Tag: comedy

A Midwinter’s Tale (1995)

Review Essay

On the face of it, there’s little reason to think of any of William Shakespeare’s plays as holiday fare — sure, Twelfth Night name-drops the celebration of Epiphany in its title, but the holiday makes no appearance in the text.  So when I tell you that Kenneth Branagh’s black-and-white arthouse dramedy indie film, A Midwinter’s Tale (titled In the Bleak Midwinter in the UK), nearly persuades me that Hamlet is as much a work of Christmas drama as Die Hard is, I do expect some pushback.  But that’s only because you (probably) haven’t seen the movie yet.  Because you haven’t yet come face to face with Joe, the play’s forlorn, neurotic, desperate director, as he turns to his rag-tag cast of community theater actors and admits, very much in the style of the Bard’s existentially depressed Danish prince, saying “As the Yuletide season takes us in its grip, I ask myself, what is the point in going on with this miserable, tormented life?”  And then, slowly but astonishingly, he gets his answer, much of it mediated through the experience of staging Hamlet itself.  I think this is a Christmas story most of us need, and yet one we rarely get.

Don’t get me wrong — so much of this film is a comedy, and a comedy that is pitched directly at anybody who’s ever been a theater kid for even a single high school semester, since so much of what the script finds funny is the embarrassingly human ways everyone from stars to bit players to techies behaves in proximity to even the smallest, most underfunded attempts to put anything on the stage.  Weird warmup exercises, arguments over billing, bizarre character choices, chaotic dress rehearsals: it’s all here.  The premise is one part Muppet Show and one part A Chorus Line — Joe is an actor/director who’s had his chances and they’ve come to nothing, so he’s hanging all his belief in art and humanity and himself on the possibility of staging an avant-garde production of Hamlet in a crumbling church in the English village he grew up in and ran away from, on Christmas Eve evening no less, in order to raise enough money to keep the building from being knocked down by a developer.  He’s going to try to pull it off with a band of ludicrously panicky and self-doubting performers, none of whom he can afford to pay really (despite his implied promises to the contrary), driving them all off into the countryside himself in his dilapidated old car.  “With live people in it?” he’s asked incredulously, early on.  “With actors in it,” Joe replies, “there IS a difference.”

The poster for A Midwinter's Tale features the cast crowded together on the lawn in front of an old stone English church: they are gesturing wildly to the camera and all are wearing yellow-tinted glasses. Above them appears the review quote "Spinal Tap for the Shakespearean Set!" and in front of them appears the movie's tagline, "The drama. The passion. The intrigue... And rehearsals haven't even started."

It’s that kind of self-deprecating, joking tone that pervades this affair.  It’s shot with restraint by the normally egotistical Branagh (I mean, love him or hate him, Kenneth’s self-regard has a gravitational field the size of a dwarf planet) who in a rare move doesn’t even cast himself in the film, though the actors on screen are a wonderfully talented collection of folks, more than a couple of whom will be very recognizable to anybody who enjoys British movies and/or television.  After a cringe-inducingly funny collection of audition scenes, Joe’s selected his ensemble and the cast relocates to the old church which will serve not only as their theater but also as their living quarters for the last couple of weeks of December.  We get to know what it is about each of these people that makes them self-deluded enough to join this absurd enterprise, and what it is about each of them that makes them vulnerable while they’re doing it.  And it’s not about Christmas at all, in part because every single one of these people is running from the kind of stability that would give them somewhere better to be on Christmas Eve than working effectively as a volunteer playing five bit parts in Hamlet to an audience that’s likely to be largely (if not entirely) plywood standees.  But also it’s exactly about Christmas, because it’s about the connections you find when you’re not looking for them, it’s about the ability to find something larger than yourself to care about when you’re scared of who it is you are or have become, and maybe most of all it’s about the kind of grace that human beings in all their bustling, silly foolishness badly need yet so rarely manage to find.  In the meltdown I quoted from in the first paragraph, at another point, Joe shouts at the cast, overwhelmed in the knowledge of his grief that he’s failed them and they’ve failed him and all of them have failed Shakespeare and the village church, “It’s Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake, you should all be with your families!”  Only to have the person he maybe has failed the most say back to him, “We’re WITH our family!”  That’s the kind of dramatic gesture only an actor could make, maybe, in such a way that it’s both not true at all and also it’s deeply, deeply true.  Made true by saying it, even, perhaps.

The script makes fools of each of them, individually, but it also denies nobody their moment to say something genuine and loving.  Even the most seemingly horrible member of the cast — a proud, bitter homophobic old Shakespearean named Henry, played with flair by the immensely talented Richard Briers — has the capacity for warmth.  In fact, what we see in him over the course of the play is maybe its greatest argument for our capacity to be redeemed, since Henry’s growth is pretty profound: he goes from sneering contemptuously to rushing with compassion to support someone in pain, and we can see on screen what it is that’s changing him as this unfolds.  Now, managing that tone may be where it loses some of you — it’s hard to switch gears between chuckling at someone’s antics and holding your breath as that same person admits some private burden they’ve been carrying this whole time.  But to me, again, that’s the Christmas magic of A Midwinter’s Tale, because that very balancing act, it seems to me, looms as a presence in most of the holiday’s best art — Scrooge’s malicious glower transformed into gleeful generosity; George Bailey’s suicidal panic giving way before Clarence’s angelic whimsy; the madcap comic antics side-by-side with the painfully real deprivations of the Herdmans in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Ultimately, A Midwinter’s Tale is an argument about art — as Hamlet relentlessly breaks down each of the performers, one of them observes to Joe that “Shakespeare wasn’t stupid”.  That, in fact, he has as much to say about grief, about fear, about family and friendship, about the human condition now as he ever did.  Not because of all the humans who ever lived only one kid from Stratford-upon-Avon ever figured us out, I think, though maybe Branagh would make that argument.  But to me it’s more that the film argues that, by giving themselves to an enduring work of art, the people involved come away from it greater than they were before.  That the sacrifice of making something — even if it’s only for themselves; maybe especially if it’s only for each other — isn’t a subtractive experience but an additive one.  Sharing this film with all of you is one part of why I wanted to write a blog called Film for the Holidays, because I think the additive possibilities of art are pretty potent this time of year, and I’m hoping at least a couple of you find this film works for you the way it works for me.  And even if it doesn’t, I hope you at least get some laughter out of it, and a smile or two at the (too-neatly-wrapped-up) ending — I watch it every December, and I never grow tired of it, myself.

I Know That Face: This is a stacked cast of British character actors, and therefore this crew has done a lot of fun Yuletide appearances on screen.  Michael Maloney (who plays the play’s director as well as its star, Joe) played Bob Cratchit in a 2000 TV movie version of A Christmas Carol.  Richard Briers (the aforementioned Henry Wakefield, a self-described “miserable old git”), as his final role, voiced Mouse in Mouse and Mole at Christmas Time, and had previously voiced Rat in Mole’s Christmas, a TV adaptation of The Wind in the Willows.  Nicholas Farrell (who plays the many-roled and many-accented Tom) appeared as none other than Ebenezer Scrooge in the 2022 A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story, as well as being the Duke of Glenmoire in Christmas in the Highlands.  And, in a fun cross-over, Mark Hadfield (who plays Vernon, part actor and part ticket seller) is in another Kenneth Branagh film, Belfast, playing George Malpass who, within that film, is playing Ebenezer Scrooge…opposite John Sessions (who in A Midwinter’s Tale plays Terry, the gay actor presenting Queen Gertrude in drag): Sessions in Belfast appears as Joseph Tomelty, who interacts with George Malpass’s Scrooge playing the role of Jacob Marley (in what ended up Sessions’s final screen credit).

That Takes Me Back: It’s fun to have this look back at the very end of the era in which you’d take out a newspaper advertisement for a casting call — I have to assume, at least, that by the turn of the century these things were mostly digital.  I just had to call the year 2000 “the turn of the century”, folks: that one stings.  Anyway, other nostalgic stuff here: well, as I’ve remarked before, payphones are incredibly nostalgic, and I can’t imagine there are as many great dramatic possibilities these days in films as there were when you could put a group of people in an unfamiliar setting and force them to hike multiple blocks just to use the phone.  In one of the movie’s pointed arguments about community versus commerce (which is yet another Christmas-adjacent angle I just didn’t have room for in the review essay), a character comments that kids these days care about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  And kids did, back then!  It’s funny to reflect on the fact that Hamlet’s clinging to the edges of our pop culture more effectively than the Power Rangers do these days — the characters could have used that perspective in the argument in question, I think.

I Understood That Reference: There’s not a ton here that intersects Christmas tales in particular, but at one point Margaretta, the agent who very reluctantly put up just enough money for this production to keep the cast from starving, suggests Joe could contact Santa Claus for some cash when he comes to her appealing for more funding.  I chuckled, anyway.  Oh, and this doesn’t really count, but this came out the year after The Muppet Christmas Carol: I highly doubt Branagh intended a nod at that film rather than at the Muppet Show “let’s save the place” esprit de corps of the movie he was making, but I’ll admit, when I see two members of the cast huddled in their church lodgings under matching Statler and Waldorf comforters they seem to have pulled out of a rummage sale bin, a) I want those comforters for myself, badly, and b) I do think of Jacob and Robert Marley, this time of year.

Holiday Vibes (3/10): I mean, in literal terms, I should probably set this even lower — despite the Christmas Eve timing of the performance, neither Hamlet nor anything around it is specifically holiday themed.  I do just think that, as I argue in the review, this is a film that in fact is very concerned with the things we think about and reflect on in the holiday season.  And by now I’ve watched this so many Decembers that it just feels like Christmas to me, so my real number’s at least a couple points higher, and I can easily imagine that for many of you, your real number might end up a point or two lower.

Actual Quality (9/10): I can’t tell you this is a perfect film, even if it’s one of my favorites to watch this time of year.  The ending is a little too rushed and has a couple of weird loopholes, and any 1990s comedy is going to have at least a couple of jokes that make you uneasy (though I do think this movie mostly deals pretty critically with the problematic things characters say).  So much of it works, though — a brilliantly talented cast getting to play both the comedy of throwing together a production of Hamlet and the painful drama of that play itself and also the feelings it stirs up in those performing and watching.  I really think it’s wonderful, and I think you might find you like it, if you give it a chance.

Party Mood-Setter?  Haha, do I think you should just throw this monochromatic indie dramedy on in the background while you’re making ornaments?  No, I don’t think it would work in that setting for anybody other than me (though I would show up at your house, take one glance at the screen, and announce “now, THIS is a PARTY”).

Plucked Heart Strings? I can only answer this for myself, and for me, yes, it gets to me.  It’s much more a comedy than a sentimental film — at least, in terms of run time there’s far more comedic material than there is sentimental/serious, and in my own memory of the film is far more of laughing than misting up.  But there are a couple of scenes that are so poignant — I don’t see how they could go by without affecting you a little, and they sure do affect me.

Recommended Frequency?  For me, again, this movie is in the rotation every single year, without fail.  Would it carry that same holiday weight for you?  I hope so, but I can easily imagine this is more of a curio for a lot of folks — a once every few years movie, maybe even a “just once is enough” movie.  If I get a vote, though, I’m sticking that movie into your catalog of holiday films and encouraging you to watch it when I come over.

If somehow I’ve persuaded you to give this one a go, sadly, here’s where I tell you there’s no free streaming version available to you: you can rent it on Amazon Prime or Apple TV, though, if you’d like to stream it.  You can own it on DVD, like I do, or on Blu-ray, like I now want to do after discovering they made a Blu-ray version sixty seconds ago when I Googled this, by purchasing it on Amazon or elsewhere.  And it’s more widely available than you might think via the library: Worldcat, at least, reports over 200 libraries have it on disc, if you’d like to try it out for free.

Remember the Night (1940)

Review Essay

Remember the Night is another of these 1940s films, and one that would merit a nearly unreserved positive recommendation if not for a few minutes’ worth of totally unnecessary and irrelevant-to-the-plot racial material.  In this case, just to be up front about it, we have a Black servant in a couple of scenes at the beginning of the film who’s either a savvy man pretending to be a fool, or else just a character written as a foolish Black servant: either way, too, his employer treats him pretty condescendingly.  It’s certainly not the worst racism of the era on film, but it doesn’t need to be that to be uncomfortable and even unsettling.  As always, I don’t mean to make excuses for the media of the past, and if for you that kind of material is a deal-breaker, I respect it and wouldn’t want to waste your time.  But if you’re someone who can enjoy a film while deploring that kind of element, I think you’ll find this one has artistic value that’s worth appreciating.

The first ten minutes of the movie were its least successful (to me) so I do recommend hanging in there — not only do they feature most of the racial element I just mentioned, but they also largely feature people who aren’t our leading actors, and in particular a tedious, egotistical lawyer whose blathering on is a little tough to sit through without impatience (even though, to be clear, the movie knows he’s tedious — part of the point is that he’s long-winded and short on substance).  Those minutes, though, establish the premise: that a woman shoplifter is, thanks to the skillful maneuvering of the DA assigned to prosecute her, about to spend Christmas behind bars waiting for an expert witness in her trial.  He feels a little badly about the maneuver, enough that he arranges for her to get out on bond.  But through a mixup, they find themselves in a car together, driving into the American Midwest to both of their family homes for the holiday.  Elaborate, sure, but also a very solid basis for a romantic comedy to unfold.

The poster for Remember the Night features Barbara Stanwyck on the right in a red dress, standing next to Fred MacMurray (who is dressed in a dark suit and tie) and placing her arms around him.

And the setting is brought really to life by the fantastic casting of the two lead roles.  Fred MacMurray always was a chameleon, able to project such a range from sweet naivete to hard criminal purpose — I grew up with him as the sort of ideal Disney dad in films like The Shaggy Dog or The Absent-Minded Professor, but in this film, he’s excellent at managing the tougher balancing act of playing John “Jack” Sargent, a kindly smalltown fella who made good as one of the savviest minds in the New York City DA’s office.  But here even Fred’s considerable talent is really getting blown out of the water by Barbara Stanwyck at basically the height of her powers — and she’s not just acting the hell out of the role, but she’s doing it in absolutely classic Edith Head costumes while speaking words out of a Preston Sturges screenplay (Sturges, for the unfamiliar, basically invents and achieves the apex of the screwball romantic comedies of the late ‘30s and early ‘40s that we now think of as classic Hollywood).  Here, as Lee Leander, she has to run the gamut from exhibiting the kind of brassy self-confidence that’s helped her survive as a con and a thief for basically her whole adult life to the kind of fragile self-doubt that emerges as the fearful center around which she’s erected that facade to avoid confronting the pain of her upbringing.  It’s an incredible performance, good enough to make me wonder why I’d never heard anyone talk about this film.

The funny thing about the film — given the fairly ridiculous premise and the snappy dialogue that Sturges is known for — is how naturalistic it so often is.  Whether it’s moments where we hear Jack and Lee connecting over some shared memories of small town Indiana life, or the way Lee seems to shrink and tighten up with every mile she gets closer to home, there’s something honest about the emotions the two actors are working with — they don’t feel like they’re falling in love because of some machination in the script.  They feel like they’re falling in love because it was meant to be — they almost feel like a couple that had been in love the whole time, and it’s only the movie that’s catching up to them.  It’s pretty magical.

The magic of the film is less Christmassy than other films on this blog — to some extent by design, since really the film only feels like Christmas in two places.  Either it’s the hyper-commercialized high street shopping of a bustling New York City, or else it’s the cornpone, apple-bobbing at a rummage sale, country Christmas energy of Jack’s hometown Indiana village.  Everywhere else doesn’t seem to have the spirit at all, almost like it wasn’t Christmas anywhere else, really.  That journey from Christmas to Christmas — from the one where Lee’s an operator who is never on the wrong foot, to the one where her defenses are laid bare and her authenticity can unfold in the softer light of home — is central, I think, to the movie’s thematic message.  And I like how the film works in that way, but it hurts the holiday score a little, there’s no doubt.

In the end, it’s a film about love — love from the moment Jack realizes what he needs to do for Lee, just out of compassion for another human (and not yet thinking of romance), to the final….well, I won’t spoil it for you.  And there’s so many kinds of love at work in this film — not just their love for each other at its best, but also the ways their love for each other trips the other person up or interferes with their designs, like it’s an O. Henry short story.  There’s love here from family — both love that builds up and a love that can feel closed off.  Even just the gentle moment of two elderly sisters, one a widow and the other a spinster, kissing each other on the cheek cheerfully as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve.  There’s such remarkable strength, too, fueled by that love, and none of it stronger or more remarkable than what we see in Stanwyck’s performance as Lee in the film’s final act.  She’s the best.

I Know That Face: There are SO many options here, it’s embarrassing, so I’ll pick just a few.  Now, she’s not exactly inconspicuous, so I don’t want to dwell on her, but it would be silly not to remember that Barbara Stanwyck goes on to be Ann Mitchell in Meet John Doe, which reaches its climactic moments at Christmas, not to mention Elizabeth Lane in the by-now classic Christmas in Connecticut.  But there’s other faces here you’ll recognize, and a voice too — the mothers in this film both have spots in other ‘40s Christmas flicks.  Georgia Caine, Lee’s horrible mother, plays the minor role of Mrs. Johnson in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek — another film culminating at Christmastime (and another Preston Sturges film).  More memorably, Beulah Bondi, who here plays Jack’s much kinder yet still complicated mother, will be very familiar to many of us as George Bailey’s mother in the totally iconic It’s a Wonderful Life.  And lastly, a voice — because Willie, the oddball servant in the Sargent home in Indiana, is portrayed by Sterling Holloway, of all people.  Holloway’s utterly distinctive voice is best known to you as Winnie the Pooh, or the voice narrating Lambert the Sheepish Lion or The Little House or Ben and Me or any of dozens of other Disney short films, so much so that it’s hard for me to accept that that’s the voice of a regular person and not a cartoon character.  Anyway, Holloway voices someone called Northwind in an animated TV movie called Tukiki and His Search for a Merry Christmas.

That Takes Me Back: Again, the 1940s films are generally an endless source of nostalgic elements and moments, but here’s a few that stuck out to me.  I loved the moment early on when they’re reading a paper map while trying to manage detours in the middle of the night: I remember both the confusion and the exhilaration of that kind of navigating, which I was usually pretty good at, and it’s a bit of a shame that at this point GPS and a smartphone have taken over about 99% of that kind of human travel guidance.  And then they haul out sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper — other than for crafting, I can’t think of the last time I used waxed paper, but it reminded me of my grandmother making sandwiches to take somewhere (I’m not sure this memory happened more than once or twice).  And then later on, the “down home” Indiana Christmas involves both stringing popcorn for the Christmas tree, and bobbing for apples — the popcorn garland in particular is such a delightful glimpse of the much simpler Christmas trees of days past, and it made me smile to see the string on the tree in the background in a later scene.

I Understood That Reference: I know, I know, this is a weird category to include when it’s so often empty, but I think that in itself is interesting — it would have been easy, I think, for Sturges to incorporate some elements of Christmas stories (indeed, of THE Christmas story) here, and so it’s at least a little interesting to me that he doesn’t.

Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): So, as mentioned above, a lot of the film doesn’t really feel like Christmas — not the courtroom scenes, and almost all the travel from New York to Indiana seems to pass through towns and houses where no one is getting ready for Christmas at all.  I do think there’s some thematic reason for it, so it’s not a critique of the film, but it does also consolidate the film’s holiday vibes into a pretty tight 25-30 minutes in Jack’s childhood home.  As you can likely tell, I like this movie a lot, but I don’t think its evocation of Christmas is one of its strongest elements — I can easily see myself watching it at another time of year without it feeling out of place.

Actual Quality (9/10): I really enjoyed this movie, coming to it with almost no preconceptions at all.  Sure, the opening ten minutes are both a little tedious and more than a little racially problematic: there’s no getting around it, and if you bail on the movie then, I get it.  But after that, from costume to script to two stellar lead performances (and a couple of really great turns from the supporting cast, as well), this is a romantic comedy that’s really hitting all the moves the genre does best.  Stanwyck is electric on film and MacMurray’s wonderfully subtle and loyal, and the two of them together manage both the surreality of the quick banter old Hollywood romance AND the reality of the emotional roller coaster two people might ride by falling in love in this way.  If you like a good romantic comedy, I think you’ll love it, and if you usually find romantic comedies either squirm-inducing or silly, I think this is the kind of film that might make you say, “well, okay, THAT one is admittedly a solid movie”.

Party Mood-Setter? I mean, I would like to tell you no — as romantic comedies go, it’s leaning more on realistic emotion than on quips, so it’s a film that rewards your full attention and that might be hard to connect with if it’s just on in the background. But the film’s pretty great at conveying the combo of 40s nostalgia and fabulous Edith Head costumes, so if you want to do the movie a bit of an injustice and treat it as occasional eye candy, I think it could work in the background.  I just also think that, when you’re really paying attention to it, it’s so good and human that it deserves the spotlight and I’m hoping you’ll give it center stage.

Plucked Heart Strings? For sure — I got genuinely choked up more than once, basically always at moments where Stanwyck as Lee really successfully conveys the feeling of a woman who’s never been given any tenderness or compassion in life experiencing the sudden shock of someone’s loving care.  Especially because, at first, that’s all it is — not Jack trying to woo her, but just Jack (and later his family) seeing a person in need and reaching out to support her like it was the most natural thing in the world….because it is, to them.

Recommended Frequency: Oh man, this one feels like a candidate for “every year” to me; it’s certainly one I want to own so I can keep it in my regular rotation, and I feel like it’s a film that will reward future viewings.  I think if the film as I’ve described it sounds appealing to you, it’s one to schedule for yourself this very holiday season: don’t delay!

Shockingly (to me) the only place I can find Remember the Night streaming right now is on Plex, the ad-supported free streaming service that shows up in this paragraph pretty frequently. It doesn’t look to me like it can be rented anywhere, though, which is unusual.  It’s purchasable in a variety of media formats, though, on Amazon (and elsewhere I’m sure), if you’re willing to wait for delivery of physical media (and willing to trust me that it’s worth owning).  And as always, try your local library — Worldcat tells me that there are hundreds of libraries with a copy on DVD.

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

Review Essay

Right off the bat, I just have to admit — Tokyo Godfathers is surely one of the more potentially polarizing “holiday films” I’ve watched for this project.  The essential premise — three homeless people on the streets of Tokyo find an abandoned infant in a pile of trash on Christmas Eve night and disagree about what to do about it — is wild by the standards of the genre, almost too wild for a filmmaker to seriously attempt to portray it on screen.  You can envision, though, Hollywood entrusting the movie to some safe director and screenwriter who turn it into a gentle comedy about how hard it is to change a diaper on a park bench, I guess.  In the hands of Japanese auteur Satoshi Kon, however, Tokyo Godfathers presents an anime vision that is simultaneously much more realistic and much more fantastic than that, and in the process achieves some incredible moments of artistry.

The realism is where this film is most likely to lose a viewer, if it’s going to — our three protagonists are Gin, a miserable middle-aged alcoholic driven to the streets via more than one kind of addiction; Hana, a trans woman under basically constant criticism and threat from a society full of people that won’t accept her for who she is; and Miyuki, a teenager on the run for months now from her middle class home, about which she doesn’t want to talk and towards which she has no intention of returning.  The three of them live in genuine squalor, a ramshackle construction of cardboard and odds and ends, and the world around them is relentlessly hostile.  The movie pulls no punches, literally — we see the violence of the streets (especially violence directed at the homeless by bored, moneyed young men), we hear the coarse and sometimes vicious language of the streets, and we fully encounter the desperation of the streets as people with no resources and few options try to work out their own issues without totally tearing apart the lives of every other human they touch.  Yeah, yeah, I know — it doesn’t sound much on the surface like a Christmas story.

The movie poster for Tokyo Godfathers: A Film by Satoshi Kon. In the background, Tokyo skyscrapers tumble at strange angles in a dark, reddish light. In the foreground, the three main characters, Hana, Gin, and Miyuki, look directly at us. Hana smiling joyously as she holds the baby Kiyoko; Gin screaming in fear as he holds his hat on his head with one hand; and Miyuki, enigmatically grinning as she gestures to both sides, as though dancing.

Unless we consider the first Christmas story — a couple on the streets, no place to lay their heads but a barn, a child born amid squalor.  That might seem a stretch to you, but the film is transfixed by the divine, opening on a Tokyo church service in which Hana is moved to ecstasy contemplating the Christmas message of hope to the poor even as, right next to her, Gin scowls and grumbles as he observes all the ways that message doesn’t seem to touch the life he’s living.  Hana — whose own understanding of herself as a trans woman is so complex (she at one point says proudly, in response to someone calling her a “mistake”, “I am a mistake made by God”) — is the catalyst for the movie’s action, since when they discover a child in the trash while scrounging, the other two want to give the baby to the police immediately, but Hana throws herself protectively into action, insisting that this is her chance to be a mother.  She wants one day — Christmas day — to experience God’s miracle for her, the child she never thought she could have.  And the other two (who, in their very tortured and sometimes torturing ways, love Hana) relent.  What a strange miracle, you can see them both thinking.  And both the strangeness and the miracles persist.

Hana names the baby “Kiyoko”, inspired by a phrase from the carol “Silent Night” — the name will matter by the movie’s end, but at first it feels like just another inscrutable nod to Christmas itself.  Something about the baby provokes all three of the main characters into introspection, and sharing more of their life before homelessness and what drove them here.  And before too long, they settle on a plan — Hana wants to bring the baby back to its mother directly (it was found with a key to a bus station locker that they see as their first clue) to confront her and see whether or not she’s worthy of the child.  So, off across Tokyo they go, and the movie never totally slows down again after that — at least one of them is almost always running somewhere.

And my earlier mention of miracles is an honest use of the word — somewhere amid the gritty reality of this Tokyo, we repeatedly encounter the impossible.  A resource available right when it’s needed; help from an unlikely friend; the perfect gust of wind; even the miracle of pain or harm bringing one of them exactly to the place they needed to go.  As Hana repeatedly observes, there does seem to be something divine about little Kiyoko, in whose presence something like peace just might prevail on earth (well, for a broad definition of “peace”).  We even get the exchange between Hana and an embittered Gin, in which she tells him “Kiyoko is God’s messenger: we are her servants.”  To which Gin replies, “Unpaid servants, then, paying for a father’s sins.”  This is the tension surrounding the Christmas message, I feel like, or at least that’s the tension this film wants to explore — it’s easy to see the wondrousness of a blessing falling into the life of one impoverished, but then you have to reckon with what Gin’s observing.  Why is he here in the first place, in need of blessing, and what’s he going to have to go through to get it?  It hardly seems fair.

This is the remarkable thing about Tokyo Godfathers.  In a movie full of obscenities and street violence, gang assassinations and car crashes and substance abuse, what the film seems most interested in is beauty, harmony, and hope.  Hana’s haikus, when she speaks them, appear as calligraphy on the screen.  Beethoven’s 9th Symphony repeatedly drifts into the background, so that when at a climactic moment in the screenplay suddenly we and the characters both hear over the radio the triumphant chorus of the Ode to Joy, it doesn’t feel forced, it feels like a celebration the film itself has been building towards.  The film’s about the ways people trick themselves, and the mistakes we make in trying to fix things.  It’s about the pain of honesty, and its power.  It’s about Christmas’s promise and the ways we feel it lets us down.  As two characters observe to each other, late in the film — one says, “God must be busy this time of year.”  And the other says, “Better once a year than never.”  

I Know That Voice: For animated films, the only “familiar” performers will be voice actors, of course — the voice cast of the Japanese original film are not, as far as I can tell, folks who ever appeared in another film involving Christmas.  But the dubbed GKIDS release of the movie might be the one you’d see — and they did a great job with the voice casting for the dub, including a couple of trans actresses to play the trans roles, which I’m glad about and curious about (I only had access to the original with subtitles, so I haven’t heard the dubbed cast).  If you do watch the dubbed version, you might hear Kari Wahlgren as the voice of Kiyoko, the baby, and recognize that she also voices Jojo in both Christmas Chronicles movies, and both Dorothy and Ozma in Dorothy’s Christmas in Oz.  Crispin Freeman (the voice here of Ishida, Miyuki’s policeman father) also voices the character of Fabian Menkle in Scooby-Doo! Haunted Holidays.  And finally Gloria Garayua (the voice of Maria, the Hispanic woman who connects with Miyuki despite their not speaking the same language) later plays the live action role of Daphne in Christmas Staycation, a 2020 pandemic Christmas movie set entirely on Zoom — that feels like one I’ll have to try, one of these days, just for the novelty of it.

That Takes Me Back: The early scenes where there’s more focus on the “trash” surroundings inhabited by the main characters give us a number of glimpses of throwback items.  Hana, for instance, has a boombox in her corner of their little cardboard home, though as I recall we never hear it played.  We do see them rely multiple times on access to a pay phone, initially to call the “hostess club” they find out about from the materials in the locker.  It’s wild watching someone looking at a photograph and trying to figure out where it was taken, without them just being able to open up Google Street View to check if they’re correct — literally running up and down streets in a neighborhood trying to figure out what vantage point you need for a specific view.  Lastly, I did spot a copy of Star Wars on VHS, which in 2003 is already at least slightly outmoded, and now seems like another world entirely.

I Understood That Reference: You know, a bit surprisingly for a film set so far outside the boundaries of the usual holiday film, there’s at least a couple of references to classic Christmas tales.  I mean, most significantly, there’s a fully-fledged Christmas pageant at the church in the opening scene — we hear some lines from it spoken aloud, and perhaps our glimpses of the three Magi adoring the Christ child help prefigure what’s ahead for us.  And this is more of a stretch I guess, but early on in the film, Gin jokes that Santa Claus may have made off with the baby when he and Miyuki wake to find that Hana’s run away with the kid — the notion of Santa showing up not to leave gifts but to steal a baby was amusing enough that I made a note of it, and it’s fun to see characters a long ways from Santa’s cultural home base still using him for that kind of purpose.

Holiday Vibes (3/10): It’s really hard to grade the “holiday vibe” of something so far from the usual, but the opening scene is very classically Christmas, and the film keeps playing with imagery from the Christmas story (and thematic allusions) in ways that maybe were subtle, but that I kept picking up on.  In other words, in strictly literal terms this is probably closer to a 1 or 1.5, just barely any on-screen holiday stuff to latch on to.  But in terms of giving me Christmas feeling, well, it’s doing more than you can see — enough that it’s hard to score, but 3/10 feels right to me.

Actual Quality (9/10): The experience of watching the film directly is more challenging — at least for me as someone not familiar with Kon’s visual style, which is really aggressive and not at all like the kinds of Japanese animation I’m more familiar with (Miyazaki and Takahata).  Also the setting is so gritty and often grim that I was feeling a lot of things as the film went by and I didn’t always find myself connecting fluidly to what was happening on screen in the moment.  But this is one of those films that gets under your skin — I keep thinking about it, and the film improves the more I reflect on its use of symbolism and the ways the characters sprang to life and how the progression of the plot unfolded things at just the right pace, etc.  I do think there are some places where it’s just a little too operatic or melodramatic for me — I enjoy the surrealism but it’s hard to dial it in just right.  But I liked it a whole lot.

Party Mood-Setter?  Ha!  I cannot imagine this being just an “on in the background” kind of movie — love it or hate it, you won’t really be able to take your eyes off it (unless you’re turning it off).  I’m recommending it, sure, but not for this.

Plucked Heart Strings?  It’s a yes for me — there’s real emotion in what a couple of the characters go through.  Don’s style is not to dwell on those moments, so unlike a lot of other films, my guess is you won’t feel the emotion as strongly in the moment as you will when you look back on the movie and reflect about it.  

Recommended Frequency: A really tough call — the movie is intense enough (and weird enough) that I wouldn’t always be in the mood for it.  But there’s no denying its quality, for me.  I’d say this is one I will revisit over the years as I age, hoping to find new things in it: at first I thought it wouldn’t likely be an “every year” movie for me, but the longer I think about it, the more I want to engage with it again, and soon.  As long as the intensity of the film (and its bold, disruptive animation style) doesn’t put you off, I think you should definitely give it a watch, and if you tried it a long time ago but haven’t gone back, I really think you should.

If you decide to take my advice and watch Tokyo Godfathers, you’ve got options for viewing it: Amazon Prime will show it to subscribers, and you can watch it free (with ads) from Tubi, Pluto, or the Roku Channel. All the usual places will rent it to you, too.  As far as I can tell, all the streaming copies are the original Japanese audio performances with subtitles (which is how I watched it), but if you’re looking for a dubbed version, I believe the Blu-ray copy available at Amazon (and anywhere else that sells movies on disc) has the English audio track that GKIDS created.  The movie’s good enough that I may acquire myself a permanent copy this year — if so, I’ll report back.  This is a movie less widely held in American libraries, but Worldcat says there are 31 copies on disc out there, and maybe one of them is near you — worth a look, if that’s your preferred method of movie watching!

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

Review Essay

Ugh, this one’s going to get me in trouble.  Okay, fair warning’s warranted here, since there are a few Christmas movies that a ton of other people think of as “classic” or “traditional” that I think are….well, I think are mediocre, if not flat-out bad.  And wow, is National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation one of them: I had never seen it before watching it for this blog, and so alas I had to make this discovery as an adult and in real time while I scribbled down notes.  So, if hearing about this film from the perspective of somebody who was dismayed and surprised by how much it did NOT work for him is going to bother you, this is probably a post to skip, since I’ll be honest about how this one struck me as an audience member.  Obviously, this is no judgment on anybody’s holiday spirit (or taste in film) if you disagree with me!

Okay, for everybody who’s staying, let’s roll on: if you’re unfamiliar (or have forgotten), the premise of NLCV is really incredibly simple.  A man named Clark Griswold, living in the suburbs of Chicago, is trying to engineer the perfect family Christmas — decorations, guests, presents, the whole nine yards.  And the universe, in big and small ways, from his terrible overbearing boss to his terrible overbearing family to every atom and microcosm within a ten block radius of his house, seemingly, wants to ensure that nothing of the kind will occur.  It’s a premise I can imagine working.  But boy howdy, does it NOT work for me.

The poster for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation depicts an artistic rendering of Chevy Chase, dressed as Santa Claus, levitating off of his snowy rooftop due to the electricity coursing through his body from an improperly shielded strand of Christmas lights. The tagline promises, "Yule crack up!"

There’s a ton of humor coming at you in NLCV — broad physical performances and also a ton of scripted jokes from John Hughes, a man who wrote plenty of movies I liked a lot better (including a couple of pretty iconic holiday films).  I think part of the struggle for me was that it was really hard for me to locate the movie’s tone: is this a silly, Three Stooges-esque film to watch with a bunch of kids laughing at cartoonish sight gags?  Or is it a much more adult movie that’s best watched without anybody under the age of 13 in the room?  Is Clark Griswold a kind of indestructible Wile E. Coyote, or a naive Christmas-loving simpleton, or a sleazy yet clumsy asshole, or a sympathetic and downtrodden protagonist?  The answer is….kind of all of them?  Whichever one of them allows for a quick gag or an attempt at humor in the moment is who he is for the 30 seconds surrounding the gag.  Because my sense of this Hughes script is that it’s not written out of much real interest in the characters or the setting: instead, it strings together a series of sketches in which a loosely consistent cast of characters sets up joke after joke (no matter how painfully unfunny….or painful and unfunny….they often are) and then moves on to the next scene.  Is this a Christmas Monty Python and the Holy Grail?  If so, I can only wish that the members of Python had given this script a quick once-over, since the wit and intelligence of Grail’s writing are how it gets away with an otherwise probably unworkable structure.

Casting Chase as the center of the film is truly puzzling, to me — Chevy’s a guy who made a career out of portraying a condescending, snide prick who, at best, you can’t help but admire for his slick skill.  And this makes him a really weird choice for someone you’re asking to land the plane as a world-weary everyman who just wants to recreate the feeling of one classic childhood Christmas morning.  There’s a truly uncanny element to his performance sometimes, too, that weirdly resembles Johnny Depp’s performance as Willy Wonka twenty years later — that manic open-mouthed grin, the detached fifty-yard stare, the sense of utter dissociation from at least half of what’s going on around him most of the time.  Wonka, though, is written in that film as a troubled freak, a character in need of growth and self-awareness who only achieves it after first confronting his own demons on some level: love it or hate it, it was a choice, and it imbued that character with some kind of dramatic or emotional weight.  I don’t know what Clark Griswold’s deal is, and I’m not sure the script does either.  He sure doesn’t confront anything about himself, or grow even a little, and if he was meant to be nothing but a punchline that would be fine, but I felt like the movie kept trying to make me empathize with him.  Maybe Chase was once a little more personally appealing than I find him now, but to me, a Christmas movie with Chevy as its star has to be one in which I’m rooting AGAINST him, not for him.

I’m not going to say that nothing in the movie worked for me — there were some moments of mayhem that did feel real (as opposed to either tired or else feverish), and as a guy who spent some happy Christmases in Chicago, I did love the glimpses of the city dressed up for the holiday.  I could have used a lot more of that.

Otherwise, watching this movie genuinely felt like a chore to me from about the 45 minute point onward: almost every joke in this film is either announced with a fanfare and an elaborate overture, or else it’s beaten to death with ruthless excess, and in either case, it just wrings what little fun I was going to have out of the moment.  And to be clear, part of what makes this dreary is just the waste of talent — it’s an impressive cast and a famously gifted screenwriter, and somehow I just feel like nobody’s being asked to do anything near their level of talent.  Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s skill as a comedienne is wasted on a minor and unhinged role as an operatically mean-spirited neighbor, E.G. Marshall’s knack for playing a cantankerous old man is here reduced to such a one-note performance that he might as well be a cardboard cutout in the scenes he appears in, etc.

I think part of what makes it hard to use the cast well is that, as designed, it’s difficult for me to make any sense of what this film is supposed to be.  Satire of the Christmas movie genre?  Broad slapstick comedy, but with enough profanity and sex jokes that it’s for adults and not kids?  Black comedy about the horrors of suburbia?  It could have been any of those things and I’m still not sure it wasn’t trying to be.  My guess is, if it works for you, it’s one of those things, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out which of them it would be.  The one thing the movie fully commits to communicating is how painfully awful it is to share Christmas with literally any member of your spouse’s immediate family….it’s a slightly atonal message to make central to your holiday movie, but it’s a message of some kind to start with.  But I can’t say it felt either keenly insightful or bleakly hilarious about this particular kind of social agony, and without achieving either of those, I’m left puzzled about how this could be a classic in annual rotation on cable channels.  I’m sure some of you will tell me (I hope politely, but I guess I did just say a lot of rude things about this movie) in the comments.

I Know That Face: The cast, as aforementioned, is stacked, but I’ll choose a few Yuletide crossovers from some of the lesser-known names.  Diane Ladd, perhaps best known for parts in 1970s classics like Chinatown and here playing one of many thankless roles as Clark’s mother, appeared in Christmas TV movies in 2018 and 2020: she’s Grandma Frances, whose heirloom ornaments are the missing McGuffin in Christmas Lost and Found, and she’s Nana in Charlie’s Christmas Wish, a Christmas movie about a veteran and a dog, so I’d rate that as having about 100% likelihood of getting a “Yes” for Plucked Heart Strings in a FFTH review, if it ever got one.  Brian Doyle-Murray, who you’ve seen in a lot of things (I think of Groundhog Day first, but you might easily be thinking of anything from Caddyshack to JFK to Wayne’s World) and who in this took on the thankless role of Clark’s horrible employer, has of course picked up spots in a couple of recent TV movies of his own: he plays a fellow surnamed Holliday in 2014’s Christmas Under Wraps and 2022’s A Cozy Christmas Inn, as well as appearing as Noel Nichols in 2015’s The Flight Before Christmas, a Christmas romantic flick that looks like a classic example of the Only One Bed trope, if that’s your thing.  Lastly, Sam McMurray plays Bill, Clark Griswold’s office pal — he might be a bit less recognizable to you (though to me he was instantly familiar from his role as the slimeball mattress king, Lester Leeman, in the aggressive beauty pageant satire, Drop Dead Gorgeous) but he’s still an actor with a ton of supporting credits over the years.  Sam McMurray offers at least a little variation on this category’s frequent theme of recent Netflix/Hallmark fare: he played Herman Munster, of all people, in the 1996 television movie, The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas, and IMDB says he voices an unnamed character in Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street, a direct to video Christmas anthology movie from 2001 based on the Saturday morning cartoon series, Disney’s Recess.  What a rich tapestry the holiday movie “genre” is, eh?

That Takes Me Back: I have to be honest — I found the movie so alternately distasteful and boring that it was hard to fixate on the nostalgia material on offer, of which there was surely a fair amount.  Probably the most nostalgia-inducing slices here had to do with the light display — whether we’re talking the cumbersome string of lights (a modern Clark would have gone with one of those laser projection doohickeys and saved a ton of fuss) or the fact that serial wiring meant that in the old days one bulb being unscrewed could prevent the whole string from lighting up, or just the chaos of nine hundred plugs plugged into other plugs (which I feel power strip / surge protectors have now functionally put an end to).  I wonder if the tension of getting the perfect light display will rapidly fade from Christmas movie trope expectations now that there are so many simple ways to coordinate really dazzling light displays?

I Understood That Reference: There were a couple of nods to more iconic (and artistically successful) media products in NLCV: early in the film, Rusty’s watching the end of It’s a Wonderful Life (“teacher says, every time a bell rings”) right as the doorbell starts ringing, which to me implied that a bunch of angels were being made, or else It’s a Wonderful Life was being mocked….as always with this film, it’s slightly hard to tell.  And very late in the movie, Clark recites The Night Before Christmas for the family on Christmas Eve, right before a character arrives with his kidnapping victim and the movie changes tone another three times in three minutes.

Holiday Vibes (8.5/10):  Look, there’s no question that basically the entire film is about things that are closely tied to holiday experiences, from painful family gatherings (hopefully rarer and less painful for most of us than what the Griswolds endure) to light displays to figuring out how to keep the magic of Santa alive for children.  Whatever else the film is, in my opinion, not doing right in its attempt to be a Christmas classic, it’s making serious efforts here on the vibes front.  Why only 8.5 out of 10, then, you might ask?  To me the film is a letdown by being unrealistic in a bad way — I don’t mind an unrealistic happy Christmas, since half of what we’re chasing every year is a mirage of the perfect holiday we’ll never achieve.  But this isn’t a holiday experience that makes me want to immerse myself in it — to the contrary, I found the viewing experience so off-putting that it dimmed my Christmas enthusiasm by more than a little.  I didn’t identify with the bad feelings; I just wanted to escape them.  Any movie that’s doing that can’t really reach the heights of a 10/10.  I mean, I think an artfully constructed bad Christmas that’s reminiscent of painfully real holiday memories could win me over (in the right mood), but whatever else this movie is, it’s not that.

Actual Quality (3/10):  I know, folks, I know, it’s a John Hughes movie and it’s full of great comedy stars and some of you grew up on this movie, and honestly, you can have it.  It’s competently made in terms of editing/set direction, and there are elements of good performances in spite of the script, but there’s just too many other complaints to offer, all of which I have already offered above.  This is, as always, not meant as an “objective” measure of the movie’s effectiveness for all viewers — just a loud wail of honest regret from yours truly, a deeply disappointed audience member.

Party Mood-Setter? Probably not.  I mean, this really isn’t for little kids, and it’s not for most grandparents either (the grandparents I had, anyway!).  The one thing I would say in its favor on this front is that I think a lot of the sight gags and slapstick would play better if it was something I was just catching a glimpse of as I moved around hanging ornaments, etc.  If you’re with a crowd that likes this movie already or if they don’t mind the edgier elements in the story, I can see it working as a background piece, especially on low volume.

Plucked Heart Strings? Haha, not even a little bit.  The film goes for sincerity about once every half hour as part of its cavalcade of tones, etc., but none of those moments came close to landing actual emotional connection, let alone tears, for me.

Recommended Frequency:  I’m never watching it again.  You’re welcome to, if somehow this sounds appealing (or if it’s an old favorite of yours).  If it’s your first time, my guess is you’ll either be more or less instantly aware of whether it’s your kind of movie or not.  If it’s a perennial classic for you, more power to you: I’ll just leave the room if you put it on, but that’s why most houses have more than one room.  If you haven’t seen it and you do want my advice, there are SO many other films to enjoy this holiday season — find another one, on this blog or elsewhere, and give it a whirl instead.

To stream this movie, as of right now, it looks like your easiest options are either Hulu or Max, if you subscribe to either one.  If you’re a cable subscriber, it looks to me like TBS will stream it for you, also.  You can pay to rent it at all the usual places (Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, Fandango, etc.), and if you like this movie a lot more than I do, it’s pretty cheaply available on Blu-ray or DVD at Amazon.  And as always, don’t forget about your local libraries!  Worldcat tells me there are copies of NLCV on DVD, available for checkout from 750 libraries — cheers to them all, and best of luck to you if you give this one a spin!

Boxing Day (2021)

Review Essay

It might be easy to feel like all the good holiday film premises have already been made: as this blog will make clear, there’s no shortage of “Christmas movies” for consumption.  But I think one thing that’s easy for at least some of us to forget is how restricted the storytelling base has been for a long time: the pool of people getting the opportunity to screenwrite, direct, and star in movies has been limited in this country to a fairly white crowd (and not just white Americans, but white Americans from certain demographic categories of geography, class, etc.).  Boxing Day, then, is a great reminder of how a pretty ordinary premise — a dude is bringing his new loved one to meet his family at the holidays but uh oh there’s some unexpected secrets to be revealed! — can take on some new life and offer a meaningfully different experience when the directing, writing, and performances are coming from a cultural space that’s been underrepresented.  Here, Aml Ameen takes us right inside the world of Black British-Caribbean people in London, and the extended networks of family and friendship that tie them together, and the result is a pretty charming (though, again, fairly simple) piece of holiday entertainment.

Again, the writing isn’t really where the film’s breaking ground, at least on the level of the big plot elements.  This is the story of Melvin, a newly-successful Black author, who’s returning semi-triumphant to his hometown of London at Christmas to promote his new book, accompanied by his lovely African-American girlfriend (practically-but-not-technically fiancee) Lisa who’s never been there before.  It’s also the story of Georgia, Melvin’s childhood sweetheart but now ex, who (we learn early in the film) got left in the lurch when Melvin fled the family drama across the ocean — and Georgia (or “Gigi” as she’s mostly referred to) has spent the intervening years becoming a massive pop star while remaining incredibly close to Melvin’s family.  But in a larger sense it’s a whole family wrestling with change — can we move on from Mom and Dad getting divorced, can we accept new partners if they’re not British (or not Black?), can we accept that the next generation thinks and acts differently than we did, etc.  Melvin’s having changed in ways they didn’t expect (or welcome) is just the catalyst for a lot of bigger conversations that are had — some of them resolved and some not so much.  That’s all right, I think: family is often messy, and the film’s reasonably honest about that.

The poster for Boxing Day carries the tagline, "It's not going to be a quiet one". Visually, eight members of the primary cast are arranged in a 3x3 grid of open cardboard boxes, each one in their own box like the opening of the Brady Bunch. The 9th box, at bottom center, is filled with gifts, one of which bears the Union Jack flag emblem.

A lot of what’s fun about the film, for me, is just seeing into the context of a family very unlike mine, and lives unlike mine.  Whether it’s Gigi and Melvin’s sister (nicknamed, I swear, “Boobsy”) playfully arguing about how their different skin tones are perceived, or Melvin’s brother Josh in a fight with his cousin Joseph over who gets to flirt with the alluring Alison, or just Melvin’s “auntie” Valerie — who, to be honest, I have no clue whether she’s his actual aunt or his mom’s cousin or just some lady from the block — shouting about how he doesn’t need an American, she’ll find him a good Jamaican church girl?  You just feel immersed in someplace that I sure hope and expect is authentic, given that the writer/director’s coming from that world.  And honestly, it was a fun place to visit — a holiday gathering that felt alive and lively even when it was uncomfortable.

There’s no denying that at times the film creaks a little — production values can feel a little more like a TV movie at times, and not all the cast was quite experienced or steady enough to make their scenes pop.  The script, too, can be a bit rushed, so that sometimes key pieces of information slip by too fast, or I find myself watching a scene without 100% understanding who’s who here, and what they’re here to do.  The tone of it carries it through, though, and I liked that the script avoided the really hack moves you might otherwise have expected.  A big Hollywood film, for instance, might have had Lisa act out in dumb ways when she realizes her fiancee’s ex is essentially Ariana Grande — had her try to climb out a bathroom window and get stuck, maybe, or sabotage the ex in some way that backfires, etc.  Instead, Lisa just settles into the social space, giving as well as she gets when talk is lively, and slipping in slightly more barbed words via innocent-seeming asides when she can’t help but take a swipe (or riposte in response to one).  It’s what a real person might do, in other words, and when it blows up (as it inevitably would) it feels more honest.  In the end there’s some movie magic, of course, but I liked that for the most part the film wanted me to just believe in these characters rather than go for a cheap joke it could use in a trailer.

Characters grow up a little quickly here, but the movie needs them to, and in any case, I felt like the movie’s message in part was that nobody here was all that messed up in the first place, really.  Sometimes people are more ready to be responsible or tolerant than even their loved ones would guess; sometimes people are better able to move on, or to accept other people moving on, than they’d have even thought was true of themselves.  We know what kind of movie we’re in, of course, from the very beginning.  And what’s a holiday film for, after all, if not to persuade us that our natures do in fact have better angels, and that sometimes we listen to them?  In a December like the one many Americans are living through in 2024, a message like that might be more than a little necessary: I was glad to get it, myself.

I Know That Face: One delightful surprise here was that Lisa Davina Philip (who plays Auntie Valerie here) is the same actress who played the widow-seeking-widower postwoman Ms. Johnston in Jingle Jangle — she’s putting down absolutely scene-stealing performances in both movies, but the roles are so different that I literally didn’t realize the two actresses were the same person until IMDB told me so.  You can see my thoughts about Jingle Jangle on that blog post.  Claire Skinner (who plays Caroline, who is Gigi’s mother and Shirley’s good friend) played Madge Arwell, one of two title characters in the Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.”  And lastly, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (who plays Shirley here) is Veronica in New Year’s Day, a movie in which two teenage boys complete a lot of dangerous dares on the titular day — and yeah, I guess that film is a stretch as a “holiday movie”, but New Year’s Day is undeniably a holiday in the wintertime so I think it should count.

That Takes Me Back: This movie’s too recent yet to really take me back to any particular nostalgic sight or sound….it sure won’t be long, though, before it’s reminding me of the good old days of 2021, huh?  It felt of its moment, anyway, and we’ll see how that feels, in time.

I Understood That Reference: Lisa has fun teasing Melvin a bit about his Britishness, which comes out in a couple of A Christmas Carol quips as she says “Damn, Scrooge!” and “Good luck, Tiny Tim!” to him on different occasions.  At one point, in the background, someone playing Santa nearly falls over at Shirley and Richard’s amateur Christmas theatrical, which as far as I can tell from the glimpses we get is a very strange nativity play, its own Christmas story of course.  And lastly, a guy standing in the street while music plays, showing one after another the set of cue cards that spell out a message of love….that just has to be a Love Actually reference, doesn’t it?  

Holiday Vibes (8/10): In terms of strict depiction of “American classic Christmas”, maybe this doesn’t hit every mark.  But in terms of bringing us into multiple lively and socially complex family spaces in the context of holiday traditions, this is firing on all cylinders — there’s no question that the movie does a lot to bring me the feeling of visiting family at this time of year.  It’s a different enough family experience from what most of my envisioned audience would encounter that I think it’s not quite to the apex of my imagined ideal, but it’s unquestionably a solidly holiday flick.

Actual Quality (8/10): So, with a lot of holiday films, there’s this balancing act between your emotional and your intellectual reaction to the film (this is true for me, anyway), and I think that’s certainly the case here.  My assessment of the film’s quality, then, is to say it’s good but not great: there’s an honesty to the writing on the level of dialogue, but the plot is a little goofily over the top at times, and the uneven range of acting experience and skill in a very classically indie movie cast means that some scenes are great and others have a harder time engaging my attention.  It’s not award-worthy work, but it’s definitely solid film-making.

Party Mood-Setter?  The film’s got great energy and some quotable moments, and if you and a bunch of your youngish adult friends are getting together to have cocktails and decorate sugar cookies or do a secret Santa exchange I can easily imagine this on the TV at a low volume for you to pay a low, casual level of attention to.  

Plucked Heart Strings?  Hmmm.  I can imagine a couple of moments later in the film being emotionally resonant, since the script is often handling something real about family, and if that’s intersecting with your particular experiences of family, I think the authenticity could get to you.  I didn’t feel those moments myself, though, and I’m hesitant to give it the nod on the basis of my guessing how others might react.

Recommended Frequency?  I mean, I’ve seen it only once, but this feels like it could be an every year movie for me.  It’s warm and sweet and silly in just the right kinds of ways: it makes me feel like I’m eavesdropping on a family I’ll never be a part of but would get a kick out of joining for a potluck.  As I said earlier, there’s a gap here — I can tell you intellectually what’s not totally working about the movie.  But I liked it a lot on that emotional level, and I think if you give it a try, it would probably win you over in that same way, and I hope you give it a chance.

Amazon Prime will show this to you, if you’re subscribed, and if not, Tubi will show it to you for free (with ads).  As far as I can tell, the film had such a limited (and UK focused) release that there’s either no DVD/Blu-ray copy available anymore, or it never really had a release on this side of the Atlantic.  As a result, this may be a rare film that won’t be accessible via your local library, but it couldn’t hurt to ask, in my opinion.

Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

Review Essay

The definition of a “Christmas film” is always negotiable — yes, Die Hard fans, I know you’re still out there, and no, I won’t be covering Bruce Willis and his machine gun, at least not in 2024 — and that’s certainly true here.  My general rule is that if Christmas is a key setting for more than a few minutes of the movie, it ought to count, and this film, which opens on a snowy scene with Jingle Bells playing in the background as people carry trees down a New York City sidewalk, really has to count.  But as I’ll discuss, it’s among the less seasonally oriented flicks I’ll cover here at Film for the Holidays.

The initial premise is more traditionally rom-com than anything else — stiff middle-aged publisher Shep (played by Jimmy Stewart) lives upstairs from “exotic” art dealer Gill (played by Kim Novak).  She thinks he’s attractive, he’s polite but has a fiancee, and she….well, she’s a witch, and one or two little spells couldn’t hurt, could they?  If it sounds like a Bewitched prequel, it basically is: that series was created after this film came out, by Columbia who released this movie in the first place.  And I’d love to tell you this movie charmed me as much as episodes of Bewitched did, once upon a time.  But it didn’t really land for me — and the reason I think the movie doesn’t work was honestly a real surprise to me.

The movie poster for Bell, Book and Candle offers the tagline "Getting here is half the fun". The top half of the poster features Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, barefoot on a chaise longue, embracing, with a Siamese cat sitting atop them both. The bottom half is divided into multiple boxes announcing the supporting cast: Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gingold, Elsa Lanchester, and Janice Rule.

First off, though, quite a few individual elements here do work.  I love the late 1950s aesthetic — sure, the 1940s classics really established the genre of the holiday movie, but as a kid growing up in the late 20th Century, it was the 1950s that seemed to have created the Christmas look I think we were all nostalgic for, less wartime optimism and more the shimmer of the postwar boom.  Kim Novak as Gill is sensational most of the time — sultry and alluring in ways the ‘40s films wouldn’t really have let her be, and clearly presented as “daring” (Novak is barefoot basically the whole movie, which felt both avant-garde and playfully flirtatious, given that it’s New York City in December and her ground floor retail establishment can’t be all that warm).  Her brother, Nicky, is played by a really dazzlingly talented young Jack Lemmon, who pulls off a range from simpleton to scheming and makes the character feel coherent throughout — sure, it’s a comedic performance, but that doesn’t make his skill LESS impressive.  If anything, it’s a bit more impressive that he’s applying so much talent to a role that’s honestly not very consistently or compellingly written, on the page.  The two of them are on screen much of the movie’s running time, and thank goodness for that, since they’re usually doing something worth watching.

The big problem here — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — is that I think Jimmy Stewart’s performance is a distracting mess.  Now, Stewart’s one of the finest American actors of his generation, if not ever: I love his work in It’s A Wonderful Life, and if anything he’s even better in The Shop Around The Corner, both of them iconic holiday films and likely to be coming soon to a blog near you.  Here, though, everything about his presentation of the character goes weird from the beginning.  Stewart’s not helped by the fact that he looks all of the 50 years old he is when this movie comes out, and Kim Novak is very 25 — sometimes there’s a chemistry between them, but much more often you just really wish each of them would find someone their own age.  (And yes, folks, I know they’re also in a romance in Vertigo — I’m not telling you anything about that movie, I’m just telling you what I think doesn’t work about this one.)  Shep is written really oddly: at times he seems naive (his calm response to finding a strange old woman inside his locked apartment is very odd) but at other times he feels almost rakish, talking about the Kinsey Report with Gill when he barely knows her, or telling his secretary he wants her to have the negligee he had ordered for his fiancee.  And fundamentally, the thing Shep needs to pull off is the feeling that we’re watching a man gradually become unsettled, even haunted, by the feeling that his own emotions and thoughts have been invaded by magical compulsion, and that he’s so horrified by the thought that he decides to run away from his brand new fiancee who….well, who looks and acts like a sultry Kim Novak who’s half his age.  Stewart, to me, just doesn’t land the plane at all — his attempts to convey pretty simple experiences like “allergic to cats” or “scared of witchcraft” feel like awkward flailing by someone in Drama 101.  I can’t really explain why it’s not working, since Stewart clearly knows how to act (he was, I think undeniably, among the finest performers of his generation) — I can only think either that he felt the script was beneath him enough that he decided to ham it up, or else that maybe he felt a little embarrassed that they were casting him as a 25 year old’s love interest, and his feelings of unease or awkwardness emerged in his performance as a result.

The film has other issues, to be sure.  My notes as I was watching remarked on multiple occasions about pretty terrible sound editing — there’s a LOT of ADR (where an actor re-records their lines in the sound booth, after the fact), and it’s just not mixed well, so that it doesn’t sound like the actor is talking naturally in the room we see them in, but instead they sound like they’re in a recording booth talking directly into a microphone.  The script’s silliness is sometimes hard to follow: for instance, a character promises to keep a secret, but then almost immediately is handing out information left and right, and the film never seems to present it as a flub-up or subversion of the promise.  The movie struggles too, I think, to convey what tone we’re supposed to be picking up on: is this light-hearted or spooky?  Is Gillian basically well intentioned or basically self-serving?  And to be clear, I think intentional ambiguity in a movie is just fine: really good, even.  But there were too many moments for me where this felt less like conscious ambiguity and more like carelessness, or else honest confusion.

As a holiday film, well, I’ll give it a rating below, but I’ll admit, after the first 35 minutes or so, we leave Christmas in our wake completely, other than a scene in which kids are throwing snowballs and skating (which felt holiday-adjacent to me?).  And even in that first half hour, these are people who don’t seem all that interested in Christmas — we’re given some traditional music here, but these adults don’t seem to have gatherings to attend, last minute gifts to buy, etc.  They spend Christmas Eve in a nightclub without seemingly a care in the world.

Ultimately the film’s got fun moments where it cheekily gets close to breaking the “code” for films at the time — one bold line of dialogue occurs when Shep tells a character, late in the movie, that Gill is a witch, and the character replies “A witch?  Shep, you just never learned to spell.”  Which is maybe the classiest (and possibly only, in 1958) way you could call a character a….well, it starts with a b.  Again, though, it can’t ever really commit to a tone, since I think the whole premise leaves us caught between seeing Gill’s bewitching of Shep as lighthearted fun and a deep betrayal, and it’s just a bit too hard to square those things no matter how you squint at them.  So the fun, for me at least, is intermittent, and the lasting impression is more confused than classic when I think about the movie as a whole.  Scene by scene, or line by line, though?  There’s some real gems in this one when remembered in that way, and it’s a flirtatiously fun changeup to throw into the catalog of holiday films I’m taking on here.

I Know That Face: Obviously, Jimmy Stewart who plays Shepherd Henderson in this film is better known to Christmas movie fans as the star of Frank Capra’s classic It’s A Wonderful Life or of the less-famous but also brilliant The Shop Around the Corner — most of us probably see his face every single Christmas season, perhaps multiple times.  And Elsa Lanchester, the mischievous Aunt Queenie here, plays Matilda the housekeeper in the household of the Broughams in another half-forgotten mid-century Christmastime film, The Bishop’s Wife.

That Takes Me Back: This “takes me back” even farther than I was alive to see, but I was charmed that we don’t just see characters using a rotary phone, but we hear them referencing a phone number that begins with a word.  I’m tempted to start handing out my office extension on campus as “HArrison Six Two”.  A less appealing hit of nostalgia came along with the sight of someone smoking casually indoors (as Merle does at the Zodiac) — I was describing to my daughter just a few weeks ago how the world used to have things called “smoking” and “non-smoking” sections, a thing she can’t really envision.  And I don’t know that this is actually a throwback, but the work “negligee” feels SUPER old-fashioned to me for some reason.  If you all are constantly talking about negligees, I mean, a) I bet you throw a great party, and b) clearly you and I are having some of your most boring conversations (my apologies).  Oh, and I chuckled at the line, “A typewriter: I’ve got to get a typewriter.”

Sadly, I didn’t find that this film yielded anything at all in the I Understood That Reference category; better luck next time, maybe.

Holiday Vibes (2/10): This was a fun film to include on the blog, and it does come up as a “holiday movie” on some lists, but as noted above, the actual festive content is really brief, and we don’t even really get much of a “Christmas” for the film’s one Christmas Eve sequence.  If you’re someone who likes to think broadly about what counts as a holiday movie, it’s not like there’s nothing here for you….but there’s not a whole lot here for you.

Actual Quality (7/10): Bell, Book and Candle is a movie I wish I could recommend with more enthusiasm, since there’s undeniably some worthwhile things to enjoy here.  I have the feeling it’s one I’ll rewatch in a few years, thinking maybe I judged it too harshly….and find myself saying again “ah, right, it just doesn’t work as a romance”.  I do think that almost everything around the romance DOES work, and for that reason I hate to be so down about it.  But in a romantic comedy, if the romance ain’t working, I don’t know that the film has anywhere to go in the end.

Party Mood-Setter?  I mean, if you’re having a flirty, fun, fifties shindig this holiday season, throw Kim and Shep on the screen and don’t pay that much attention, maybe?  But honestly it’s got to be a “No” since what this question is asking is, can this background a festive holiday gathering, and here I don’t think it’s anywhere close to being enough of a holiday vibe.

Plucked Heart Strings?  There’s emotion on screen, but I don’t feel pulled in by any sentiment — Gill is certainly going through it, especially late in the film, but I never found myself feeling anything along with her.  Again, I think the tone is the challenge here, since it’s not clear to me who’s wronged who, or how, or even if anybody’s really been wronged at all, and the main characters became just a little too caricatured along the way for me to connect deeply with them like this.

Recommended Frequency? Look, if you’ve seen it and it didn’t win you over, I’m definitely not here to tell you to put it on this December.  But if you’ve never seen it, honestly, I think you could give it a go for Kim and Jack: Novak and Lemmon are really on their game here, and even if the film is only “fine” overall, I doubt you’ll regret getting to see the movie’s best scenes and lines. As for me, having seen it once already, I do think this will be a once a decade kind of movie for me — if it’s more than that for you, though, I’m delighted and hope you have fun in the fifties!

You can stream Bell, Book and Candle if you’re an Amazon Prime member, and Tubi will play it for you for free (with ads).  It can, of course, be rented from most of the usual places online.  Amazon will sell it to you on Blu-ray, or DVD, or VHS (is VHS making a comeback, folks, and nobody told me?).  And as always, I encourage you to make use of your local library: mine has the movie on DVD, at least, and I bet yours will too.

Jack Frost (1998)

Review Essay

There’s this hack comedy quality just oozing from Jack Frost from the jump — it’s hard to say what it is exactly.  Could it be that the main character is actually named Jack Frost, which we know because he’s a musician in a group called the Jack Frost Band, which we can see displayed prominently behind him, while he sings the lounge lizardiest version of “Frosty the Snowman” I’ve ever heard?  And in the audience an enthusiastic record company exec literally places a cellphone call and tells the person on the other end to “listen to this”, holding the phone up pointed at the stage like someone whose only image of a great concert is from Back to the Future?  Oy.  We haven’t even met the child actors yet, and this is already so painfully a mediocre ‘90s family movie, which, as a kid who grew up in the ‘90s, I sure have a deep experience of as a milieu.

Because yes, on the one hand, this is a story about magic — about a child who resurrects his dead father in the body of a snowman by means of an unexpectedly magical harmonica and then the dad can learn some Lessons about Parenting and the Value of Family.  But it’s also a movie that’s picking through ideas cut out of other, better-but-still-not-amazing ‘90s movies, and deciding to shove all the schoolyard snow bullies and ridiculously self-important children’s fantasy into the film it can manage to hold.  Our main child character, Charlie Frost, is a hero, smart and friendly and skilled, and his only enemies in life are the dumbest and most mindlessly aggressive of meathead elementary schoolers — squinting, scowling menaces who use the word “twerp” like it’s going out of style and prioritize actions that will cause emotional harm since they have no ambitions in life beyond being screenplay villains.

The movie poster for Jack Frost features a huge snowman in a top hat and red scarf with an eerie, menacing grin on his face, looming in the background behind and above the title of the film and the movie's principal cast members, Michael Keaton, Kelly Preston, and Joseph Cross, plus an adorable dog. It was the 90s.

Part of what’s exhausting about the movie — and I’m sure it’s partially because I’m not a kid anymore, I’m a parent, and I see these things differently now — is that in the cinema of the 1990s, few things were worse than a parent whose job was important or demanding enough that they couldn’t devote 100% of their time to teaching their kid how to play hockey or bake cookies.  I mean, Keaton as Jack Frost is not that bad a parent — he’s curious about his kid, he’s been thinking about him while he was away, he prioritizes time with the kid the moment he’s home, including playful midnight snowman building, etc.  Sure, he makes a promise he couldn’t keep, but it just feels like a pretty minor sin in the grand scale of things — but the movie subsequently punishes him by killing him off, and then restoring him to life solely so that he can learn how important it is to self-destructively indulge every wish Charlie has.  Am I reading too much into a screenplay that didn’t honestly think that hard about this?  Sure, I suppose — you can expect more of this kind of overthinking on other films too, I suspect!  I just think that the film already had a pretty massive idea here in the snowman that’s a resurrected human being — lashing that kind of elemental magic to a story this pedestrian just seems so foolish and tedious.

I mean, surely there’s a limit to how many butt jokes you can make in a film and expect to be taken seriously.  Add to that the fact that they take advantage of a major character who’s a snowman to make multiple PG-acceptable (apparently) BALLS jokes?  Like, I guess that’s what a snowman’s constituent elements are — they’re balls?  What am I even talking about anymore?  And the screenwriters know how hack this movie is, since early on in his second, crystalline existence, we even hear Michael Keaton comment on how bad a joke it is that a man named Jack Frost became a snowman after death.  I have to say, fellas, it doesn’t make it less goofy and ill-advised to have you acknowledge it.  But “goofy and ill-advised” are the constant drumbeat of this movie — at one point, Jack Frost tells Charlie, “you da man!” To which his son replies “no, YOU da man!”  To which Jack replies….can you guess?  “NO, I’m da SNOWman!”  I was shocked there wasn’t a laugh track.  Later in the movie, a character says to Jack and his son that “a snowdad is better than no dad.”  That’s a line so howlingly awful that my wife and I have been saying it to each other at every opportunity, ever since I accidentally made her watch this with me.

I will say, though, that I think it’s possible the movie is hampered by factors external to the script — any movie reliant on the naturalism of its child acting performance is likely to have a really rough go of it unless it’s very lucky with casting.  In this one, for instance, Joseph Cross was a kid with some talent — he’s grown up to be a very solid performer in the films I’ve seen, at least.  But as a child actor in Jack Frost, he’s pretty rough — and he’s acting opposite an animatronic/early CGI snowman effect that on the one hand is pretty incredible for the technology at the time, but on the other hand is still pretty limited in its ability to convey Keaton’s emotion and energy.  The movie’s best on-camera performer (once Keaton’s trapped inside Frosty) is Kelly Preston as his wife, but the film’s so engrossed in Jack Frost’s need to fix his allegedly terrible parenting that it pays really no attention to his relationship with his wife, and as a result she’s far too sidelined.  Essentially, I’m arguing, the screenplay was doing no favors of any kind to the movie in the first place, but the premise worked against its ability to put compelling performances on the screen — maybe there are folks out there who feel nostalgia about this (or can still marvel at the snowman: again, it’s honestly pretty cool as a practical effect), but for me, it’s just a reminder of all the ways a movie can go wrong.

I Know That Face: Michael Keaton, of course the leading role here as Jack Frost, is also the title character in Batman Returns — a film that, like Die Hard, is set at Christmastime and has Christmas elements, but was never marketed in that way, yet now it’s amusingly contrarian to claim it’s one of your favorite Yuletide movies.  Hey, you do you.  Andrew Lawrence, who plays Tuck Gronic (one of Charlie’s hockey teammates), voices T.J. Detweiler on Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street, as well as directing and co-starring in Mistletoe Mixup, a holiday romance flick involving a couple of other Lawrence brothers, to boot.  Lastly, Mark Addy, who plays Mac MacArthur, the improbably British man who is somehow also a local retail employee in this tiny Colorado mountain town, appears as “Ass” in The Flint Street Nativity, a television movie from Great Britain in which adult actors portray children acting in a school Christmas play.  Ugh, heaven help me, I am intrigued: what a bonkers premise.

That Takes Me Back: Man, the ‘90sness of the film was such a nostalgic rush that picking out individual elements was a bit difficult, ironically.  Things I noticed in particular included the kid needing a bag full of “Game Boy batteries” for his trip to the cabin, him having a lava lamp on his bedside table (what was it about the ‘90s and lava lamps? Did we have some technological leap forward in lava lamps in that era?), snowboarding being treated as something new and edgy, and lastly, having actual independent radio stations where there’s a live local DJ talking to you.  That last one’s sad.

I Understood That Reference: Frosty the Snowman, of course, looms large over this film — it’s the only piece of Christmas media I detected, but we do get a double dose, both of the song (oozing with lounge singer charm) and later a glimpse of the animated Rankin/Bass television special itself in all its tacky glory.

Holiday Vibes (3.5/10): Jack Frost himself, of course, is a figure who doesn’t really play into any particular holiday pantheon, and this snowman phenomenon doesn’t really play with either the Jack Frost mythology or the idea of Christmas’s magic.  Though the film takes place around the idea of celebrating Christmas, honestly the movie is so busy being a ‘90s kids’ comedy full of bullies and butt jokes that there’s not all that much holiday energy on display?  It’s about as Christmassy as any film set in December in the United States, which is to say, a bit, but not that much.

Actual Quality (3.5/10): Surely I’ve already given you enough commentary on this — it’s a bad movie.  All the good things about it are Michael Keaton trying his best under pretty dire conditions (he’s badly miscast as a relaxed lead singer in a band, and the snowman’s lamentable dialogue has already been referenced) plus a decent adult supporting cast (Preston and Addy have talent, to be sure), and a snowman effect that’s genuinely impressive (while also being creepy and chunky, especially when viewed from the vantage point of 2024).  All of that adds up to a film that still really lacks any reason for existing, let alone for taking 100 minutes of your evening.  If you’re not already pretty deeply nostalgic for this, watch the trailer and you’ll know all that you need to.

Party Mood-Setter? No.  At least I can’t imagine a party that would be enhanced by it — there’s so many better family films that have both better quality and more holiday energy.

Plucked Heart Strings? No!  It’s honestly kind of incredible that a movie about a dad dying on Christmas Day, and then being restored to half-life only to then basically die on Christmas Day…again…somehow never once made me feel emotionally invested, but it really didn’t.  The movie’s tone (and everything else about it) works relentlessly against this.

Recommended Frequency: NO.  Just, no.  If you didn’t already form an attachment to this movie at a young age, I would steer you to so many other, better movies.  I’m not really thrilled I watched the whole thing, and I definitely won’t be touching it again.

Well, friends, if you have cable television (I know, I know, it’s 2024, but SOME of you statistically must still have it!), TNT will stream this to you for free.  You can buy or rent a digital copy from all the usual places — YouTube, Google Play, AppleTV, etc.  Amazon, in addition to renting it to you on Prime, would sell you a DVD copy or, astonishingly, a copy on VHS, of all things.  But, don’t?

The Holiday (2006)

Review Essay

The Holiday’s a Nancy Meyers film through and through — and if you’re someone who knows those movies (What Women Want; Something’s Gotta Give; the 1990s Father of the Bride reboot films, which she screenwrote), you know a little bit about what you’re in for.  Lush interiors, especially really lavishly appointed kitchens; romantic/comedic dialogue that owes a zippy debt to Nora Ephron even if it’s rarely quite as stylishly composed; a willingness to take the emotion of a scene more than a little over the top.  This movie hits those marks reliably, and as a result is, to me, both reliably entertaining for a big chunk of its runtime and also a little too artificial and hollow to really land the punches it’s swinging for.

The premise is simple enough — Cameron Diaz’s Amanda and Kate Winslet’s Iris are both on serious rebounds after painful romantic fallouts that have left them questioning their own identities.  They find each other via a wonderfully hokey of-its-2006-era home swap website, and agree that Amanda will spend Christmas in a charming Surrey cottage while Iris spends her Christmas in a sprawling SoCal McMansion, buffeted by the Santa Ana winds.  They’re hoping not to find love, of course, which is why it’s so convenient when Iris’s brother Graham (played by Jude Law) drops in to find Amanda unexpectedly in residence at the cottage, and when Amanda’s ex’s buddy, Miles (played by a charmingly baby-faced Jack Black), shows up to retrieve some things and encounters an unanticipated English woman on holiday.  The rest….well, you know the rest, probably, though there’s a twist or two I won’t reveal.

The film poster for the movie, The Holiday, featuring the names and faces of the movie's four principal actors, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and Jack Black.

The film’s at its best when it’s not trying to advance the primary plot, which is Diaz and Law falling in love — two incredibly attractive humans at basically the height of their Hollywood stardom, but underwritten in ways I’ll get to in a moment.  The absolute best pairing in the movie, by contrast, is actually Kate Winslet’s Iris and her new neighbor, a frail old screenwriter who was big in the mid-20th Century but now gets lost walking down the street – a man named Arthur, played spiritedly by Eli Wallach, who was 91 at the film’s release.  Iris and Arthur are incredible pals, and his not-so-secret desire to lift her self-esteem and make her see herself as a sassy screwball heroine with “gumption” is maybe the sweetest part of the film – both romantic and comedic without being rote.  Meyers’s eye for exterior shots, especially in the English countryside, is really excellent, so there’s a lot of cinematic beauty here to enjoy at times when all we’re seeing is establishing shots or montages.

The two main pairings are underserved by the film in different ways.  Winslet and Black are honestly very cute together – Miles is a sweet, decent fellow who, when the “Jack Black” within him is dialed down to 85% or lower, is impossible not to like, and Winslet’s character is developed really successfully (I think the emotional richness of the Arthur subplot helps her a ton in this regard, plus Iris is just given a more sympathetic situation in the screenplay to begin with).  The problem with their subplot is that it’s given short shrift by a movie that’s more interested in Diaz and Law — Miles and Iris get a couple of really nice scenes together, but that’s about it, and the romance as a result feels a little hasty.  The challenge with Amanda and Graham, meanwhile, is connecting with them: Graham’s character has the biggest twist, and while the revelation we get about him really adds substance to his character, it’s also hard to reconcile all the pieces of the guy we’ve been introduced to with the person he apparently is?  Jude Law is, again, so hot in 2006 that even this straight dude can appreciate the man’s cheekbones, but in some ways that makes him harder to see as anything but a movie star in the spotlight.  And poor Cameron Diaz is handed, in Amanda, a character who never really feels like a person to me — she’s all screenwriting quirks and problems, and most of the moments that are meant to provide emotional depth for her end up seeming flat or unrealistic to me.  Diaz has been good in other things, but here I think the material’s not strong enough to let her succeed, or else maybe she’s not quite strong enough (unlike Winslet) to elevate it.  Maybe both.  There are still, for sure, some good moments for Diaz and Law, especially later in the film where we’re seeing a life that’s a lot less artificial and flashy.  In the end, though, I found myself rolling my eyes or checking my watch too often when one or both of them was on screen.

I Know That Face: In this category, there’s a couple of people with fun crossovers into holiday movie territory.  The aforementioned Eli Wallach, Amanda/Iris’s charming elderly next door neighbor Arthur, narrated The Gift of the Magi in 1958 — a TV movie you probably didn’t see, unless you were around in 1958, I’m guessing — and appeared as a character named Behrman in a segment called “The Last Leaf” in another TV movie, O. Henry’s Christmas, that, yeah, you probably didn’t see unless you were watching television in 1996 (I was, but I don’t remember this one: you can apparently watch a terrible transfer of the whole thing on YouTube right now).  Arthur’s Hanukkah buddy, Ernie, is played by Bill Macy (no, not William H. Macy….an older actor who, I presume, is part of the reason there’s an “H.” in William H. Macy, given Screen Actors Guild rules about having distinctive working names) who also plays a character named Doo-Dah in Surviving Christmas, yet another semi-forgotten 2000s holiday flick, and one I’ve never seen.  Shannyn Sossamon, who plays Miles’s crappy girlfriend Maggie, turned up in 2021’s High Holiday, which is apparently a movie about a family Christmas dinner in which someone slips weed into the salad dressing so that everyone (including her right wing politician father) will get blazed and say their true feelings out loud?  Sounds ghastly…I guess maybe someday I’ll watch it and find out.

That Takes Me Back: I have to say, there’s a number of slices of classic mid-2000s life here.  Iris’s job is writing wedding columns for a British newspaper, and while we get only glimpses of her older word-processing software in use, the fact that she’s working in old school journalism at all feels quaint these days.  At one point Amanda’s awful ex shouts at her, “You sleep with your BlackBerry.”  Can’t get more 2006 than that.  Iris is carrying a BlackBerry around, too, sending emails on it from the plane (prior to takeoff, we assume).  When Amanda searches for vacation homes to escape to, she types in a simple keyword search and gets actual functional Google results with no ads or promoted posts cluttering things up: talk about things we didn’t appreciate until they were gone.  And one of the most charming and funny and ultimately sad scenes for Iris and Miles unfolds as they peruse a video store stocked with every kind of film on DVD — I miss those places all the time anyway, but especially when I’m trying to track down forgotten holiday films.

I Understood That Reference: I wish there was anything of this kind to dwell on here, but somehow in a film that’s at least partially obsessed with classic Hollywood films and movies with great music (thanks to the careers of Arthur and Miles respectively, and their effusive personalities), no holiday-themed media ever comes up in the film’s screenplay, even in passing.  It’s a real missed opportunity.

Holiday Vibes (5/10):  I don’t want to seem ungrateful: after all, Meyers opens the movie at an office holiday party, and the soundtrack is chock full of Christmas bops, including multiple people singing to us about a merry little Christmas and Motown singers walking in a winter wonderland.  But the film’s not all that interested in Christmas other than as set dressing — there’s no family Christmas gathering on either side of the pond, only a couple of painful gift exchanges, and as the movie progresses, the sound’s less Motown and more Imogen Heap (which is not a complaint: I love Imogen Heap).  None of these people seem to be living lives in which ordinary Christmas activities are really part of the routine — it would have made sense to have a “frantic shopping for Christmas gift” section, or a “my homesickness is assuaged by this particular Christmas memory or moment that feels familiar” but it’s not in the cards.

Actual Quality (8/10):  It’s a solid Nancy Meyers movie with a great cast — there’s more than enough great set design and good cinematography, and some lovely people to watch fall in love on screen.  Hard to be disappointed in that.  It still drags at times, as noted, in the Amanda/Graham sections, and I found myself wondering how awesome it would be to just have a film about Iris — an English fish out of water in Southern California for Christmas, simultaneously finding herself loving and being loved by two sweet fellows, an elderly Hollywood widower who’s surely being reminded of the love of his life and a teddy bear of a film composer with an impish grin who’s on the rebound himself.  That film, I think, had real 9 or 9.5 out of 10 potential, especially with Winslet, Wallach, and Black in the main roles.  As it is, it’s a solid B- of a film, for me.

Party Mood-Setter?  To me, no — it’s too sexual for Christmas with the kids but not sexy enough for a more flirtatious party of young adults.  It’s playful enough and cinematic enough at times to get closer to qualifying, especially with those lush Nancy Meyers interiors, but fundamentally it’s a movie that needs your whole attention, and that wants to deliver most of its message through scenes that are at least a little poignant.  Not great for inconsistent attention while you’re doing something else.

Plucked Heart Strings?  This one is much closer, for me, but it’s still a no — the movie invests most of its big emotional arc in Cameron Diaz as Amanda, which again I think is not really working on either a screenplay or an acting level.  If you do get misty-eyed at this film, I think it’ll be out of sympathy for Kate Winslet’s Iris, whom she makes a human being with genuine pain in her life that she needs to triumph over.  I can see it — it just didn’t happen for me.

Recommended Frequency:  This is definitely a “now and then, in the right mood” film, from my perspective.  There’s not enough here to make it a perennial classic, especially because, ironically, the actual holiday content in a film called The Holiday is a bit thin.  But it’s also more than watchable enough, especially (as I’ve made pretty plain) the to-me-superior subplots involving Iris, for me to imagine putting it on again in the future, now and then, when I’m in the mood to see particular moments or a particular acting performance again.

You can find The Holiday streaming on Amazon Prime, or for rent at the usual places (AppleTV, Google Play, Fandango at Home, etc.). You could pick up the Blu-ray (or DVD) at Amazon pretty inexpensively, it looks like. And of course I will always recommend you check at your local library: according to Worldcat, there are thousands of copies waiting out there for you! As will always be true here, I earn nothing from any links I’m providing: they’re just here as a courtesy. If you give the movie a go, I hope you’ll leave your thoughts in the comments!