. Carter, the bank examiner, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as well as William Edmunds, who plays the waiter at the restaurant in this movie and who is unforgettable as Mr. Martini in the 1946 classic.  Moving on from Capra’s iconic movie, I can’t leave out a mention of the delightful Sara Haden (Flora, another of Mr. Matuschek’s shop employees), who will later play Mildred Cassaway, the secretary to the titular bishop in The Bishop’s Wife, a movie about an angel hitting on a married woman while building a cathedral, and the judgmental Mrs. Katie Dingle in The Great Rupert, a movie about a squirrel redistributing a miser’s wealth in answer to a Christmas prayer. Both of those movies sound made up (okay, I may be having a little fun with how to describe them), but I’ve watched them both with at least interest and sometimes delight, and I bet they’ll make this blog if it persists into next year.

That Takes Me Back: It’s funny: the internet should make it easier than ever to have anonymous pen pals, and yet it feels so old-fashioned here?  I guess there was a sense in which half the people you talked to on Twitter were anonymous pen pals, but let me tell you, there was precious little that was intellectually elevating about those conversations.  I have commented on this before, of course, but it remains wild how many plots in the pre-cellphone era consist of having arrangements for dinner that can’t be changed, since characters have no way to contact each other, and therefore hijinks ensue.  Oh, and though we certainly still have all sorts of weird dieting habits as a nation, when Novak tells the customer that, after gaining a few pounds from candy, you need massages and electric cabinets, I did smile to think of what on earth that was like.  Electric cabinets?

I Understood That Reference: We don’t get much here, but late in the movie at one point Pepi tells Mr. Matuschek that he’s going to be “Santa Claus” to the girl standing on the street corner.  Creepy, Pepi.  Take it down a notch.

Holiday Vibes (4/10): I mean, as I acknowledge above, Christmas only really comes in at the hour mark.  I would argue that, from there, it slowly zooms to fill the whole space as retailers and potential fiancees get immersed in the holiday.  And even if I turn away from the central relationship in the movie, there’s plenty of talk about Christmas between characters in ways that feel like the build up to the holiday to me.  Not enough to make this overwhelmingly a Christmassy vibe, but enough to earn its 4, I think.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): I love this movie, and I’m not alone in that — the American Film Institute put it in their top hundred love stories of all time, and of course it’s been memorably remade (more than once, though the one most of us think of is You’ve Got Mail).  I think in terms of what a romantic comedy can achieve, it really does almost everything it ought to do — it avoids most of the clumsy hurdles that such films often throw in the way of their protagonists (there’s no external threat from an attractive man or woman, there’s no real obstacle at all between them other than the fact that their correspondence is a secret and it remains that way for some time due to the insecurity both of them seem to feel) in ways that I find really satisfying.  It is just a very successful ‘40s romance that’ll sweep you off your feet if you let it.  I hope you will.

Party Mood-Setter? This one depends enough on rapid fire dialogue, or subtext and pretexts when it comes to these interactions, that I doubt it’s one you could pay attention to while painting an ornament.  It’s good enough (and brisk enough) though that I think you could make it a “let’s get together and watch this” event this December pretty successfully.

Plucked Heart Strings? My heart sure soars as some of these passages unfold — I don’t know if I’m just a sucker for Jimmy Stewart in this setting or if there really is a deeper emotional connection available from these characters, but yeah, I think it’s there.

Recommended Frequency: I mean, as far as, what am I going to do?  I’m going to watch it every single year.  No question.  I think for you, it will have to depend on how much this feels like a Christmas movie to you.  I’d love it if you gave it a try, though — here’s hoping it resonates for you as it does for me.

You can watch this movie on Max (which some of us subscribe to via their Amazon Prime channel) or rent it from Amazon, Fandango, Google, or Apple.  It looks to me like it’s available via a premium add-on at lots of services too, though I won’t try to game all those out.  If you want to be like me (in this one respect) you can own it on Blu-ray or DVD from someplace like Amazon.  And Worldcat says it’s in over 1,000 libraries on disc, so don’t forget about that wonderful resource.