How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Review Essay

We might as well get this out into the open from the outset: I like the 2000 film, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. That’s a semi-controversial take already: the movie has long had plenty of detractors, and in some circles I’ve seen people make disparaging swipes at movies being “like that Jim Carrey Grinch movie,” as though it was shorthand for a bad holiday flick. But it may not be THAT controversial—the film’s a perennial holiday showing even now, 25 years (!) after it was released, and I think a lot of people have at least moderately fond memories of it. What’s probably going to be a little more startling, though, is my argument that, in fact, I love this movie, and I think it might be one of the best holiday movies ever made. And what will be sacrilege for at least some of you is my argument that it’s a far better film than the 1966 Chuck Jones animated version of Dr. Seuss’s original book, which a couple of generations (mine included) grew up on. It’s how I feel, though, and however hot the take, I’m going to do my best to persuade you that I’m onto something, anyway, even if you aren’t as taken with this movie as I am.

The basic premise of the Grinch tales in all their manifestations—and I’ll acknowledge up front, I’ve not seen the 2018 animated film or the televised Broadway musical, so I’ll have to leave them for some future blog post—is well known to almost anybody in the American cultural sphere. Somewhere in the world of Dr. Seuss’s imagination, there’s a town called Whoville, populated by the Whos, a people about whom all we really know is that they celebrate Christmas with enthusiasm. Neighboring this bucolic village is Mount Crumpit, and on the slopes of that mountain lives a sour, solitary creature called The Grinch, who hates Christmas (and, by extension, Whoville), because his heart is “two sizes too small.” He eventually gets fed up with the sound of holiday festivities and steals all Christmas accoutrements from the homes of the Whos, before his inevitable change of heart. It’s a simple story, fit for a children’s picture book, and I think it works just fine as Seussian spectacle (and as a short animated special). I wasn’t ever really in love with the original, though, I’ll admit: it’s not among my 2-3 favorite Seuss books, and of all the midcentury Christmas specials airing on my family’s TV in my childhood, it was honestly one of the least essential, as far as I was concerned. There just wasn’t much to the story—the animation was stylish and the voice acting was fun, but that’s about as far as it went.

On the poster for How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jim Carrey in his Grinch makeup (wearing a Santa costume) is staring at the viewer with his hand holding his chin. Below his image, we see a snowy landscape, with a glowing vilage next to a thin, winding mountain peak, that establishes the scene in which it takes place.

The genius of the 2000 film adaptation, in my opinion, originates in its need to bulk up a very simple story into a feature-length screenplay. As a result, the movie is forced to grapple with the Grinch as a character—why is he the way he is? What’s his history with Christmas, or the Whos? Depth is needed, and the script supplies it. Furthermore, the only Who with any persistent importance in the story from its original book form (Cindy Lou) has to be given a sense of connection to the Grinch also, and here I think it’s managed really successfully. The emotional investment she makes in The Grinch builds something powerful into the movie’s final act. It all matters.

I suspect that one of the reasons the 2000 film takes heat from long-time Grinch fans is that it more or less up-ends the moral landscape of the original story—and in doing so, it puts our society in an unflattering light. But that’s what I love about it. The original tale is a simple one: us nice Christmas-observing nuclear families are the good guys, singing our little songs and having our little feasts. The villain of the piece is the outsider: he does not look like us, he does not celebrate our holiday, and when our innocent celebration has made him angry, he tries to wreck our joy. The fact that we continue to be happy because we have right-sized hearts convicts him at the last possible moment, so that he can repent and be integrated into the Christmas celebration. Put it like that, and it doesn’t sound so nice, does it? No offense to Ted Geisel, but it sounds a lot like the kind of pro-conformity message that he is otherwise famous for undermining in stories like “The Sneetches.” The 2000 version, on the other hand, rightly understands that to the extent that there’s a plausible villain in this scenario, it’s the people of Whoville: they’re the ones whose material wealth is overflowing while a solitary creature is isolated outside their community, subsisting on their trash. Their obsession with celebration is so all-consuming that they don’t consider the side effects of it—all the noise, noise, noise, noise!—which would be bad enough if the Grinch was merely someone indifferent to Christmas. But of course it’s more complicated than that: from his youngest days, his experience of Christmas was isolating. The holiday celebrated in Whoville demanded a great deal of cultural conformity that was unhealthy—the Grinch is mocked openly for his differences, and ultimately is driven out of town by bullying and ridicule at a young age. Later, when the sound of the Whobilation’s Yuletide festivities is driving him crazy, the Grinch grabs a hammer to knock himself out with, saying, “Now, to take care of those pesky memories”: he knows that what bothers him here isn’t the noise, it’s the mistreatment that it now represents to him, because of his experience of the Whos. And of course, most of the people of Whoville aren’t evil (their Mayor being the prime exception to the rule). They’re just cheerfully complicit in some pretty cruel abuses out of a desire to remain comfortable and untargeted, themselves—they’ll quietly allow a powerful, arrogant blowhard to stand in public at a microphone, abusing outsiders for his own self-aggrandizement and making up passages from The Book of Who to suit his demented purposes while dismissing the one true believer willing to stand up to him in public and insist that the community’s values are actually imperiled. Yep, if you thought you could escape the politics of 2025 here, I’m afraid I can’t let you. What an incredibly apt movie for the moment.

And yet, what I think is most impressive about this movie is that the Grinch’s critique of the society bordering him is—for a movie in which Jim Carrey is a huge wisecracking green Yeti, essentially—pretty nuanced. In a crucial scene, mid-film, The Grinch is given a triggering Christmas “gift” by the Mayor, in front of the whole town: it’s a reminder of the Grinch’s trauma, and the gathering treats it as a chuckle-inducing anecdote. Remember that day where we made fun of you so badly that you fled into the mountains to live as a hermit….when you were, like, 8 years old? Kids do the darnedest stuff, don’t they? (I’m telling you, this film is wiser than it has any right to be about how “good” people do bad things.) Anyway, you’d expect the guy to blow up in that moment: this is personal, it’s painful, and he could say so. But he doesn’t confront Whoville until their town’s materialism is the thing on display, because I think on some level, the Grinch understands that that’s the real problem. A society that’s more focused on the superficial, on presents and costumes and conspicuous consumption, is a society that loses touch with its own heart. He doesn’t tell them it’s what leads them to hurt an outsider like him. He doesn’t believe in their capacity to understand that truth, really—he has no faith in the Whos, and they’ve done little to deserve such faith, in any case. This is what makes the triumph at the end of the story something powerful—it’s not just some mountain gremlin returning everyone’s Christmas ornaments so they can have the party they’d been planning on. The Grinch comes back to them because they showed him that something he didn’t believe in was real—that this community could learn to find more joy in each other as people (him included) than they ever had in their stacks of Christmas presents. He apologizes to them for how he’s behaved because they’ve earned his trust on a level he never imagined.

And yes, I know, I’m talking in soaring thematic terms about the ethical messages of a movie primarily intended to give us Jim Carrey making a fool of himself on screen. Well, look, Jim’s not for everybody (and I don’t feel a ton of affection for some of his wildest comedic performances), but to me putting his manic energy inside this huge green fur suit is a match made in heaven. My wife and I can (and do) quote half his lines all year long, from “Nice kid…. Baaaaaad judge of character.” to “One man’s toxic sludge is another man’s potpourri!” to “Oh no….I’m speaking in RHYME.” I can imagine, of course, responding negatively to some of Carrey’s antics, but I just think it works for the character—it lightens what might otherwise be too heavy a story, honestly, to have the Grinch be someone who’s responded to being ostracized by becoming a standup comedian, transmuting his pain into a PG-friendly Don Rickles routine.

The other thing that gives this movie its needed heart is the performance by Taylor Momsen as Cindy Lou Who—sure, the character is earnestness personified, but that’s her dramatic function. What I appreciate about Cindy Lou, and this only increases with time, is the way she expresses something far more mature than a child performance normally would. This Cindy Lou is not merely some little kid woken up by the Grinch’s theft, as she is in the original. She’s someone wrestling with the question of why Christmas doesn’t feel the way it used to—asking herself what the magic was, and where it’s gone. This is not, I acknowledge, something an elementary schooler would normally feel. But speaking as a kid who was a melancholy elementary schooler (somewhere I still have the Last Will and Testament I wrote at the age of about nine), it tracks. More than that, though, what Cindy’s wrestling with is what we all wrestle with, no matter what holidays we do or don’t celebrate: where does our capacity for that childhood sense of wonder and delight go? Is it just nostalgia for something that never existed and we’re smart enough to see that now, or was it real and we can find it again? Given all that, it’s a really lovely (and touching) message that Cindy discovers that we can have that holiday happiness again, but only if we get our heads on correctly about what the holiday’s actually about. We can’t find the joy in ever-increasing material consumption—the joy isn’t there. It’s in the hearts of people who see and hear each other, of people who not only have the capacity to love but who put that capacity to work. It’s in a community that, rather than seeing outsiders as threats to their stability, can look at those outsiders through the lens of the values they claim to profess, of welcome and inclusion and care. THAT’S what can leave us singing “Fahoo, fores; dahoo, dores,” hand in hand with our neighbors.

And I think folks forget what high-quality craft goes into this film—Anthony Hopkins’s narration providing a lovely, lyrical insight into the story. Incredible production design, from the costuming and makeup worn by the ridiculous Whos to the junkpunk vibes of the Grinch’s “lair” that’s filled with what are apparently his inventions. A great symphonic score by the always reliable James Horner, and a sentimental song that seems to have stuck around in the Christmas pop canon in “Where Are You, Christmas?” I think the admittedly larger-than-life presence of Jim Carrey in outlandish makeup slinging one-liners leaves people misremembering that that’s all this film has to offer. Again, I know mileage varies. A lot of you won’t get out of the movie what I see here. But if you love it also, well, I hope I’m helping articulate some of the things that we might both be seeing in this film.

I Know That Face: Molly Shannon, who here plays Betty Lou Who (Cindy Lou’s decoration-obsessed mother), is a veteran of seasonal projects: she’s Tracy in The Santa Clause 2, she plays a fictionalized version of herself in It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, and in 2004’s The Twelve Days of Christmas Eve she plays Angie, a kind of angel who gives the protagonist 12 attempts to get Christmas Eve right (a la Groundhog Day). But she can’t match the even more holiday-infused track record of Christine Baranski, the Grinch’s love interest here as Martha May Whovier—Christine’s playing Regina in 2020’s Christmas on the Square (a Dolly Parton project), she’s Ruth in A Bad Moms Christmas (a comedy I fear I’ll have to review one of these years), and she’s Lee Bellmont in Recipe for a Perfect Christmas. Christine also voices Flo in Timothy Tweedle the First Christmas Elf, and she’s Prunella Stickler in Eloise at Christmastime, and of course as a sitcom regular (on Cybill, as Maryann Thorpe) she appears in Christmas episodes, including season 3’s “A Hell of a Christmas.” I would be remiss if I didn’t take the chance to shine the spotlight on the director’s dad, Rance Howard, who’s Whoville’s “Elderly Timekeeper”—he voices Rudolph in Elf Sparkle and the Special Red Dress, he plays a blind man in Holiday in Your Heart (a LeAnn Rimes vehicle), and back in 1986 he was in his own Dolly Parton project, A Smoky Mountain Christmas, playing Dr. Jennings. Lastly, we have to tip our cap to Jim Carrey, the Grinch himself, who of course got a much more negative review from me when I reviewed his work as nine different people in Disney’s A Christmas Carol.

That Takes Me Back: The whole village is wired in series, so that a single loosened bulb on the Whoville Christmas Tree turns out the lights all over town. It reminded me, for a moment, of having to test every single bulb in the lights on the tree in order to figure out what had gone wrong.

I Understood That Reference: Of course, as the Grinch prepares to deploy his plan to steal Christmas, Santa’s been there ahead of him. In any case, the Grinch is aware of the Rudolph narrative, since he riffs briefly with his dog, Max, about the reindeer’s having saved Christmas.

Holiday Vibes (8/10): Christmas in Whoville obviously both is and is not like Christmas anywhere else: there’s a lot here that “feels holiday” as Cindy Lou’s dad would probably have said, and of course my watching it routinely each December must add to that feeling. To me, the feast and the presents and the decorations certainly create the right kind of feeling…but even more so, the message of love and our capacity to create community together is just what I want to feel at this time of year, and I’m glad it helps me do this.

Actual Quality (9/10): Look, I know this isn’t a flawless masterpiece—any movie where one of the jokes is getting a sleeping man (however odious) to kiss a dog’s butt is definitely not hoping to win any awards. But I also think it absolutely deserves a much better reputation: it takes what is, frankly, a reactionary message about insiders and outsiders in the original tale, and transforms it into a much more thoughtful exploration of ostracism and its consequences. It’s also funny, and sweet, and the whole movie takes place inside of a snowflake, like the one on your sleeve. It’s great in my book, anyway.

Party Mood-Setter? It’s absolutely quotable enough to just be rolling in the background while you do other things, and the story’s cultural saturation is so high that a Grinch on the screen probably won’t be too distracting to party-goers, even though it easily could suck people in.

Plucked Heart Strings? I find some of Cindy Lou’s struggles pretty easy to identify with, but they don’t exactly make me mist up. It’s an effective emotional arc, but I think you probably won’t need to watch the movie with a tissue box next to you.

Recommended Frequency: I’m not sure how to get through a year without watching this one. It’s just too deeply ingrained into my memory (and my wife’s). If you’ve never seen it, or just haven’t in a while, I hope you’ll consider giving it another spin.

This movie is fairly easy to access, though not necessarily for free—you can stream it if you’re a member of Amazon Prime, or Peacock, or Hulu. You can pay to rent it from most of the usual places too, it looks like. Barnes and Noble will sell it to you on disc, and around 1,500 libraries have a copy to check out for free, according to Worldcat.

Scrooge (1951)

Review Essay:

Cheers to you, friends, and thanks for sticking around through most of a blog season, at this point. The end (and Christmas!) is in sight. It’s the last of this year’s Christmas Carol Sundays at FFTH and I knew from months ago where I wanted to finish up this sequence. My first year as a holiday movie blogger, I wanted to finish the quartet of Christmas Carol adaptations with my personal favorite of the many I’ve seen (the Muppets), and this year, I wanted to pay homage to the one I grew up on, my mother’s favorite, the 1951 film, Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim. I hadn’t seen it in many years, but I remembered that in my childhood, whenever it was on television, it was important to my mom to watch it, and my memory was that I’d really liked it. I added it to the schedule and hoped it would meet my high expectations, and the great news is, I feel like it fully did so.

Every really good adaptation of Dickens’s novella has some kind of thematic hook—a way of reading his story that, both in what they include or exclude from the original tale as well as in what they choose to add to the narrative, shows what the filmmakers believe is central to its message. The hook for this film is fear, and I think one of the things that surprised me most (in a great way) is how much the exploration of that fear turns out to be a key that unlocks a lot of really interesting elements in characters and scenes I know so well that sometimes it feels a bit silly to keep coming back to new adaptations thinking I’ll find something here.

The poster for the 2020 re-release of Scrooge depicts, in black and white, Alastair Sim's haunted face, wrapped up with a thick scarf and set under a large top hat. Snow is falling around him, and over his shoulder we can glimpse some horses in harness, and the indication of some trees and houses. The tagline, "Christmas? Bah! Humbug," appears above his head.

For this incredibly faithful rendering of Dickens’s text, the first emergence of fear as a central preoccupation is in Alastair Sim’s magnetic performance as Scrooge. Where other Scrooges on film tend to push other kinds of emotions forward—anger, for instance, or cruelty, or arrogance—Sim’s old moneylender looks haunted from the moment he appears on screen. Some of this is just the hand Sim was dealt by time and fate: his huge, hooded eyes (reminiscent in some ways of Peter Lorre’s) are, by the early 1950s, better at expressing that kind of paralyzed anxiety than they would be most other kinds of emotion. But let’s not sell Sim short: he’s doing a lot of work, too, as a performer to evoke the sense of his fear. We see him darting away from interactions (startled by the man on the steps of the Exchange, for instance, or quietly but firmly insistent that the child carolers move on from the sidewalk outside his office), and indeed, the one flash of his anger early in the story only emerges in response to the touch of his nephew Fred’s cheerful, welcoming hand on his shoulder. Scrooge lashes out in response, pounding the desk and shouting, as though it’s that kind of intimate human contact that frightens and upsets him more than anything else in the world. Other than that, though, the Scrooge we get in these sequences is softer of voice, more restrained than many Scrooges—still a covetous old sinner, to be clear, but it’s apparent that he’s been made the way he is, somehow, by his experience of fear. He seems baffled by Fred’s happy, impoverished marriage more than he is wrathful about it, as though it’s not possible for him to make sense of a life lived outside of the fear of not having his wealth to protect him, and in one sad moment at dinner on Christmas Eve, we see him retract his request for extra bread with his meal once he realizes it will cost a haypenny. It’s a reminder that Scrooge’s severity isn’t just for people under his thumb—he’s just as severe with himself. The miserly impulses of his heart are less a cage he’s trying to trap the poor inside, and more a prison he feels chained within, as well.

Scrooge’s fears are amplified by a number of decisions made by the screenplay that I think add a lot of texture to the story: Ebenezer, in this film, had been the means of his mother’s death as she died in childbirth, and he’d lived a remote and deprived life after his father rejected him. When his older sister (in this version), Fan, comes to get him from school, he tells her how overjoyed he is to be with her again, and she promises him that he will never be lonely again, “as long as I shall live.” But of course Fan does not live; she dies bearing Fred as Scrooge’s mother died bearing him. He opened up his heart once before and lost the one safe harbor in his whole world—no wonder he shrinks from humanity, and from Fred’s kind hand in particular. Furthermore, we learn over the course of the Christmas Past sequence that Scrooge’s whole life is a kind of haunting: his pinched, chilly office was once the warm, friendly office belonging to Mr. Fezziwig, an office that young Scrooge and his partner Marley basically forced Fezziwig out of, years ago. Scrooge’s life, too, is lived in a shadow—he inherited Marley’s house and furniture upon Jacob’s death, which means that of COURSE Marley’s haunting him here, this is literally the man’s home, and the bed from which Scrooge rises to see the first two spirits is the bed that Marley died in. To me, this enriches the film so much: I understand better both why Scrooge doubts the apparitions he at first encounters, and why he comes to believe in them so fully.

The writing, then, is a real strength: I’ll say that, for me, the acting is a slightly more mixed bag. Sim himself as Scrooge is really wonderful, expressive in almost every scene at a level that engages me. Some of the supporting cast rise to his level, but others feel a little stiff or amateurish, which probably reflects just the relatively limited budget and simple approach of this small British production in the 1950s. Maybe the worst of the offenders, for me, is the Ghost of Christmas Past, about whom my complaint really is that he’s forgettable: there’s just not that much personality here on a level that would make his work with Scrooge more memorable. This fault is amplified slightly by the fact that the movie extends the Christmas Past sequence by quite a bit, adding in scenes to help convey how Scrooge changed over time. But these are minor complaints: truthfully, the movie committing to a deep exploration of Scrooge’s past is really effective, because it helps me understand how a young clerk who loved the joy of his kindly boss did grow into the walking black hole of this aged Scrooge, towards whom money is drawn and out of whom no good human emotion seems likely to emerge. And the other side benefit of this long exploration is that it gives the old Scrooge time to make sense of things—he starts to anticipate what each next scene will reveal, and he pleads not to have to face them. This is true in a lot of adaptations, but I think Sim more than any other Scrooge I’ve seen manages to persuade me that by the time the Past section is done, he’s basically been convinced of what he’s done wrong in life. The key to Sim’s version of the man, then, is that even knowing he’s done wrong, he’s still not ready to change, and that brings us back around to fear: Scrooge pleads with both Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come that he is simply too old, too far gone. He begs them to leave him in peace as a lost cause and go find “some younger, more promising creature” to transform. This is a Scrooge whose depression has so chained down his heart that even when he knows he is a bad man, he cannot believe himself capable of good. And so the Present and Yet to Come sequences become less about punishing Scrooge and more about forcing him to understand that he has ample opportunity to have an impact, right now and before he’s in the cold ground. It’s marvelously effective.

As a result we get a different vision of the Present than most adaptations supply: we see far more about the whole Cratchit family (and not just Tiny Tim), who really are poised to be helped by a man who can create wealth and opportunity for a bunch of young people on the verge of adulthood. Our glimpse of Fred’s party skips the guessing game entirely (no need to skewer Scrooge further) in exchange for a longer conversation between the partygoers in which Fred can defend his belief that Ebenezer has the capacity to change, and show up as a guest someday. Again, that party’s full of exactly the kind of young people Scrooge was once, people who, as I think he must understand, are about to make the same choices he once made, and maybe could live differently than he has. And most poignantly (here departing again from Dickens), Scrooge’s once-betrothed, here named Alice instead of Belle, is a woman working at one of those poorhouses Ebenezer’s such a big fan of—an angel of mercy to those in desperate need. I said critically of Scrooged that I thought giving him a love interest to reconnect with was too cheap, because it reduces Scrooge’s reforming to being transactional, something he’s doing to “get the girl”. So what I love here is that Alice is never mentioned again—we understand, as Ebenezer surely does, that she’s out there. That a more compassionate, more loving man might even find a bridge of connection to her, in the future. But there’s no guarantee of this, and I think it’s quite possible he never even sought her out: that he understood that the Spirits’ message was not “hey….guess who’s still single?” but rather “you jerk, the only good thing about the poorhouse is the kindness of people too good to stand in a room with you: it’s time to grow up.”

And then Scrooge’s Christmas Day here is such a moving and happy celebration: Sim, who has played the man’s fear so successfully, can unleash the relief of this unlikely chance to live a better life with incredible joy. I like the elevation of his servant, the “charlady” as she calls herself, in prominence as a character here, so that he can have an extended dialogue about how he’s feeling and what he’s thinking about, and apply his generosity directly to the woman he’s frightening. And because this is a story of how a fearful man found the courage to trust other people instead of hiding from them, Scrooge’s arrival at Fred’s house has never hit me with more emotion. Everything about it, from how gingerly he steps across the threshold to the gentle encouragement he gets from the maid at the door to Fred’s wife getting up to extend her arms to him in welcome, and lead him in a merry little dance, is so fully expressive of the gladness of complete redemption. Scrooge can change because loving community is possible, and because (to follow the logic of Dickens’s original tale) in Christmas we are given a holiday that asks us to create that kind of welcome for others. Even if in some ways it feels a little too easy for the old moneylender, in other ways that’s just the dream the story asks us to believe in. As Scrooge himself comments in nearly the film’s final scene, “I don’t deserve to be happy. But I can’t help it!” What better description of grace could there be?

I Know That Face: Kathleen Harrison, who here appears as Scrooge’s charlady servant, is in IMDB’s credits for the 1974 TV movie Charles Dickens’ World of Christmas, but I have no idea what role she played. Michael Hordern, who portrays Jacob Marley (both living and dead), is the voice of the narrator for the British TV series Paddington Bear, which includes the 1976 episode, “Paddington and the Christmas Shopping”. Hordern also voices Badger in the 1980s stop-motion animated series The Wind in the Willows which aired several lovely Christmas-themed episodes, and the man wasn’t done with Dickens by a long shot, it seems, since he voices Jacob Marley again in the award-winning animated 1971 film A Christmas Carol (which I will definitely get to on the blog someday), and he appears in live action as Ebenezer Scrooge in a 1977 TV movie A Christmas Carol, one of dozens of such productions that I’ve simply never heard of. Hordern’s joined in 1971 by Alastair Sim, in fact, who voices Scrooge in that film, reprising his role in this one. And I learned to my surprise, in digging into this cast, that there’s a crossover I hadn’t spotted with another earlier film this year: Roddy Hughes, who here plays good-natured old Fezziwig, has I think a single line as a chemist dispensing medicine in The Crowded Day.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: This is a fairly comprehensive version of the original tale, including a lot of things I love to see. A couple in particular caught my ear and eye: not many productions leave in the comment by Marley that he’s procured this chance for Scrooge, with Ebenezer replying, “Thank ‘ee, Jacob.” It’s a sweet note of grace early on. This is one of the very few adaptations that manage to leave in Scrooge being taken by Christmas Present to a coal mine where the workers are singing carols together (alas, we don’t also get their visit to a lighthouse, as in the original). And Christmas Present here gives us a brief glimpse of those starving, near-feral children, Ignorance and Want—less unsettling than the Disney version I watched earlier this year, and I think therefore more affecting?

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: As I mentioned, we don’t get the guessing game at Fred’s where the company’s meaner to Scrooge than they are earlier in the evening: it’s an unusual cut, but like I noted, I think I get why emotionally the filmmakers wanted something else. We also don’t get the young couple rejoicing because Scrooge’s death may give them a chance of keeping their home, exchanging that time instead for a very long dialogue scene with “Old Joe” the ragpicker, who’s buying up whatever the dead have left behind.

Christmas Carol Vibes (10/10): The evocation of the original tale, and this time and place, is so effective. There are adjustments, as any adaptation would have to make, but here they’re so in line with the tone of the novella that I had to double check a couple of these innovations to make sure they weren’t in there and I’d forgotten them. If you want the feeling of reading the book, this will suit you to a T.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): Thanks to a well-paced screenplay and a really effective performer in the role of Scrooge, this is a nearly perfect film to immerse ourselves in. Sure, I complained about a couple of semi-flat performances, but really, you hardly notice: the rest of the film keeps chugging along with great skill. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to revisit it, since it deserves more attention than I’ve given it.

Scrooge? Sim is tremendously successful at imbuing him with humanity: making Scrooge a fearful person instead of a furious one unlocks a way of understanding him as a victim as well as a villain. He’s younger than he looks, too—a mere 51 when this was released—and as a result he has the physical energy to be able to really leap about giddily on Christmas morning, enough that we can believe his housekeeper was rattled. Definitely a top tier performance, and one that is the secret to the movie’s success.

Supporting Cast? This is a slightly more mixed bag—Mervyn Johns is genial but less memorable as Bob Cratchit, and I’d say both the Spirits with speaking lines are just a little underwhelming. Glyn Dearman does a good job with a Tiny Tim who’s right on the edge of being too perfect for even this heightened fable, though, and Rona Anderson probably gives the best performance I’ve ever seen of Scrooge’s betrothed (with apologies to Meredith Braun, who does such a lovely job as Belle in the Muppet version, but Rona’s been handed more dialogue and more screen time, and that makes a difference). Also, as I note, we get a lot more “Christmas Past” time here, which means that we see a lot of Marley and Fezziwig we wouldn’t normally (as well as the actor playing a young Ebenezer), and all of that goes really well. I’d say that this isn’t really the movie’s strength but there’s plenty to enjoy in it.

Recommended Frequency? I haven’t been watching this version every year, given how well I knew it from my childhood, but this viewing made me feel like it really ought to make it into my annual rotation. Sim is so good at the role, and the emotion of the story hit home for me as a result.

You can watch this film pretty easily, if you like: Tubi has a copy, as does Plex, if you don’t mind the ads. If you’d rather pay for an ad-free experience, you can rent it from Amazon Prime. I own a digital copy from Amazon (which I assume is the same version they stream) and I’ll mention that the audio levels are slightly off in some sections: if you notice that kind of thing more than others, I figure it’s best to be forewarned. The film is available under its alternate title of A Christmas Carol (I wonder where they got that?) on disc at Barnes and Noble, and though it’s not as universally accessible as some films, it’s in several hundred libraries, according to Worldcat, and therefore I hope you can borrow a copy for free that way, if you so desire.

The Lion in Winter (1968)

Review Essay

It has been suggested (not unfairly) by some of this little blog’s faithful readers that I don’t have much sympathy for mean-spirited movies. My relatively harsh reviews for films like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Mixed Nuts, and most recently Scrooged do seem to bear that out: I didn’t respond well to the tone of any of those films, which all felt to me like they were dragging me in unwillingly as an audience member to participate in some downward-punching humor. Well, I didn’t place this film on the slate for this year thinking that it would offer a counterargument: in truth, I’d never seen it, and in my head I had imagined it would provide a little more solemnity, a perhaps slightly stiff historical drama to give some restraint to this final weekend before Christmas and the end of the blog season. Well, boy, was I wrong…but the fiery, aggressive, and (yes) mean-spirited film I got gave me a lot to delight in. I’ll see if I can explain why.

The premise of The Lion in Winter (a film adapting a stage play of the same name) consists of complicated family politics unfolding at a difficult Christmas gathering…only, unlike most films of this kind, the gathering occurs in a medieval castle (Chinon, in what is now France, for the Christmas feast in 1183), and the family’s internal politics govern the control of most of Western Europe. The family in question is that of Henry II, one of the Plantagenet kings of England, who by might and savvy and deft diplomacy had maneuvered himself to such heights that by this Christmas, he styles himself the Angevin Emperor: at the age of 50, he is a man who knows that his time grows short, and his legacy needs to be provided for. “I’ve built an empire,” he says early on, “and I must know that it is going to last.” Now that his eldest son is dead, he’s left with three potential heirs, and he invites all of them (Richard, Geoffrey, and John) to Chinon for the feast, knowing each of them thinks they can plot their way to the crown as his successor. Invited, too, is the boys’ mother, Henry’s rich and powerful queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he has kept imprisoned in Salisbury Tower for many years now as he’s followed his heart in pursuit of other women: Eleanor may be here as a temporarily paroled prisoner, but she is still Henry’s equal as a politician and a schemer. Henry will, of course, have his mistress there, too: young Alais is her own complication, since she’s formally betrothed to Richard, but Henry has no intention of giving her up. Alais’s half-brother, though, the teenage King of France, Philip, will be at this gathering also, and he intends to force the matter of her marriage or else demand her dowry back from Henry. And you thought your family’s Christmas dinner conversations took place on thin ice, eh?

You might think, upon reading this still-insufficiently-detailed summary, that this will be far too complicated a web to make sense of as a viewer (especially if you’re not really up on your 12th Century politics) and that could be true for some, I’m sure. But I think the film works far better than you’d expect for a couple of key reasons, and the first is the strength of the acting. When you put Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the hands of Peter O’Toole (then at the height of his powers as an energetic British leading man) and Katharine Hepburn (nearing the end of her dominance as a midcentury actress, but still capable of enormous screen presence at any moment, as proven when she wins her fourth Academy Award for this role), you give the audience a real gift: even when we can’t follow every detail of every double-cross, the sound and fury of these characters bears us along with the plot like a boat adrift in a flooding river. Add in a brilliant supporting cast—maybe none of them more scintillating than a young Anthony Hopkins as the brash juggernaut, Richard, whom we know best by his nickname, “the Lionheart”—and almost any dialogue would ring out like dueling swords.

The poster for The Lion in Winter depicts Katharine Hepburn, clutched closely to himself by a bearded Peter O'Toole: she looks up at him beaming a smile that could be sweet delight or poisonous malice, while he narrows his eyes looking down at her, whether in love or in contempt. Below them, we see the painted image of two medieval armies in pitched battle, and behind the couple and this battle, the poster is splotched abstractly with a red paint that suggests blood.

It’s not just “any” dialogue, though: the screenplay (also Academy Award winning) is full of the most poetically intense exchanges, written for the heightened surreality of the theatrical stage, so much so that on film it borders on camp (and might topple over the edge into ridiculousness in the hands of any less gifted cast). I wrote down dozens of quotations as I watched, and will share examples to give you a taste of what I mean: at one point, Richard, goaded into fury by his whinging little brother John (who grows up into the tyrannical King John of the Robin Hood legends), whips out a dagger and chases John around Eleanor’s bedroom, seemingly intent on murdering his brother then and there. John screams out to his mother for help, exclaiming in apparent shock that Richard’s got a knife, to which his mother exasperatedly flings back, “of course he has a knife; he’s always got a knife: we ALL have knives! It’s 1183, and we’re barbarians!” At another moment, Eleanor’s reminiscing about her first husband, King Louis VII of France, and how she accompanied him on crusade—she recalls, “I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure, and I damn near died of windburn… but the troops were dazzled.” Did I say it “borders on camp”? Maybe I should correct that: it takes place deep inside camp’s territory. The writing’s not just fireworks, though: sometimes there’s a quiet weight in it that reveals a character’s inner wisdom. Henry, at one point, defends his latest conniving by saying, “I’ve snapped and plotted all my life. There’s no other way to be alive, king, and fifty all at once.” Later, in a crisis, when Richard insists that whatever comes he won’t drop to his knees and beg, Geoffrey mocks his brother, saying, “You chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered.” And Richard eyes Geoffrey, as if from a height his brother cannot touch, and replies, “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”

How is it that I can laugh at the soap opera of this maddening family, and a Christmas gathering in which the vast majority of the words flung between them are harsh, or cruel, or insincere, or condescending, or deceitful….and often more than one of those at a time? Again, I think the strength of the acting and the writing help: the worst insults carry the humor a little better when they’re delivered through really high art, I suspect. But I think it’s also that these people and their problems are so remote from me and mine: I can comprehend (after having played enough hours of Crusader Kings 3) a world in which people have these problems, betrothals lasting decades because they’re complicated feudal land arrangements, and marriages that are annulled decades after the fact but only if you effectively own the Pope, but that’s not the kind of thing I have to maneuver while eating Christmas dinner. Moreover, every single character on screen is just that—they are self-consciously characters. Eleanor and Henry are playing roles, roles that change at a moment’s notice depending on who’s in the room and what they want, and these children raised by them (Alais included) have learned to play the game too or else have learned how to benefit from it. Almost none of these words draw blood because the combatants are too scarred from decades of dueling, and everyone knows that this morning’s enemy may be your ally (or at least the mutual enemy of a more dangerous foe) by day’s end. Every bridge still up between these people was built for the sake of burning. If you watch this film, you’ll hear people saying some of the worst things they can think of—Eleanor and Henry, in particular, are gifted at this—and only you can know if that’s the kind of thing you can let yourself enjoy as a spectacle. I found that, more often than not, I could, and did.

I like, too, the way the movie gives us just enough to keep these characters straight: the three princes, for instance, are all introduced to us while fighting, in three quick, nearly wordless scenes. The economy of it from a screenwriting perspective is impressive. John (“Johnny” as Henry calls him) is dueling his indulgent father, who easily bests this teenager who seems to have no plan at all in life but to swing wildly, trusting that his father won’t hurt him really. Richard, on the other hand, we see at a joust, effortlessly tossing his opponent to the ground like Marshawn Lynch in Beast Mode, and then moving with a swift and apparent ruthless purpose to take his life before something interrupts: we perceive that Richard is a man of action, a fellow who likes to run directly ahead and trust his strength to carry him through obstacles. Geoffrey, then, we see perched high above a beach where his men are stationed secretly: he is never in any danger, and with a few swift hand signals to knights waiting below, he springs a trap he’d clearly set long in advance. He is cold and cunning, a strategist who if given time can get an advantage on his opponent, and who will never ever expose himself to risk. We’re only a handful of minutes in and we can already see the ways this family will find themselves at each other’s throats, with a kingdom up for grabs. As Henry himself later comments, “they may snap at me, and plot… and that makes them the kind of sons I want.” He loves the battles he fights with these young men, and he looks forward to them with a relish that suggests the energy of this conflict is what keeps him young, himself.

I know I haven’t touched on the holiday elements of the film much, but to be honest, despite the feast of Christmas being the ostensible reason for them all to be here (especially King Philip of France, and Henry’s prisoner queen, Eleanor), it comes up very little. It provides a context for some good japes—”What shall we hang, the holly, or each other?” made me laugh—and there are moments when both Henry and Eleanor make reference to religion, and sometimes even elements of Christmas itself, to clarify something about their purpose, but they’re momentary flashes at most. This is a story about power: “power is the only fact,” says Henry, though as the movie unfolds, we learn that there are other “facts” besides power that Henry struggles to understand. Among them is love, though it’s love in a lot of guises, few of them deeply sentimental. Eleanor’s seemingly deep attachment to Henry (much like his own strange, strained attachment to both Eleanor and Alais) is hard to parse: how much of it is performed for the sake of getting what she (or he) wants, and how much of it is honest? How real are Alais’s feelings, either—the girl seems passionate, but is it a passion for the crown, for the chance to bear sons to a king, or is it love for that aging king, himself? Surprisingly, maybe the sincerest expression of love we see in the whole film is an expression of same-sex affection: Richard the Lionheart, we learn in a couple of key scenes, is a man who loves another man, and as Richard is maybe the least subtle or deceitful of all the people in Chinon Castle this Christmas, I found it hard to interpret the things he says as being anything less than true, often painful feeling. For 1968, it was genuinely unexpected to encounter a gay character on screen, not to mention a character who in every other way seems to avoid the kind of stereotypes that would have then been commonly believed about gay men.

I could keep talking about this film for a long while—there are so many splashy scenes to comment on, so many lines of deliciously wicked repartee to quote—but I doubt that really serves you as a reader. If by now I’ve persuaded you to try the film, you’ll get more fun out of these things happening without my advance notice, and if you’re pretty sure it’s not for you, you should probably not be subjected further to my secondhand version. It’s probably just as polarizing a film as A Christmas Tale, which I wrote about earlier this year—shockingly similar, in fact, since in this film as in that French arthouse picture, we get a son asking his mother why she doesn’t love him, and we get to hear her complicated answer—but it’s just that somehow in this situation I “get” the film, in a way that I never “got” the other one. It’s not that this film is historically accurate, to be clear: none of this happened. These people existed, in one form or another, and they were almost certainly all schemers and plotters who played politics with each others’ lives, but they didn’t have a Christmas at Chinon Castle, in 1183 or at any other time. The resolution we get from the film’s final act is a resolution that deepens our understanding of these characters, but it’s not giving us much sense of what would happen next in a tumultuous era in medieval history. The truths that The Lion in Winter has to tell are truths about people, and the ways we lie to ourselves and each other to get what we think we want.

I Know That Face: Peter O’Toole, here the larger-than-life Henry II, appears later in his career as an elderly artist mentor named Glen in Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, and lends his voice to Pantaloon, a toy soldier general, in 1990’s animated film, The Nutcracker Prince. John Castle, who in this film portrays the cold, scheming Prince Geoffrey, shows up in 2013 in one episode of the TV series A Ghost Story for Christmas as John Eldred. Nigel Stock, Henry II’s loyal servant William Marshal, plays Dr. Watson in a 1968 British TV episode of a Sherlock Holmes series, “The Blue Carbuncle,” which is the Holmes mystery set at Christmas (Star Wars fans may enjoy that Peter Cushing, Grand Moff Tarkin, plays the great detective in this episode). Anthony Hopkins, an electric presence in this early career-making role as Richard the Lionheart, at nearly the end of his career turns up as an aging and violent king—King Herod the Great—in the 2024 television movie Mary. He’s also an often-forgotten presence as the unseen narrator in the Jim Carrey How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I’ll review here in the final days of this blog season. And of course blog readers will need little reminder of Katharine Hepburn’s other holiday performances, but in case you do, here she is obviously the Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most skillful of schemers, but we’ve seen her recently as Bunny Watson in 1957’s Desk Set, and as I remarked at the time, she also appears as Cornelia Beaumont in the 1994 TV movie One Christmas, which I kind of doubt will make it to FFTH anytime soon, and as Jo March in 1933’s Little Women, which I think stands a slightly better chance (though it’s undeniably less of a “holiday movie” per se).

That Takes Me Back: Haha, despite the jokes sometimes told by young people about my advancing age, no, I am not nostalgic for the High Middle Ages. I mean…given my personality, I suppose I kind of am. But I don’t have anything here I can point at, saying, “can you believe they’re chanting in plainsong, haha, remember the days before polyphonic harmony?”

I Understood That Reference: At one point, Eleanor slips into Alais’s room and hears her singing a carol—she praises the young woman’s singing as the only thing that keeps the castle from feeling “like Lent”, and goes on to comment that, growing up, she was so conscious of the earthly king’s power (as opposed to God’s) that when she was little she was never sure if Christmas was the birthday of the King of Heaven or of her Uncle Raymond. Shortly thereafter, Henry steps back inside the castle, having stood outside on the ramparts for a while and looked up at the great sea of stars in the night sky, and comments, “What eyes the wise men must have had, to see a new one in so many? I wonder, were there fewer stars then? It is a mystery.”

Holiday Vibes (2.5/10): As I mention above, we know it’s Christmas, but very little celebration occurs: I’d expected a Christmas mass or a big feast, but the events of the story either skip or preclude such gatherings, and as a result, though we do see wrapped presents and hear a little talk of the holiday, it’s not much at all to go on.

Actual Quality (8.5/10): This is a big, loud, well-acted and well-written royal soap opera. It’s probably about the best version of such a thing I can imagine, but it’s also not really high art. I found a lot of it fun, some of it confusing, and at least a few moments were pretty uncomfortable—especially when characters find ways to hurt one another that really do cut to the bone. I mostly loved the fireworks, though, and honestly, so do these characters. Eleanor and Henry are like bitter athletic rivals, who at the end of their careers can take some delight not just from their own remaining talent but from seeing it still burning in their ancient foe: game does not always respect game, maybe, but here, these competitors are happier when they’re getting as well as they give, for the sake of the sport.

Party Mood-Setter? It’s either too complicated to follow or too involving to watch: I don’t think I could leave it on the background of a gathering, though I guess maybe I could be decorating Christmas cookies while laughing at the banter between these spoiled princes and their seasoned warrior parents.

Plucked Heart Strings? Not even Eleanor herself, I think, has any idea how many of her tears are real, if any, and though Alais is badly treated by Henry, in time we see her true colors as a schemer, too. Maybe a person with a very particular romantic history could find themselves leaning in and feeling Eleanor’s attachment to Henry in spite of it all, but it doesn’t resonate for me. If I can feel it in any part of the film, I think it is in Richard, and what little we are shown of a love he knows must remain a secret.

Recommended Frequency: It’s a lot of fun, but there’s so little Christmas content here that I really think this is best left for whatever time of year you feel like picking it up, especially because it’s not just that we’re missing much in the way of references to the holiday, but because I feel like most of the thematic content runs counter to the best holiday narratives we’ve got to work with. It’s just out of step with the season, I feel like, though if you feel like trying it out once to see if a wintry medieval castle is close enough to the holiday spirit for you, I don’t think there’s any harm in it.

There doesn’t seem to be any free streaming option for watching The Lion in Winter, but you can rent it from all of the usual streaming services, it appears: pick your favorite. Or, of course, you can get it on disc: Barnes and Noble would be happy to sell you a copy, obviously. The easiest approach, though, might just be to trust your local public library—Worldcat promises that over two thousand libraries have a copy of this on the shelves, and my guess is that of all the “holiday” movies I review here, this one might not be in quite as high demand at this time of year. If ever you watch it, I hope you can get the entertainment out of it that I was able to find.

A Midnight Clear (1992)

Review Essay

It’s in some ways remarkable how powerfully the World War II experience looms over American Christmas movies. Just in the last two years, this blog has run the gamut of possible intersections—the war is the context for Christmas in Connecticut even though it’s not being commented on, and the legacy of the war haunts Dan Grudge in Carol for Another Christmas. The war is a locus for slightly premature holiday celebration for Wallace and Davis in White Christmas, and a distant field of glory from which George Bailey’s brother Harry makes his heroic return in It’s A Wonderful Life. It is a system that subjects men to torture in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and it creates the post-conflict hardships that the veterans band together to overcome in It Happened on Fifth Avenue. I came to A Midnight Clear thinking that I basically understood what I might get from a WWII Christmas movie. I was wrong. This movie surprised me, and then devastated me. It is an incredibly powerful anti-war film, and it’s also a holiday film, and I’m not going to forget it, and I’m not totally sure when I’ll be ready to see it again. It earns its place in the FFTH canon.

A Midnight Clear doesn’t waste any time—the opening sequence establishes us in the Ardennes in December 1944, and suddenly we follow the sound of a howling scream to find an American soldier bursting out of his snowy foxhole to run heedlessly through the forest, stripping himself naked as he stumbles between the trees, chased by his panicked comrade who is trying desperately to corral him. We come to learn that these are members of The Squad, an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon formed of the soldiers from various outfits who had each scored at the top of their unit on IQ tests. The Squad, as we meet them, has lost half its strength in brutally violent combat, and the surviving six men are all, in various ways, already broken by their experience of the conflict, not least among them Vance Wilkins, the man we just saw crumbling before our eyes as he fled through the Alsatian woods. Even so, in some ways none of them have yet seen the worst of war’s horrors.

The DVD cover for A Midnight Clear depicts six weary soldiers in full combat gear, standing in a snowy, wooded place, all facing the camera somewhat defiantly. Beneath them, two critic quotes are given: Richard Schickel of Time Magazine calls it a movie to seek out and treasure, and Siskel & Ebert give it their patented two thumbs up.

We learn, partially through retrospective voiceover narration, the ways in which the Squad has tried to insulate itself from what’s going on around them. The guys call Vance Wilkins “Mother” for the ways he, a practically elderly 26 year old, tries to protect them all, and Paul Mundy, a fellow who dropped out of training for the priesthood, they call “Father”—Father and Mother have certain expectations, among them the avoidance of profanity, and the rest of the unit tries to live up to them. As our primary POV character, William Knott, observes to us via narration, “we want to make it clear we’re not actually a part of this army.” Knot is the Squad’s formal leader, the recent recipient of a battlefield promotion to Sergeant, but between his certainty that Mel Avakian’s a better soldier than him and his respect for the moral leadership of Father and Mother, Knot seems totally incapable of wielding the office, and hasn’t even bothered yet to sew the stripes onto his uniform. The guys have figured out his name, abbreviated, is “Will Knott” and have taken to affectionately calling him “Won’t”. In a sense, that’s what all of them—the four I’ve named, plus Bud Miller (“mechanical genius and resident wit”) and Stan Shutzer (“our avenging Jewish angel”)—are trying to say to the war. They won’t. But this isn’t a kooky countercultural comedy about opting out of being a soldier: these aren’t Kelly’s Heroes. The Squad is simply a group of men too conscious of themselves and the world around them to go to battle calmly, and when they’re ordered to do so, the emotional and psychological consequences are profound.

The cast of this strangely forgotten 1990s film is almost a who’s who of gifted young character actors—Mother is played by Gary Sinise with incredibly brittle, fragile composure; Father’s presence is warmer and stronger in the hands of Frank Whaley, who’s the kind of actor you think “I don’t know that name” and then you look at his credits and realize you’ve seen him six times and he’s been good each one of them. The list continues here—brash, cheerful confidence from Peter Berg; quiet, sure competence from Kevin Dillon; an over-the-top bullying commanding officer who’s right in John C. McGinley’s wheelhouse—and even granting that all of these dudes are basically perfectly matched to their roles, it’s still probably true that the best performance in the film is a young Ethan Hawke as Will Knott. Hawke’s been one of the finest actors of his generation basically since his generation started taking adult roles on film, and in 1992 he’s poised between memorably great roles as a kid growing up fast in Dead Poets Society and White Fang and his entry into life as an adult leading man in films like Before Sunrise and Gattaca…perfectly poised, in other words, to play a nineteen year old shoved by the Army into responsibility for the lives of five other men, none of whom really think of him as the man in charge. We feel this film’s urgency, its tragedy, its moments of relief, and its profound grief and loss because these actors know how to take us there, and they do so unflinchingly.

I know, I’m doing a lot of table-setting here, but it’s because I’d like to persuade you to watch the kind of movie you almost certainly won’t seek out at the holidays. The fact of the matter here is that The Squad receives orders (from McGinley’s Major Griffin, whom we instantly understand is the kind of self-important fiend who not only considers his men expendable but takes a certain amount of pleasure from reminding them that they are) to advance ahead of American lines to an abandoned chateau which intelligence suggests may be poised near the source of a pending German counteroffensive. He’s already sent one patrol out that way and nobody came back. So, why not send the battalion’s wise guys—what else are these eggheads for? And off they roll (in two requisitioned Jeeps) into the quiet terror of no man’s land, where they almost immediately encounter the truly unsettling tableau of two dead soldiers, one German and one American, whose frozen bodies have been propped up on their feet and posed as if in an embrace. What in God’s name is this, the Squad asks themselves? Nazi obscenity? Bleak comedy by soldiers as broken as they are? An ironic mockery of armed conflict? Father blesses the bodies and lays them to rest. They continue forward, edgier than ever. It feels like nothing about this is going to go according to plan.

I want to hold back a fair amount of what they find at the chateau and in the woods surrounding it, since much of the movie’s power for me comes in its surprises—the pleasant and the blood-chilling alike. The film makes it clear, though, that we are entering a strange world: Knott comments at one point, “I’m not exactly sure what country we’re in. I don’t know what day it is, or what time it is. I don’t even know my name.” He says this to set up a joke, but he’s also telling us where this story is happening: this is a placeless place. A timeless time. Whatever it is that happens here, it is removed in some ways from the outside world, or at least it is until that world comes crashing back in around them. Part of what unfolds in the movie’s second act is in flashback—we see these men developing connections to each other, and the efforts a handful of them made to lose their virginity back in the States before they shipped out to France. There’s a gentle quality to the interactions they have with the woman they encounter that tells us something about these men—the still-living ones we’re watching in the snowy Ardennes but also one we’ve never met, since by now his body is buried back behind them somewhere, underneath that same snow. Back in the movie’s “real time”, we watch an unfolding set of encounters with a perplexing, mysterious German unit in the woods surrounding the chateau (and The Squad’s internal conflicts over what, if anything, to do about what they’re encountering).

Last year I watched a film similarly set at Christmas somewhere in eastern France, and there’s no denying I found something powerful and moving in Joyeux Noel, a film about the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in World War I’s first December, 1914. But I think there’s a way in which I find the encounter with Christmas here—as experienced by both American and German soldiers—more honest and therefore more moving. What little happens in connection with the holiday here has an authenticity because of how sparse the joys are for these men, and because of how much we know they’ve already lost. If they even make it to Christmas, there’s not a whole lot left inside these guys to release themselves into that kind of festivity—and when, late in the film, one soldier tells another, “Merry Christmas”, it is an irony more than a salutation, an acknowledgement that in war we are given very little to celebrate, even in a “good war” like the Second World War.

I don’t want to sugarcoat this film at all: it is more than willing to present you with violence and violence’s aftermath. Most of the soldiers we meet are going to die, and if there are military heroes in the Battle of the Bulge, I think we never really see one here, though the heroic challenge of resilience in these events is real, and I admire the hell out of these guys, both the ones who survive and the ones who “join the great majority” as Corporal Avakian calls it. After all, he comments, most of the people who ever lived are dead. To some extent, coming to terms with death is what each of these men is trying to do. Coming to terms with the deaths we see on screen—making sense of them, making sense of what they might mean—is our work, as an audience. Unlike many war films, you feel the weight of every body that falls here. No one is truly anonymous, on either side. Even after their death, their bodies remain present in the film to an unusual degree, and the intimacy of being in that proximity to the dead and feeling an obligation to them is an almost unbearably heavy burden. The weight of those losses won’t just be felt on the battlefront; it’ll be carried home, too, by men too young to know how to shrug it off their shoulders, or else men old enough to not want to shrug it off. And it matters, friends, it matters. This screenplay is adapted from a novel written by William Wharton, a man who was severely wounded fighting in the Ardennes in 1944. He knew better than any thousand Americans in 2025 with cocksure, vapid “FREEDOM ISN’T FREE” bumper stickers just exactly what the cost of even a just war really was, and in A Midnight Clear, we have to look his truth in the eyes. Especially for anyone who fell in that forest and never got up to come home again, I think we owe it to them to consider what it was for and what it was worth. This film helped me do that.

I Know That Face: Despite being a cast that’s stacked with great actors, both leading men and character actors, hardly anyone here ever appeared in a holiday-themed production again, that I can find. The big exception is John C. McGinley, who here plays the arrogant and brutal Major Griffin: McGinley played Chuck Manetti-Hanahan in a 2024 Hallmark miniseries called Holidazed, as well as appearing as himself in It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie in 2002, which is one of the few Muppet films I’ve never seen (I really ought to add it to next year’s slate). McGinley of course is also a veteran of TV acting, in particular his role as Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs, where he appears in multiple Christmas episodes, maybe most memorably the first season’s “My Own Personal Jesus.” I can’t check every single TV appearance by hand in the filmographies of the other guys, so I’m assuming there are possibly more matches like that—the only one I know for sure is just my memory of Peter Berg (here playing the bold, confident Bud Miller) as Dr. Billy Kronk on Chicago Hope for several seasons, which I know encompassed an appearance in at least one Christmas episode.

That Takes Me Back: This isn’t nostalgic for me, obviously, but at its most powerful, the film reminds me of the worst of the war stories I heard from one of my grandfathers, whose recollections of the agonies he saw at the end of the war were too painful for him to share in full. At most, I heard from him the whispered, tearful memories of the people he couldn’t save, and I learned from him at a young age the toll of war’s echoes in those who have lived through one. I wish I could have understood him better and I also know that I never, ever could have: it was a mercy, probably, that I couldn’t. I thought of Grandpa, though, watching this film, and I wonder what he would have told me about it, if he could have sat through it and then spoken at all once it was done.

I Understood That Reference: The story’s too bleak for Santa jokes, and nobody gets to any other Christmas story that might be a little more emotionally taut or sober for the circumstances.

Holiday Vibes (3/10): There are a couple of scenes in which Christmas and its celebration are fairly central to what’s happening, both in terms of plot and of thematic arc, and they’re incredibly moving. Beyond them, though, the only seasonal element really is the ever-present snow. If you’re looking for a classic holiday movie experience, this isn’t the place to start.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): I found this movie profoundly affecting and effective—tremendous performances, dialogue and narration that sometimes bordered on the philosophical, and an effective cinematic use of an evocative landscape. There were, at a few moments, some pieces that felt slightly too convenient (or too implausible), but I can be pretty forgiving of those elements when I can see where they take me, and here I developed a high level of confidence that the movie was taking me someplace worthwhile. It’s a powerful film.

Party Mood-Setter? No, absolutely not. There’s nothing casual or cozy about this movie’s experience. Whatever you’re getting from it is going to have to be faced head-on.

Plucked Heart Strings? It’s a profoundly emotional viewing experience: you may or may not tear up, given how inevitable so much of the film’s saddest moments come to feel. I can’t imagine, though, sticking with this movie without becoming so invested in these men that their demises (or survival) are a matter of profound importance. You’re going to feel something about the events of the movie’s third act.

Recommended Frequency: I have no idea how often I could watch this movie, but I am so glad I’ve seen it, and I will watch it again. If you’ve not seen it, it fully deserves your attention. Just don’t try to write Christmas cards while it plays out in front of you.

I know I may not have won you over about watching a bleak, violent anti-war film, but I hope you’ll at least consider it: it’s an easy one to watch in terms of access, at least. Amazon Prime subscribers can watch it ad-free, and if you’re willing to sit through ads, you can catch it on Tubi, Pluto, The Roku Channel, or Fandango at Home. Apple, Google, and Amazon would be happy to rent it to you, if you’d prefer to stream it that way. Barnes and Noble is happy to sell you the film on disc, and Worldcat reports that about 450 libraries have physical copies, too, so you may have luck borrowing it for free. I hope you’ll seek it out, though, if you’re ever in a mood to receive the kind of messages I’m suggesting it can send you.

The Crowded Day (1954)

Review Essay

One of the gifts I get from writing this blog is tracking down films I’ve never heard of before, just out of a desire to add to the diversity of what I’m getting to watch as the marathon continues. Today’s motion picture is certainly a prime example: The Crowded Day is, as far as I can tell, a nearly forgotten glimpse of post-war Britain, a movie that doesn’t even make most of those “Fifty Forgotten Christmas Movie” lists that proliferate across the Internet. I had never heard of it before, at least—the cast is (with one or two exceptions) totally unknown to me, too—and so I’m hoping that, in sharing it here, I give it a slightly wider audience.

The Crowded Day delivers the viewing experience that the title promises: we see one truly crowded day of the “Christmas rush” at a central London department store, which in the movie is named “Bunting & Hobbs” although, as the signage visible in the film even reveals, it’s shot on the premises of Bourne & Hollingsworth, an iconic Art Deco department store building on Oxford Street in Soho. Our primary characters are an ensemble of shopgirls who work at Bunting & Hobbs while living nearby in a boarding house operated by the store—one of the department heads in women’s wear, Mrs. Morgan, seems to double as a hostel matron, barking orders at the girls whether they’re at work or at “home”. Over the course of a full day that includes the B&H Christmas party, we follow the ups and downs of life as young single women caught up in a modernizing Britain, a cultural landscape that seems to expect a certain amount of pre-war decorum while also accommodating the changing post-war mindset of these young folks. The generational gap between the shopgirls and the older managers and executives is vast, and a source of both comedy and drama as the day unfolds.

This DVD cover for a two-film pack advertises The Crowded Day and Song of Paris, both films directed by John Guillermin. The image is from The Crowded Day: a black and white image of a stiff, proper British man looking mildly horrified as he holds clothing in his hands while standing next to a naked mannequin. Staring at him are one of the shopgirls along with two lady customers: the shopgirl is smirking slightly, while the customers look puzzled and curious.

The light-hearted comedy is certainly where the movie spends the bulk of its time. Young Peggy French’s storyline, for instance, is definitely a comic one—her beau, Leslie Randall, is too obsessed with his car, and so she engages in a little performance art to convince him that she’s ditching him for the store’s dignified and somewhat older personnel manager, Mr. Stanton, in an attempt to make Randall jealous enough to sell his car and devote himself to her. Peggy tries to pull all this off without telling Mr. Stanton, which creates some amusing moments tinged with cringe as she insinuates herself into Mr. Stanton’s day repeatedly so as to make a spectacle of her apparent attachment to him, and the older fellow tries in every possible polite and civil way to keep her at arm’s length. And there’s a lot of comedy here and there around the store, as shopgirls quip to each other (one tells another, in reply to a complaint about the supervisors, to vote Labour in the next election), and in particular in an extended sequence where one girl, Suzy, manages to trick Mrs. Morgan into wasting the afternoon on a fool’s errand so that she’ll stop stealing Suzy’s commissions.

The film walks a line, though, between the fun of this shopgirl life and its tragedies. The heaviest story by far is that of Yvonne Pascoe, whom we’re introduced to as she’s getting out of bed and is clearly under the weather. We gradually come to realize, through hinted comments and eventually plain statements, that Yvonne is secretly pregnant, and is desperate to make contact with the baby’s father, Michael, whom she hasn’t heard from in many weeks. In this time and place, Yvonne has few options—she knows there’s no job for a pregnant shopgirl—and the movie does not shy away from how negatively people would respond to her revelation (Michael’s mother in particular is shockingly cruel), nor how desperate Yvonne would feel. I was impressed that a film of this era would depict someone wrestling with the appeal of suicide as an escape from a life that feels “ruined” at such a young age, and it does so with some real gravity.

The film walks other tightropes in its balancing act, too: there are times, for instance, when the life of these shopgirls isn’t glamourized at all, and we understand how little they live on and how much they prize tiny victories and indulgences. But there’s also at least a little fantasy here—certainly the opening sequences, in which these attractive girls are all running around in nightgowns teasing each other and interrupting each other’s baths, etc., feel more like the director wanting to imagine something idealized (and appealing to an imagined male gaze). Sex and sexuality certainly is an undercurrent through a lot of the film: Yvonne’s aforementioned predicament, of course, but we also see several different variations on these young women and their relationships to men that remind us of the full range of treatment the shopgirls can expect, from gentlemanly to predatory. It’s 1954, though, so the film is only going to explore these things in limited fashion, of course. And I think the film’s premise is, itself, a balancing act: how do we tell satisfying stories that still feel like they could fit within the confines of one day, even if it’s an unusually hectic one? There are times when I wish there was a little more air to breathe in the movie, and more of a chance to connect with these characters, who can become interchangeable, or who simply aren’t very easy to understand because I don’t know enough about most of them.

In the end, I’d say that the movie delivers on the simple promise of immersing me in this world and the lives of these characters, but it doesn’t quite reach the level of profundity it might have achieved if it could have helped me become more invested in most of their stories (Yvonne is a notable exception). For people who, like me, find both the 1950s and British society fascinating, it’s a great period piece that will leave you wanting to see more of the world inhabited by the young women who work at Bunting & Hobbs. One character, for instance, who doesn’t live at the shopgirls’ hostel, goes home instead of attending the staff Christmas party, and I get such a revelation about her life that I suddenly wanted a film just about her. As Christmas films go, this one fits the genre really well—almost all the activity we see on screen is connected with holiday celebrations of one kind or another—while also not really giving us a traditional holiday experience, since the titular “crowded day” concludes before the celebration of Christmas has really commenced. It’s not the first film from this year’s list that I would urge you to see, but if you try it out, I think it’ll be worth your time.

I Know That Face: Prunella Scales, who here is a customer named Eunice in search of a white nylon wedding dress, has some holiday media connections—she is young Vicky Hobson in Hobson’s Choice, my mother’s favorite film and one set partly on New Year’s Day, and she plays Kate Starling in two TV episodes of A Christmas Night With the Stars—but she will be most familiar to most of us for her work as the put-upon hotelier Sybil Fawlty in the classic comedy series, Fawlty Towers, which really ought to have had a calamitous Christmas episode but never did. In The Crowded Day, Prunella shares the screen again with Richard Wattis, performing here as a bewildered man trying to manage a mannequin, who earlier in his career had also been cast in Hobson’s Choice, playing the part of Albert Prosser, the young solicitor. John Gregson, appearing in this film as the gearhead Mr. Randall whose obsession threatens to lose him a girlfriend, showed up last year on the blog in The Holly and the Ivy, playing the role of David Paterson, the ambitious engineer in love with Jenny Gregory.

That Takes Me Back: I know department store shopping still exists, but that crush of Christmas really feels like a childhood memory, to me. The way we shop has changed so much, due to the Internet, the rise of big box retailers, and the pandemic, and while I don’t want to idealize old department stores as some kind of wonderland (this film sure confirms that they were never that), there’s a charm to it that makes me smile and think of the past.

I Understood That Reference: I detected no references to Christmas stories, even when one character’s stop inside a church gave us an opportunity for some holiday-specific messaging, and a more heavy-handed film probably would have seized such an opportunity.

Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): Holiday shopping is very much on display, but that’s most of what we get—there’s surprisingly little talk about Christmas presents or traditions, and we basically never see anybody with their family doing more ordinary kinds of Christmas observance. If you’re someone who still goes out and Christmas shops in person, or even if that’s just a memory of yours but a clear one, you’ll find resonant moments here.

Actual Quality (8/10): The film’s most effective, as I describe above, at evoking the world inhabited by the shopgirls, and whether it’s the screenplay’s dialogue or the acting performances, I think the film is least successful at helping me invest deeply in most of the individual characters. Sometimes the film’s surprisingly strong at evoking feelings just through the editing and cinematography (there’s pretty intentional and effective use of Dutch angles, for instance, in the final act). I think the overall effect is solid though not really spectacular: I can imagine many of you would get something good out of the movie and I would be surprised if it was (or became) anybody’s favorite holiday film.

Party Mood-Setter? It’s a slightly missed opportunity, since I’m certain that portions of the film definitely could do this, with bustling store aisles and light-hearted banter, but the suicide subplot is much too intense for this purpose and would be very hard to ignore or set aside.

Plucked Heart Strings? It’s impossible not to have some feeling for Yvonne’s plight, regardless of how you feel about how she’s choosing to handle the stresses she’s under. It’s the strongest element in this film, there’s no question, for me.

Recommended Frequency: This film, as I’ve mentioned, was an unknown one to me, and therefore interesting to see. I would certainly watch it again someday, but it’s more a social document of the 1950s in the UK than it is a holiday movie, and one I probably won’t return to all that often at this particular time of year.

How are you going to watch it, yourself, if you decide to do so? Ol’ Reliable has our backs again—I don’t know how Tubi manages to get all these relatively unknown holiday flicks onto its roster each December, but I’m grateful for it. If you’d rather avoid the ads, though, this one’s a very cheap rental right now, available for a couple dollars at Amazon, Google Play, or YouTube. This is a rare film that’ll be nearly impossible to get on disc: there doesn’t seem ever to have been an American release, so Amazon will sell you an expensive copy but one you will only be able to watch if your player can handle discs from Europe, and Worldcat reports a mere 7 libraries seem to have this disc available in their collections. I complain sometimes about our overreliance on streaming, but this is a perfect example of a film I basically could not have seen were it not for the streaming services.

Black Nativity (2013)

Review Essay

It’s often the case at Film for the Holidays that I’m criticizing (if not lambasting) some movie that other people really love, sometimes a lot of people. Yesterday’s salvo at Scrooged, for instance, presumably ruffled at least a few feathers: that movie has its fans, and I get that I might have irritated some of them with my reading of it. So sometimes it’s good for me instead, I think, to try to make the case for a movie that most people don’t like very much, since I don’t just want to seem like a guy taking potshots. Certainly that’s the context of today’s post, in which I really had a good experience watching Kasi Lemmons’s adaptation of the Langston Hughes play Black Nativity, a film that seems to have left audiences and critics alike feeling disappointed at its mediocrity. I’ll confess, I’m not sure I get why people disliked it, and I’ll do my best at least to explain what it is that moved me about the film.

This movie adaptation takes the Hughes original—a retelling of the original narrative of Jesus’ birth through the lens of the Black experience in America and richly infused with gospel music—and encases it in a new narrative written for the screenplay, the story of a fatherless boy named Langston, growing up on the streets of Baltimore. When he and his mother, Naima, are about to face eviction from their home, Langston is packed off via Greyhound bus to New York City, where the grandfather he doesn’t know presides over a thriving Black church in the heart of Harlem. Langston doesn’t understand a lot of the context of his life: who was his father, anyway, and where’d he go? Who are his grandparents, and why have they been estranged from his mother for so long? How can he, a boy on the cusp of manhood, stand up for himself and his mother, and provide the home he knows they both need—can he, in fact, do that at all? And, speaking of context, what does it mean to him and to those around him to be Black Americans at this point in history—why is he named Langston, and what does the legacy of the civil rights era mean to people living generations in its wake? It’s a film trying to do and say a lot…and I think it succeeds.

The poster for Black Nativity calls it "The Musical Event of the Holiday Season". The six main cast members all appear, superimposed on each other, in a column in the center of the poster, flanked on either side by colorful, snowy New York City streets. Above them, in a dark blue night sky, a light shines down on an angel with her wings outspread over them all.

One of the ways it succeeds is by building a lot of thoughtful complexity into the conflicts between characters. As Langston goes unwillingly out of Baltimore via bus, we get to see his mother Naima (played by the multi-talented Jennifer Hudson) singing about the challenges of parenting that she keeps navigating because she believes in him more than she believes in herself, while also seeing his POV, in which he assumes his mother thinks of him as an obstacle and a burden, sent away to relieve herself of a problem. The duality of that parent/child misunderstanding is going to be revisited, of course, when we eventually contend with the much more deeply embedded divides between Naima and her parents (Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett—friends, if this movie fails its audience, it’s sure not for lack of on-screen talent), and by then we’ve got this lens to help us anticipate that neither side sees the whole story. And even the parents’ side is complicated—a simpler, less thoughtful movie would likely give us a couple upset at their runaway daughter, waiting for her to apologize to them for all the grief they put her through. But here, when Langston starts to get some answers out of his grandparents, his Grandma Aretha says that they’re waiting for Naima to forgive them. And when he painfully confronts them about their absence from his life, almost shouting, “What kind of parents are you?” he hears the pain in their own experience, in the words of the reply: “We’re the broken-hearted kind.” This is a family so haunted by regret and so walled in by grief that they don’t know how to stop hurting each other, yet they also clearly have the capacity to understand that this isn’t a case of the right and the wrong—at least Langston’s grandparents get it on some level from the beginning, and he and his mother are on a journey towards understanding. As Aretha says, herself, at a later moment, “We’re so human. We’ve all done things. That’s between us and God.” Is that an acceptance of blame, though, or an evasion of it? Given her tone and her body language, I see Langston’s grandmother as accepting the reality of what she’s done wrong; her husband’s a more complicated guy, maybe in part because as a minister he’s a little more liable to moralize or try to explicate some ethical truth, but I also see him owning some part of the harm he’s done. When I compare this family and their emotional landscape to the much better reviewed A Christmas Tale, which I wrote about a few days ago, I don’t know—I just find this film a lot more thoughtful, and more willing to believe in our capacity to understand ourselves and each other, which is what I want this time of year, maybe.

Some of the elements in the movie, I’ll acknowledge, are a little too simplified for the sake of the screenplay: Langston’s arrest right after his arrival in New York City feels implausible even for a justice system that’s biased against Black suspects, given what we and the characters in that scene can clearly observe, and the connections he makes with the criminal side of NYC, both in the jail cell and then persisting on the sidewalks of Harlem once he’s free, might be a little too sanitized and convenient. The setup, though, is meant to keep Langston poised between pathways in life. Is he going to be a young man who’s proud of his heritage or one who’s ready to sell his birthright for a bowl of pottage, to use an analogy his grandfather, Reverend Cobbs, would appreciate? Is he going to walk down the sidewalk to the church where he’s the beloved (if wayward) grandson of a family he isn’t sure he belongs in, or to the street corner where, if he plays his cards right, he can pick up the weapon or the illegal goods that maybe can make him the cash he needs to halt eviction proceedings? Everywhere he goes, from a jail cell to a pawn shop to the front pew of Holy Resurrection Baptist Church, he is confronted by not only his legacy, but what his legacy means to generations of older Black men who are putting a burden of expectation on him that he’s not sure he wants (or is able to carry). I’m sure there’s a lot to this context I don’t understand as a guy who hasn’t lived Langston’s life (or Reverend Cobbs’s), but what I could understand of it had a lot of power. I’ll also accept that musicals are hard for a lot of modern audiences, especially musicals set in the real world—it can be a strange juxtaposition between gritty life in the street and a character singing their feelings, and if that’s part of what people reacted to negatively, well, I get it even if I think the musical elements are good more often than they are cheesy.

The movie reaches its high point on Christmas Eve, when Reverend Cobbs insists on Langston accompanying his grandparents to church. From the pulpit at Holy Resurrection, we develop a deeper understanding of what Reverend Cobbs means to his community, as he begins to expound on the story of Jesus’ birth, “according to my brother Luke.” Langston falls into a bit of a reverie here—a dream? A daydream?—and his dream sequence consists of elements of the original Hughes play, staged dramatically all around Langston as though the events of the gospels were happening in the streets of Harlem. The young pregnant woman his grandfather tried to help with a little money is the Virgin Mary; the crook he met in jail has a makeshift tent in an alleyway that Langston pleads for him to share so that the baby can be born. We get an angel and a promise, and as song and dance start to involve all of these characters, even Langston, in the narrative, the events and the words combine to present one of the movie’s basic thematic claims: that Christmas is about a baby who came to put right a world broken by sin, and what “sin” means here is the weight of having done things you regret, things that hurt others and left their mark on you too. From that perspective, we all need the opportunity for a renewal that hardly ever comes back around to lives that missed their chance at it the first time. This is a deeply religious claim about the metaphysics of salvation, of course, but it’s also a simple secular truth that in each new generation—the birth of Maria’s baby, the birth of Langston to Naima—there is a chance of healing where there once was harm. And it’s so overwhelming an experience for Langston that it shakes him right out of his pew. He won’t believe in redemption when he lives in such an unredeemed family; he can’t accept grace in the world if it’s so obvious there isn’t grace for him and his mom. He sprints out the doors of the church into the cold of a Christmas Eve night in New York City, alone.

And even if this movie’s not as good as I think it is, I’m not going to spoil for you what happens then. Black Nativity has a lot to say about it not being too late for any of us, if we’re willing to tell the truth, not just about the hurt done to us but the ways we’ve hurt others. We can be failures by plenty of society’s metrics without being unredeemable—in fact, I’d say this is a film that argues there’s no such thing as “unredeemable.” And an act of unexpected mercy can re-order not just one life, but the lives of many. Sure, there are ways that some of the film’s final confrontations are too clean, too simple. Family is messy, and so is the kind of sin that several characters bring to each other to acknowledge, to accept, to make amends for, and the movie pretends for our sake that it won’t be all that messy in the end if we can be grateful for what we have. I don’t think that’s true enough to the story this film has been telling. I’d say that, far more than “be grateful,” the message we need echoed back to us in the end is that, yes, broken people break those around them. But it is only people who can be authentic in their brokenness who will have the capacity to bring the kind of healing we all need. Regardless, though, the end credits roll on a Black church in the heart of Harlem, a community that knows a thing or two about injustice and hope and dreams deferred, where the choir and congregation are on their feet singing about the troubles of the world and what’s coming to end them all. It’s an exhilarating feeling, for this audience member, anyway. I hope it will be for you, too.

I Know That Face: Forest Whitaker, here playing Reverend Cobbs, Langston’s grandfather, was of course a different kind of distant grandfather as Jeronicus in Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, which I covered last year. Tyrese Gibson, who plays Tyson (or “Loot”) in this film, appears in the role of “Bob” in The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, the second in a series of Kurt Russell / Goldie Hawn Santa Claus movies that, I suspect, I will have to surrender to and watch at some point.

That Takes Me Back: There’s a pay phone in this motion picture….and it WORKS. I wonder if 2013 is nearly the last year you could put a working pay phone in a movie and not have it feel like a period piece. It sure took me back to having to carry around 35 cents in case I needed to call home. Oh, and one of the ways Langston learns something about his mother is that, when he gets to his grandparents, Naima’s room is full of CDs she left behind her, which express her musical taste (and how young she must have been when she left). I wonder how a modern movie would handle that….stumbling into your mom’s teenage Spotify playlists?

I Understood That Reference: This is the most elaborate / stylized “original Christmas” story I’ve seen in a movie – Joseph and Mary, the innkeeper, the stable, an angel speaking to shepherds in the field, etc., but all of it transformed by this gospel fantasia lens into the story as Langston understands it. That’s certainly the Christmas tale that Black Nativity is in conversation with, as the title makes no disguise of.

Holiday Vibes (7.5/10): We don’t get a ton of “holiday gathering at the family home” stuff, since this family’s in such a weird place, but New York City at Christmas is a pretty powerful energy all of its own, and for anybody who like me grew up with church experiences at Christmas being pretty formative, the experience at Holy Resurrection Baptist Church is very resonant. It’s good at evoking the time of year in lots of ways.

Actual Quality (9/10): Like I said, not a whole lot of people agree with me on this one, but I’m sticking with my own experiences here, and I thought this was a really powerful film. Some wobbles here and there, as noted above, but overall I felt really moved by the characters’ relationships to each other, I enjoyed the gospel music thoroughly, and I think if you’re either someone whose experience of Christmas is similar to the Cobbs family (lots of praying and singing) or if you at least can be culturally curious about the experience of Christmas in the Black American church as an outsider, I think this movie has a lot to say about how those spaces can and ideally should give life to people. 2025 has been a rough year and I’ll take the hope I’m given.

Party Mood-Setter? I’m leaning no, since so much of it is more emotional and intense than I’d normally look for in a background movie, but it’s also true that one of the movie’s big strengths is its gospel soundtrack and you can get plenty of joy out of that just letting it play in the background, I bet.

Plucked Heart Strings? I’ve got to admit: I was genuinely caught off-guard by the movie more than once, with a moment that felt emotionally real in a way I was not expecting. I was tearful by the end, and my guess is that lots of people might feel similarly moved: the emotions being tapped into here felt pretty universal to me, though as I’ve noted, apparently this is not a well-reviewed movie, so there’s something I’m missing (or something others are).

Recommended Frequency: I’d say that this is one I’d love to work into an annual rotation, and certainly one I think you should return to regularly, especially if you’re someone for whom the original story of Christmas “from brother Luke” is a meaningful part of your holiday experience.

Subscribers to Peacock can watch this one ad-free, and if you are happy to watch it with ads, our old standby, Tubi, has got your back again. All the usual places will rent you a streaming copy for about four bucks, and ten dollars will get you a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack at either Amazon or Walmart (Barnes and Noble didn’t have it when I checked). Worldcat says you public library users have options, though: about 700 libraries hold it on disc.

A Christmas Tale (2008)

Review Essay

One of my favorite bands—in fact, if I’m thinking about “bands” as opposed to individual musicians, they’re probably my favorite band—is The Mountain Goats, which has been the primary outlet for the remarkable songwriting talents of one John Darnielle for the last three decades plus. I mention TMG for a couple of reasons, as I try to figure out how to tackle 2008’s A Christmas Tale, a very French movie about a dysfunctional (and very French) family gathering on the titular holiday. A good Mountain Goats song often has a lot to say about damage—about what it’s like to be a person who’s been damaged, who carries that damage inside yourself, and about what it’s like to understand your own capacity for damaging others (whether you’re going to explore that capacity actively or not). A good Mountain Goats song also often has a lot to say about love—about love as it is outside of the storybook, where in our real lives love can be as painful as it is pleasant, as catastrophic as it is consoling…how love (in its myriad forms) is the one source of solace in the restlessness of life but also how the itch of love (in those same myriad forms) can sit uncomfortably under our skin in ways we will never be at peace with. A great Mountain Goats song is usually about both love and damage. A Christmas Tale, if it’s working for you, is going to work like a great Mountain Goats song. The position I’m going to have to advance, alas, is that A Christmas Tale never fully works for me, but I at least respect what it’s attempting—art that is aggressive and polarizing and honest about things that might be hard to hear.

The film comes out of the gate like an accidental firearm discharge—an aging French man, Abel, looks at us straight down the barrel of the camera lens, saying “my son is dead,” and follows it up with a eulogy that clarifies that he has no real intention of mourning the six year old they are laying to rest. This is not a movie for the faint of heart. The premise that unfolds thereafter works like so: Joseph, the six year old, died of leukemia after no bone marrow match was found for him. The parents, Abel and Junon, even had an extra son, Henri, in an attempt to “make” a marrow donor, but it didn’t work. Now, decades later, all their surviving kids are grown when a new disaster strikes. Junon is diagnosed with leukemia. And so now, for a second time, as Christmas approaches, the members of this family must be tested to see if any of them are a match (and, if so, will a family this internally divided, this estranged from itself, knit together sufficiently that Junon will be given the gift her son Joseph never received?). If you’re thinking, “James, this sounds BRUTAL, why would you watch this,” friend, we try a little of everything here at FFTH. I wanted to explore another foreign language film this year, and I wanted to see how a Christmas movie tackled genuinely heavy subject matter. If it’s not for you, I hear you, but stick around to at least learn why this film is somehow not always as raw emotionally as you might think.

The poster for A Christmas Tale is a photograph of a large family gathering at the dinner table, with a Christmas tree in the background. The image has been divided by thin white lines that holds characters apart from each other, and the image is topped with a red lid and bow that suggest this is a wrapped present.

One reason I don’t think the movie’s quite such a heavy burden, as an audience member, is that I spent a lot less time grieving for these folks than I did staring at them in puzzled wonder. Their emotional registers are so differently calibrated from my own, and the kinds of conduct they condone (and engage in) are often really unexpected. Everyone’s at odds with everyone else, starting with the eldest surviving child, Elizabeth, who’d exiled her brother Henri (yes, “extra” kid, failed marrow donor Henri) from the family years ago in exchange for the money that saved him from ruin, and running all the way to Sylvia, wife to Ivan (the youngest brother—yeah, somehow, after “extra” Henri, Abel and Junon chose to have another kid), a woman who apparently was pursued as an object of potential romantic conquest by at least three members of this extended family and who, spoiler alert, is going to have a dalliance with at least one person she’s not married to before the movie’s over. And if you’re saying, wait, James, surely Sylvia is not knocking boots behind her husband’s back in one of the bedrooms at her in-laws’ house on Christmas Eve, my answers are a) yeah. Yeah, she is. And b) it’s not even clear how much she’s trying to keep things behind her husband’s back. That was one of the many moments I had, while watching this film, in which I shook my head gently and said, “Those French folks….they are different than I am, aren’t they?” Virtually everyone in this family has the capacity to go to battle against just about anybody else on screen, and within three minutes they can be kissing each other on the cheek and looking for another bottle of wine to open and share. The emotional roller coaster doesn’t come to a stop until the end credits roll.

The two most damaged players at the heart of this story are two men who barely know each other at the movie’s start but come to find a weird sense of kinship as it progresses. One of them is the self-destructive, narcissistic rage monster, Henri, who clearly never had the chance to recover from his knowing from the youngest possible age that he was a failed experiment, a child born to rescue the older brother he could not save. Everything about Henri—his addictions, his chaotic love life, his aggressive and cruel demeanor—is completely explicable based on all we know about him and two tragic deaths in his past. His father calls him “Henri Misery” as a nickname, and at one point when Henri asks his mother why she doesn’t love him anymore, she laughs and tells him that she never loved him in the first place. Here’s the thing, though: they all seem drawn to each other regardless of these cruelties, either because they’re a family that does feel a love they can’t put into words, or else because what holds them all together is some force other than love. The other significantly troubled family member is Elizabeth’s son, Paul Dedalus, a teenager with a history of mental health issues who’s been hidden away from Henri due to Elizabeth’s totally broken relationship with her brother. Paul’s having hallucinations, he’s experiencing suicidal ideation, and he’s treated like a fragile china doll by his mother, who expects the family to observe all her rules around keeping him calm and safe. Henri and Paul, of course, are seemingly the only two members of the family who might be fit candidates for the bone marrow transplant, and so fate throws them together with Junon, their mother/grandmother, as the family argues over who should do it if both of them can (or whether either one or both of them will be disqualified for health reasons). One of the film’s more moving if inscrutable sections occurs when, on Christmas Eve, it’s only these three members of the family who decide to walk together to midnight mass, despite none of them having given any indication of interest in religious observance previously.

But I’m drowning in this film, friends—I’ve already written so much and I’ve managed to say so little. I took over a dozen pages of notes while watching this incredibly complicated, layered foreign film and I’m still baffled by half the things I even understood well enough to write. Every possible combination of characters in this family seems to have its own special energy, whether of kinship and affection or of hostility and struggle (usually both). There are unsettling moments and eerily calm ones. At times it feels like a very normal family gathering at the holidays and at times characters speak so mercilessly to each other that you can’t believe they stay under the same roof without one or both of them burning the house down around their ears. Sometimes conversations involve characters discussing things or taking actions based on knowledge I don’t really understand how they came to possess. I probably missed something in the flurry of subtitles, but I think it’s also possible the movie intentionally maintains at least a mildly dreamlike state of ambiguity, where things don’t fit together as neatly as I might have expected.

As I suggested at the outset, I’m just not sure this works, even for me, a guy who’s open to art that explores some pretty complicated feelings. I think it’s one thing for me to try to understand the psyche of a difficult, selfish person in a three minute rock song, and another to watch that person on screen for a couple of hours dealing out unrelentingly vicious commentary at almost everyone he encounters. I can feel compassion for Henri but I also feel trapped in the room with him, and when I feel that way it’s hard not to see his sister’s side of the story. I think the director feels a lot more compassion for the parents than I do—parents who, yes, lost a child young, a horror I hope never to understand—given how appallingly and borderline abusively they’ve conducted themselves towards and around their kids ever since. The film doesn’t seem all that interested in letting the story lead us towards resolution of most of these issues, though, and to the extent that anything gets “resolved” I would say I find the resolutions both implausible and unsatisfying. Sure, in real life, I bet these people would go on damaging themselves and each other, with no real guard rails in place to hold them back. But in real life, I wouldn’t stay at their house for several days at Christmas…heck, I probably wouldn’t pick up the phone when they called. So, why would I watch a movie about them?

And I think that’s the question that you’d have to answer for yourself: could it be that, by watching a deeply dysfunctional French family stumble their way together through the holiday under intense pressure from this urgent medical need, you could maybe process some of your own feelings about both the holiday and your family experiences? Might you gain a better understanding of some difficult people in your life, or be able to reflect on the ways you’ve abused your own power as it relates to those difficult people? I bet some of you could, and certainly the critics who reviewed this film seem to have almost universally found it really powerful and moving. The fact that I wanted that experience and didn’t really get it doesn’t mean that it’s not there to be gotten, after all. I just think that too often the film struck me as a document that wanted to believe in its own profundity more than it ever managed to express something profound. Abel at one point quotes a passage from memory—a passage from the works of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s long and complex, and I can imagine it being rich with meaning, but it’s so out of character for him, and seems so unrelated to the other appearances he makes on screen, that it just felt like a director’s affectation. Affected, too, is the movie’s final moment—an atmospherically lit and shot scene in which a character delivers to camera the final lines spoken by Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What on earth does Robin Goodfellow or a fairy-laden bucolic comedy have to do with this bitter, wintry French family drama, you might well ask, and that’s sure what I said out loud (I might have raised my voice) at the screen as the end credits rolled. Like, I’ve just told you the final scene in the movie, but if you stopped six minutes before the movie’s end and tried to guess which of the characters it is who speaks these lines, I bet you’d have no more than a 1 in 10 chance of getting it right, it’s that random. But I guess it’s “literary” or something. Anyway, it’s a challenging European art film, with some gruesome medical imagery, frank talk about death, and a little graphic sex—all of those things felt organic to the story, so I’m not complaining about anything being sensationalistic, etc., but I figure it’s good for you to know going in that for a movie called “A Christmas Tale” very little of it will be light-hearted or magical. Some smart folks have gotten a lot out of it, though, and if you try it yourself, I hope you do too.

I Know That Face: Anne Consigny, who plays the rigid daughter Elizabeth here, appears as Suzy Elisabeth in 2017’s Let It Snow, which is not to be confused with the 2019 Let It Snow that I reviewed three days ago. And Emmanuelle Devos, who here is Henri’s buxom Jewish girlfriend Faunia, who ducks out of the Christmas celebration to go and not celebrate Hanukkah with her own dysfunctional family, shows up as Beatrice Barand in 2023’s Noël joyeux.

That Takes Me Back: At one point we see family members getting wood from outside and moving it into the house for the fireplace, which was a regular nightly duty as a kid in the wintertime, for me. I’m happy not to have a wood stove any longer, but there are things I miss about it, and the smell of the woodpile on a cold December evening is among them. Also at one point one of Abel and Junon’s grandkids appears on screen dressed as a knight for the little impromptu Christmas play they’re staging, which reminds me of a brief and mortifying appearance I made in my church’s Christmas pageant as a child: I was dressed as a knight, and the passing Good King Wenceslas (a church teenager) caught his robe on my cardboard “armor”. As an adult I know the audience’s laughter wasn’t AT me at all, but as a kid of course it felt like I was the butt of the joke.

I Understood That Reference: We do catch glimpses of the creche at Abel and Junon’s home, where the grandkids wonder when Jesus will show up. Slightly later on, Faunia and Henri have a couple of brief exchanges that allude to Christian practice/Jesus as a central figure for the holiday, in connection with Faunia’s identity as a Jewish woman who wants to duck out before Christmas itself is fully under way.

Holiday Vibes (7.5/10): There’s no question that we are fully immersed in a household at Christmas, where things like a big family dinner and a Christmas play occur, not to mention the trip to midnight mass, etc. But big chunks of the movie take place outside that immediate context, and also Christmas itself is usually sidelined by whatever emotional trauma a character was working through on screen. Overall, this is a fairly Christmassy movie but not achieving peak levels of holiday.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): It’s very hard to give a fair rating here. Critics would place this as a 9 or a 9.5, as far as I can tell. In terms of my moment-to-moment comfort with the film, it played a lot like a 5 or a 5.5, much of the time. It ages a little better in the days after seeing it than I had expected it to, though, so that I don’t think a 5 would be a remotely fair rating, and I can certainly see the good craftsmanship in it. I’m splitting the difference then, but I want to acknowledge to you that I think the movie’s pretty polarizing, and that you’ll probably have one experience or the other, rather than a “7.5, fine but nothing special”.

Party Mood-Setter? I mean, I kind of still have no real idea what I watched, so I am reluctant to rule it out, but I don’t think it would work. It’s just too dense with characters and exchanges and subtext for you to not pay attention to it. Also, unless you are a speaker of the French language, you’ll have to be reading the subtitles to follow it, which isn’t great for a background movie.

Plucked Heart Strings? You know, it really seems like I should have been emotionally invested, but all these characters are so inscrutable that I couldn’t say I really connected with it at any point in this way. The meanest things they say to each other would hurt feelings in real life, but if they’re hurting feelings, it’s not usually obvious from the way anyone reacts.

Recommended Frequency: Either I need to not bother watching it again or I need to see it six times so that I can actually follow all the nuances of the dialogue and the intersecting storylines enough to really appreciate it. I have no idea which of those two things I’m going to do, genuinely. I think if a complex art house French family drama sounds like your idea of a good time, you should try it, and if it doesn’t, this really isn’t the movie that’s going to convince you to love foreign cinema.

You ought to have easy access to watch the film, if you did want to try it out. It’s streaming (with ads) on Plex, Philo, and Sling TV. You can pay to rent it on Apple TV and it looks to me like some streaming services will let you get it via subscription (maybe a subscription to the IFC streaming channel, or Criterion?). Barnes and Noble will sell it to you on Blu-ray or DVD, if it’s something you love enough to own, and if you’d rather just snag the disc for free at the library, Worldcat suggests you have hundreds of options.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Review Essay

Part of the fun of the Film for the Holidays experience, for me, is finally sitting down to watch a movie I have been meaning on some level to watch for years, only to find that it’s not quite what I was expecting. Sure, sometimes this is a negative experience, but more often it’s a neutral or positive one as I find myself recalibrating my expectations on the fly: it’s more interesting, at least, to be surprised. In the case of 1944’s movie musical, Meet Me in St. Louis, I was expecting to be mostly dialed in for the star power of the incomparable Judy Garland, and don’t get me wrong, Miss Show Business is here and as fabulous as any of us would expect. But sometimes in these holiday films, you get kind of fascinated by a truly charismatic supporting player—they’re not always even in sync with the rest of the cast or screenplay, but they’re so undeniably magnetic that you find yourself leaning in every time they’re on screen. Think Dan Levy as Abby’s flamboyant friend John in Happiest Season. Anyway, there’s a performance like that in Meet Me in St. Louis, and it tickled me.

Let’s handle the central story of the motion picture first, though—this is the story of the Smith family, and in some ways it’s an almost Austenesque premise wherein the oldest girls, Rose and Esther, are both pretty keen to land a guy (and grappling with some societal hurdles and conventions to do so) while maneuvering around a difficult parent (here, Mr. Alonzo Smith, their father). It’s also a story about turn-of-the-century American optimism—St. Louis as a city “on the grow” about to welcome the whole world to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a place western enough that the big cities back east are a different country you can only reach by means of echoing long-distance phone lines but also connected enough that kids from the local high school head to the elite universities of the Atlantic Seaboard pretty routinely. And it’s at least attempting to also be a story about the pressures on a lower middle class family: Mr. Smith’s worried enough about money that he’s willing to uproot the family to make a big move for his work, but not so worried about money that he can’t change his mind about that, at least in theory. The film doesn’t really land this last punch, I’m afraid, since the family hardly ever seems low income (given their pretty lavish digs in a lovely neighborhood, with the girls expecting to head off to college, and Mr. Smith’s professional standing as a lawyer), and this is a problem since a lot of the conflict in the story hinges on the idea that the Smiths are so in need of the promotion/raise that they’re willing to throw away a whole lot of happiness in order to get it. Sensible plots aren’t exactly the hallmark of the Golden Age Hollywood musical, and it’s probably fair to say that most people are being drawn here for that mix of MGM talent and Tin Pan Alley songwriting that make for a bit of a sensory extravaganza. But I still think we can do a little better than this.

The poster for "MGM's Meet Me in St. Louis" features overlapping portraits of several young people (two teenage girls, a younger girl, and a teenage boy), along with the credits for the main cast. The only tagline reads "Glorious Love Story with Music".

In some ways the movie’s a bit more grown up than you might expect: both Rose and Esther Smith are pretty savvy about boys. Esther (the character Judy Garland plays) at one point informs her big sister that “I’m going to let John Truett kiss me tonight.” When Rose chides her, saying, “Men don’t want the bloom rubbed off,” Esther quips back, “I think I have too much bloom. Maybe that’s the trouble with men.” These ladies know a thing or two about the need to attract a fellow’s attentions without, shall we say, overindulging either themselves or the fellow in the process. And of course it’s the 1940s, so the film’s going to ask us to play along with romanticizing things like a young man getting passionate enough that he grabs a young woman and kisses her, no permission sought: the fact that we know very well it’s what she wants doesn’t really make the moment 100% fun, from my perspective, but maybe I’m being too much of a wet blanket about it. Nobody in this film manages to seem like a bad person for more than about five minutes (and only for the sake of creating just enough conflict to keep the story humming along). When the meanest character in your motion picture is *checks notes* a devoted father who thinks he needs to relocate his family for their economic well-being, well, the stakes are pretty low.

I teased you a little up-front, though, with my claim that the show here is stolen by a high charisma supporting cast member, and I need to deliver the goods, so here it is: Margaret O’Brien, the child actress, is incredibly compelling as “Tootie” Smith, the youngest of the family’s five kids. We’re introduced to Tootie having wandered away from the family home to help deliver ice on a horse-drawn wagon, entertaining the delivery man between stops by discussing her plans for the burial and mourning of one of her dolls who she plans to have “die” later that day—as she tells him, the doll has four fatal diseases, “and it only takes one.” Later, on Halloween, we follow her through the neighborhood in an era predating the “or treat” option: Tootie’s all tricks, all the time, and her idea of a trick is on the level of stealing lawn furniture to add it to a bonfire, throwing flour at neighbors in an act of mock assassination, and, most memorably, the attempt to derail a double-decker streetcar by placing a hastily prepared mannequin on the tracks. She is a menace to society, and I love her. Admittedly, Tootie’s also young enough to be scared of the mayhem she’s capable of, but I think that only adds to the impressiveness of the mischief she accomplishes in one brief night out. She’s endlessly quotable and really my big complaint of the film’s second half is that it spends way too much time worrying about getting Esther and John’s romance sorted out (over, it has to be said, the most comically miniscule of hurdles) and far too little time letting me watch Tootie, I don’t know, pursue a career as a juvenile arsonist or weigh the pros and cons of poisoning her grade school teacher or whatever other kinds of sheer chaos she is probably up to, off screen.

Now, here’s where I probably ought to admit a certain amount of favoritism at work here, or at least my predisposition to cheer for spunky kids like Tootie Smith in St. Louis in 1903. Two of my great-grandparents were small town Missouri children in 1903-1904: my great-grandfather Warren was a scamp (injuring his hand as a 12 year old in an “accidental revolver discharge”…lord knows what Warren’s parents were doing at the time) and my great-grandmother Opal, who I will always and only ever think of as “Nana”, was a bright and brave woman all her life. In 1904, the year of the Exposition, Opal was a 9 year old living in Lewistown, Missouri: at 150 miles from St. Louis, she was too far away to get to go to the Fair with her father and grandmother, but her dad gave Opal and her younger sister Nellie the consolation prize of a trip to Quincy, Illinois (about 30 miles away) to see Barnum and Bailey’s Circus that summer. It was pretty easy for me to enjoy this 1900s peek into a Missouri family’s life, sanitized and historically inaccurate as I know much of it is, since it let me muse just a little about what it might have been like for Opal and Warren to hear tales of the World’s Fair or play a prank on Halloween. If you feel any kind of connection or kinship to this part of the country or that era of history, I bet this will work a little better for you, too.

And of course, what this movie does best of all is its music, which I haven’t really touched on. It’s a mix of songs: I’d never heard “The Boy Next Door” before but Judy Garland can make anything sound like a classic the moment she gets started. I was familiar with the chorus of “The Trolley Song”—and I bet many of you, too, know “Clang! Clang! Clang! went the trolley”—probably from the Looney Tunes or some similar source. And I could certainly sing all of this movie’s biggest hit and the one that pulls it squarely to Christmas (yes, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the conceit of this blog): Esther, in an attempt to soothe the fragile and frantic emotions of an agitated Tootie, pulls her little sister into her arms and sings, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” We get about 25 minutes of Christmas out of the film, but it’s a climactic 25 minutes, coming as it does at a point where the family’s preparing to move to New York, and treating the holiday as a huge final farewell—one last dance, one last tree in the front room, one last chance to maybe see if that John kid can get his act together and propose. At its best, it’s a perfect Golden Age holiday sequence—red and green gowns that dazzle the eye, a real humdinger of an emotional song performed beautifully, and a finish that affirms love and family and togetherness in the way we want all our holiday flicks to end. It’s just not always able to hold onto that perfection, since some of the machinations of the plot at the end are creaky, and while the song is beautiful and in Judy’s confident hands it packs an emotional heft out of the gate, its lyrics are sometimes a strange fit for the moment and the characters involved. The movie works, but it doesn’t work as well as it wants to believe it does. What it does do, aided so much by the energy of Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien, is give us the Smiths as a convincing and loving family, whose holiday celebration is genuinely joyful to look in on, and at this time of year, what else do we really want?

I Know That Face: We just saw Tom Drake of course, who here is Esther’s beau, John Truett, when he appeared as Pat Dingle, a similarly fresh-faced boy next door, in The Great Rupert. Margaret O’Brien, one of the last surviving child stars of the 1940s and the adorably gremlin “Tootie” Smith in this film, has voice acting roles in Elf Sparkle Meets Christmas the Horse and Elf Sparkle and the Special Red Dress (playing Mrs. Claus in the latter), as well as portraying Mrs. Foxworth in This Is Our Christmas. And Margaret also plays Beth March in 1949’s Little Women—a film that, much like this one, incorporates a significant Christmas sequence even though it’s not exactly a “holiday movie”—and she’s not alone, since the March parents in that version of Little Women are played by Leon Ames and Mary Astor, the same actors portraying her parents in this movie, while Harry Davenport, who’s Tootie’s grandfather in this film, appears in the Alcott adaptation as Dr. Barnes.

That Takes Me Back: This film’s set so long ago that it’s not so much making me nostalgic for things I remember as it makes me curious about things that maybe my grandparents or great-grandparents would have been nostalgic for. Would the making of your own household ketchup have been such an engrossing enterprise back then, as it seems to be in the opening scenes? Did people really tie ribbons in bows around the necks of housecats back then? I associate this more with animated Disney films, in part because most of the cats I have known would have declared a vendetta against anyone subjected them to such indignities, and yet there the bow is on Tootie’s cat. As I mentioned earlier, the film gives me a glimpse of a Halloween full of tricks only, and honestly, the chaos and vandalism is overwhelming enough that I can understand the citizenry of St. Louis getting together after Halloween 1903 and agreeing to the new “tradition” of trick-or-treating as a kind of public safety measure. Anyone who knew Tootie Smith would have gotten to work the next day in an attempt to invent the fun size candy bar. Oh, and there’s some shenanigans involving a dance card, which made me wonder when the end of the dance card era was (and why it ended).

I Understood That Reference: Tootie’s waiting up for Santa Claus, but of course he won’t show up until she’s asleep. How will he find the family next year in New York, though? Gosh darn it, Tootie, you’re too dang cute sometimes. When you’re not feeling murderous, that is.

Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): As noted above, the final half hour or so of the film really does a pretty good job of realizing an emotionally resonant and colorfully delightful Christmas holiday. The addition to the canon of a now-ubiquitous holiday song has to count for something here, too. But the score can only get so high before I say, hang on a second, the vast majority of the running time unfolds without even any reference to a winter holiday. The score of 4.5 is probably generous, all things told, but like all my numerical scores, it’s to be taken with a grain of salt.

Actual Quality (8/10): At its best, this is a lot of fun—a couple of great songs, a lovely Christmas tableau, a charming performance from a child actress. At its worst, it’s super forgettable: some of the music isn’t all that catchy, there’s so little conflict of any real consequence, and the film’s biggest questions as we get to the third act are a mixture of problems that will clearly be resolved with ease and problems that barely seem like problems. The plot’s not strong enough to be a selling point, but it doesn’t give itself over into spectacle quite enough to get away with a weak story the way that other films frankly do (the plot of White Christmas, for instance, isn’t better than the plot of Meet Me in St. Louis, but that movie finds way more ways to captivate an audience and let the plot take a back seat). Shaking all that up, this ends up a B/B- of a movie for me as an artistic product (even if I felt a little more charitable towards it, as a viewer).

Party Mood-Setter? There’s not quite enough Christmas in the film to work for this purpose. But it’s so gentle and full of nostalgia that I don’t think it would particularly distract you if you did turn it on.

Plucked Heart Strings? I mean, I was not expecting this, but I really did find myself getting emotional at the Christmas gathering: the love of the people involved, and their gratitude for each other, got to me on some level.

Recommended Frequency: I’d say that Meet Me in St. Louis is a film that, if you watched it for a few Christmases in a row, would become “a Christmas movie” just as much as a lot of other films that are not set primarily at Christmas but have some key Christmas scenes—in the vein of It’s A Wonderful Life or White Christmas in that way. I’m not sure it’s quite great enough for me to make that effort, but it’s more than good enough for a viewing and it’s one I will absolutely watch again, as much for the old-time nostalgia of it as for the holiday elements.

As with so many other films this year, you can watch this (with ads) on Tubi. It’s rentable on streaming from almost all the places you might think to pay to rent it, too. The Blu-ray is cheaper than the DVD at Barnes and Noble, if you know you want to own it, and Worldcat will help you find it in over 1,800 libraries worldwide.

The Silent Partner (1978)

Review Essay

Last year, I commented in my review of the Albert Finney musical Scrooge that I’d selected it in part because the 1970s have a dearth of holiday feature films, and that if I wanted to cover at least one movie from each decade from the 1930s to the 2020s, one of my few other options was “a Santa Claus bank heist filmed in Canada.” Well, it’s a new year and I need a new 1970s representative lined up, so here we go, folks. A couple of readers last year encouraged me to give this one a try, and I appreciate them steering me to something very different artistically, since I’m enjoying exploring the scope of what a “holiday movie” might be. But be forewarned—this film’s very graphic, both sexually and violently, and it’s the violence (and often the sexual violence) of this film that ultimately made it too tough a viewing experience for me to enjoy it much.

There’s plenty of reason why The Silent Partner seems at the outset like a potential hidden gem—in addition to just the amusing nature of the premise of a Santa Claus bank robbery, I notice right away that our main character, the timid bank teller Miles Cullen, is played by Elliott Gould back in his undeniable leading man era, and one of his colleagues is played by a young, fresh-faced John Candy. So far so good, right? Add to that the fact that, as I eventually realize, the crooked Santa is being portrayed by the famously talented Christopher Plummer (in an admitted lull in his long and illustrious career) and it just seems like this film should pop off the screen. The film’s great at evoking the 1970s by just capturing the era as it was—big hair and earth tones, the smoky haze of the air anywhere indoors adding a slightly dreamlike quality—and as a guy who grew up just a few years later, a lot of the imagery made me nostalgic for the media of my youth, at least initially. I was hopeful.

The poster for The Silent Partner depicts a faded, creased black and white photograph of the face of Elliott Gould as Miles Cullen, in front of which we see superimposed Christopher Plummer in a full body red-and-white Santa costume, brandishing a revolver. Above them appears the tagline "Do you still believe in Santa Claus?" Below them, next to the film's title and major credits, the small black and white image of a collapsed (murdered?) woman is lying at the bottom left corner of the poster.

The plot is engaging also, in the first act, when the dominos are aligning. Through a slightly implausible set of occurrences, Miles Cullen realizes that there’s a Santa Claus who intends to rob his mall bank branch, and who specifically plans to come in right after a major retailer has dropped a huge wad of Christmas cash off as a deposit. Planning in advance, he arranges to hide the cash in his lunchbox, so that the Santa robber will walk off with a MUCH smaller heist, while taking the heat for the thousands in missing cash that Cullen will pocket. The robber can’t complain to anybody, of course, given his criminal liability, and thus Cullen will slip away laughing with the perfect crime. The only thing Cullen hasn’t thought about is that the crook under that Santa costume, a hardened tough named Reikle, is absolutely ruthless enough to hunt him down and cause no end of pain and suffering in pursuit of getting the cash he knows Cullen screwed him out of. At that point, it’s a cat and mouse game: Reikle can’t kill Cullen until he knows where the cash is, and Cullen can’t escape Reikle because he isn’t really capable of the kind of violence it takes to permanently rid yourself of a guy like that once you’ve stolen “his” money.

To some extent, your ability to have a good time watching this movie will depend on your patience with a cast of characters who are, almost without exception, neither charming nor interesting. Cullen’s sad sack bank teller desperately wants a woman, and he’s surrounded by people having a ton of semi-fulfilling sex, including a lucky-in-love John Candy—moreover, the environment at the bank is so sexually charged that one of his fellow tellers is a young woman walking around in a tight shirt that says “bankers do it with interest”, a walking HR problem if HR had meaningfully existed in 1978. Anyway, I’d love to tell you that rooting for Cullen feels like I’m pulling for the underdog, but somehow Gould’s portrayal of Cullen never felt appealing to me: he’s sleazy, he’s selfish, he hides a fair amount of misogyny under his “nice guy” exterior, and ultimately he risks way too much danger (and not just for himself) in pursuit of an amount of cash he himself admits isn’t really life-changing. I want him to “win” because Reikle is a monster, and because I know the screenplay has Cullen set up as the hero, but knowing that the movie wants me to think of Cullen as the hero ends up becoming an unsettling experience, since for me, men like Cullen are guys I don’t identify with and don’t want to. And I don’t think the movie is at all self-aware in wanting to explore Cullen’s flaws, though others might see it differently. The same goes for basically every character in the film, other than Reikle, a character the movie’s working overtime to present to us as evil incarnate since that justifies everybody else’s actions (to some extent).

It’s Reikle and the world around him that moves this film from an unsettling watch for me into a really upsetting one. We see multiple acts of violence committed by Reikle against partly or fully nude women, at least one of whom is a sex worker, as he expresses his frustration and his dominance by hurting them. And “hurting” is too gentle a word—I don’t want anybody to be as unaware as I was, going into this movie, that one of the scenes involves the violent decapitation of a woman using the broken glass side of a fish tank. I’m obviously familiar with the fact that horror movies traffic in this kind of outlandish violence all the time, and maybe it doesn’t sound all that intense to you, but speaking as a guy who generally doesn’t watch movies like that, it was an incredibly tough scene to sit through. I think part of the sourness of all this is that I consistently felt the sex and violence were exploitative and not communicative. The woman Reikle murders exists only to be hot enough to have sex with Cullen, and then fragile enough for Reikle to destroy so that he can get back at Cullen, and then important enough to Cullen that he’s motivated by that killing to really ruin Reikle once and for all. But she’s not a person with her own ideas or angle that I can decipher—she’s not a character in this story the way Reikle and Cullen are. I won’t tell anybody they can’t find purpose in the horror of this movie at its most violent, but I couldn’t find it, and I couldn’t really give myself a reason in retrospect why most of the events of the film had happened, other than to engineer either naked women or gruesome violence (or both) onto the screen I was watching. I’ve handled both sexuality and violence really sympathetically here with regard to past films, too, in Carol and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, so I’m confident it’s not that I’m automatically stuffy or Puritanical about what belongs in a holiday movie. I just want these choices to matter, especially when they’re exposing performers to really vulnerable or even potentially degrading moments on screen, and it’s troubling to me when I think that they’re not being treated with respect.

In the end, I’d say that the film also lets me down by never really knowing what story it’s telling. Cullen at the outset is this nebbishy nobody, someone so harmless that his boss reliably uses him as “cover” by having Cullen bring the boss’s girlfriend to the Christmas party so that the boss’s wife doesn’t figure things out. And yet at some point a switch flips and he’s openly defying a murderous criminal, tailing him home down dark streets and setting up elaborate schemes to entrap him. It’s just not clear why or how he knows how to do any of this, and if he was Kevin McAllister in Home Alone I would shrug and say, this is a child’s fantasy, who cares how Kevin knows to do these things? But this isn’t a child’s fantasy, and it’s too bleak to be a satisfying grownup fantasy (for this adult viewer, anyway…I could believe this is the fantasy of some Reddit incel but the less I think about that, the better). As a result, I don’t know how I’m supposed to understand who Cullen is or what he’s doing, which is a problem in a film that’s 100% about this guy’s triumphs and travails. Reikle, too, is weirdly underwritten: I can’t tell you whether Plummer was playing him as con man or as unhinged megalomaniac or as sadistic freak, and my sense is that the director wasn’t giving him much help to find the character either. I get the feeling that the filmmakers were most motivated by creating something for the male gaze—hot women and gritty violence and in the end the guy that everybody discounted (especially the women!) was the cleverest of them all and gets to both engineer some violence and have a hot woman, maybe even more than one.

I Know That Face: Christopher Plummer (here playing Reikle, our primary villain) narrates a Claymation short film in 1998 called The First Christmas, and in 1990 narrates two other holiday films, namely Madeline’s Christmas and The Little Crooked Christmas Tree. Plummer also appears as Scrooge in 2017’s The Man Who Invented Christmas, which maybe someday I’ll add to my rotation of Christmas Carol adjacent films. Indeed, Dickens makes a lot of intersections with members of this cast: Susannah York, for instance, (here portraying the much put-upon Julie) plays Mrs. Cratchit in the George C. Scott adaptation of A Christmas Carol from 1984. Ken Pogue, whose familiar weathered face appears in this film as Detective Willard, is a veteran of multiple Christmas outings: he’s Hank Fisher in 2009’s A Dog Named Christmas, Dr. Norman Ferguson in 2000’s The Christmas Secret, and back in the day he was Jack Latham in 1979’s An American Christmas Carol, in which Henry Winkler plays the miser Benedict Slade under a massive amount of old-age makeup. Most of all, though, you (like me) will have spotted a very young and unexpectedly trim John Candy who here is in the minor supporting role as the bank clerk Simonsen, but who we will all well remember as Del Griffith, the shower curtain ring salesman from the 1987 Thanksgiving movie, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, as well as, of course, Gus Polinski, the Polka King of the Midwest, in 1990’s Home Alone.

That Takes Me Back: Everything about the bank situation for Miles Cullen was so reminiscent of days gone by (for me): some of you out there have safety deposit boxes, but I haven’t opened one in decades. I can’t remember the last time I was counting out a cash deposit at the bank….maybe back when I ran the staff soda machine at the high school I taught at? And I also can’t remember the last time I handled carbon paper, despite it being everywhere in my youth. Oh, and while this is less specific, I just have to say, every single coat I saw on the Canadian extras roaming around whatever mall this was filmed at reminded me of the coats I was buying in the late 1980s from the local thrift store: I don’t know why it was the winter coats, in particular, that felt nostalgic to me, but it was. Maybe it’s that I didn’t have much occasion as a 10 year old boy to wear a tight t-shirt that said “bankers do it with interest”.

I Understood That Reference: I’ll give it to The Silent Partner: Santa Claus is all over this movie, both cheerfully and violently. It’s really the one successful holiday element in an otherwise not at all Christmassy movie. I wouldn’t say the film deals much in the details of the various Santa legends, but maybe that’s for the best.

Holiday Vibes (3/10): It’s all about those mall scenes—ringing bells and Santa outfits, decorations up at the bank, etc. But they’re done with pretty early on, and once the initial heist takes place, we’re fast-forwarding well beyond the holiday season and not headed back there. Christmas is a bit player here, and since it occurs at the beginning instead of at the end of the film, I think it loses even a little more weight in terms of impact.

Actual Quality (3.5/10): There’s something interesting about the plot machinations here—Cullen’s creativity in solving his problems is interesting, and while neither Gould nor Plummer is really given a great role to play, they’re both talented enough to elevate at least some of the scenes into something more gripping and memorable. For me, though, that’s about where it stops: in the end I don’t think the plot or the characters make enough sense on their own terms, and I’m sure not excited about the ways this story is being presented. It feels far more hackish and less purposeful than I was hoping for.

Party Mood-Setter? Haha, dear reader, I hope you are not throwing any parties in which a violent decapitation would seem like chill background media. If you’re watching this movie at a gathering, I think it must be because this is a film you want to pay full attention to.

Plucked Heart Strings? I mean, there’s emotion in the horrifying acts of violence against women here, but that’s not really what I’m talking about in this category. Ultimately those women aren’t made real enough by the script to be people I’m moved by. I’m just upset, and that’s not the kind of emotion you’re reaching for from a holiday film, or at least that’s how I feel about it.

Recommended Frequency: I’m really not sure how to recommend this movie, which I doubt I will ever watch again—it will work for audiences that are ready for it, but I’m not entirely sure who that is. I think it might well work better as a horror thriller than it does in any kind of Christmas context, but if you like a Santa slasher movie (and I know many such films exist), this is probably one for you to try. Good luck with it.

If, despite my warnings, you’re up for a viewing experience with this film, it can be rented from most of the big players in streaming land for a few dollars. You can buy it on Blu-ray if you’re really sure this is your thing, though I might suggest a quick try at your local library first (Worldcat says about 300 libraries have it on disc) to see if you’re really sure it’s worth owning. And if you’re in line at the bank in front of a guy in a Santa costume, I say, why not offer to let him go ahead of you?

The Family Man (2000)

Review Essay

Folks, here’s the thing about The Family Man. It’s somehow 12 different movies you’ve seen before and it’s none of them at all. It’s A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day and Big and 13 Going On 30, but it’s also really not like any of those movies in so many key ways that you should probably forget I just mentioned them. It’s a film that, for me, gets some things so right and then fumbles the ball in such weirdly unexpected ways that it’s maybe one of the hardest films I’ve had to reach a numerical rating for, since it’s incredibly hard to reduce this motion picture to a single number (of any magnitude) without feeling like I’m only describing some of the movie I had in front of me. If you’ve seen it, I really wonder what you think of it, and if you haven’t, I’ll work at avoiding spoiling the ending but you may want to take it in before I ramble on about it. In the end, there’s one element at work inside The Family Man that does kind of explain all of it—its genius at its best and its wobbliness at its worst. And that element is a man we’ve come to know (and love?) under the stage name Nicolas Cage.

It’s probably at about this point that you want to tap my shoulder and say, “James, you still haven’t told us literally anything about this movie?” Okay, okay: on the one hand, this is a film with such a clear central premise that it should be easy to summarize. It seems like a classic tale about the road not taken: Jack, a thirty-something Manhattan high finance whiz got where he is in life by leaving behind him a stable girlfriend, Kate, whose goals were more altruistic. But a Christmas miracle suddenly places him in the world where he made the other choice—waking up in bed with his wife Kate on Christmas morning, with loud young kids and a needy dog and in-laws crashing through the front door. And then of course he’d like to escape this bad dream he’s having, but instead he’s got to live his way through it until….well, the “until” is part of this movie’s mystery and either its ultimate success or its failure. But the basic structure of a body swap / life swap / alternate timeline movie in which the fancy big city guy learns something as he stumbles through life in the suburbs is largely going to show up on screen in the way you’re expecting, at least for the movie’s long and chaotic second act. The third act, on the other hand, is unexpected in ways I’m really not sure about—maybe it’s a strength of the movie or maybe it’s a weakness that it didn’t really arrive at its outcomes in one of the ways I’d expect films of this kind to work. I really don’t want to spoil it, so I may have to leave that judgment to you.

The poster for The Family Man depicts Nicolas Cage from behind as he stands in a trenchcoat on a snowy street with his briefcase on the sidewalk beside him. He is looking in through a large picture window at an image of himself seated in an armchair with Tea Leoni and their kids, cuddling together to post for a family Christmas photograph. The tagline appearing next to him reads, "What if..."

Back to Nic Cage, though, and the reason this film is both really good and not really successful in landing the punches it wants to. Cage is an astounding, generational talent: there’s nobody like him, and he does things nobody else can do, which is not to say he’s the finest actor working but he may be one of the most irreplaceable. He’s on screen for nearly the entire running time of the movie, since this alternate universe switcheroo is one that effectively he alone is conscious of, so it’s his experience we’re tracking. Given that fact, Cage’s fundamental watchability is hugely important—he makes everything from his character’s frustration to his character’s delight feel energized, even thrilling, as he takes the roller coaster ride of a man trying to figure out how he feels about this new life he’s been dropped into. Even when the movie’s probably taking too long to complete the roller coaster ride (and it starts to feel a little pedestrian), you know Cage is capable of anything, and you keep your eyes on him. As the character of Jack works out who he is, not as a balance sheet but as a person, he starts to understand why a man with his financial genius “settled” for the life of a suburban dad. At its best, the film is both funny and heartfelt, as Jack navigates the sometimes outlandish silliness of his new world and discovers who he really cares about, and, maybe more importantly, discovers what it means to care about them.

And what makes all this not quite work, in my opinion, or at least not quite work in the ways that all-time great multiverse movies like Groundhog Day work, is that Jack is too compelling from the very beginning of the story. The scenes we see of him on Christmas Eve prior to the dimensional shift are of a man who, sure, is a little arrogant and flighty in his personal relationships, a man maybe too used to the opera and fine whiskey and out of touch with “everyday life”. But he’s also really happy? And he’s not even a cruel person, that we see—sure, he’s in a world of high finance and mergers, etc., but there’s no obvious ways he’s complicit in ethical violations, and he’s upbeat and funny with his coworkers in ways that feel basically positive. It’s not a bad life; to the contrary, it feels like a guy who’s figured out how to live at the top in ways he’s pretty fulfilled by. Even if we consider the inciting incident that drags him to a new plane of existence, it’s not something he did wrong—to the contrary, he risks his own life pretty needlessly, since he could have remained an “innocent bystander”, but instead he steps forward to try to de-escalate a potentially lethal confrontation at the cash register of the shop he’s in, only to learn that the dangerous criminal is actually an angel. Or something…honestly, the movie’s pretty bad at explaining the metaphysics of why this switch-up even happens or what qualified Jack for the experience. Don Cheadle just smiles and tells Jack to remember he did this to himself, but what does that even mean? Anyway, the result of all this is that we never really understand why we should be rooting for Jack not to go back to the life he came from, other than that Tea Leoni is hot (I mean, no arguments there), and that we know that in a Hollywood movie we’re supposed to be rooting for marriage and the suburbs and 2.3 children and a car in every garage, etc. And knowing why we would be rooting for the suburbs is pretty darn important in a movie that is about really nothing else.

One of the other problems, fundamentally, is that the movie starts like it’s shot out of a cannon. We literally know nothing about the Jack/Kate relationship prior to the breakup other than them standing at the airport gate in 1987 with her telling him she’s got a premonition he shouldn’t fly to London for his internship, and him telling her it’s ludicrous for her to ditch law school and him to ditch the internship. It’s the only glimpse we’ll see of the relationship he left behind, and as a result, I just think it’s hard to invest myself fully in believing that clearly this young grad student should have listened to his girlfriend’s weird dream logic rather than continue to pursue a career he clearly thrives in. And then once you start to lean on the logic of the movie, it does break down a bit…maybe most importantly, why is it true that Jack has to give up all his dreams and opportunities, whereas Kate still gets to go to law school (she’s an underpaid lawyer for a nonprofit in the “future” of the movie) and practice her craft, and the house and the life near her parents and all the rest of it are clearly the things she values in life. Why are her values more important than his? Again, if the movie made him an obvious monster at the outset—a selfish, cruel man who uses his gifts to oppress other folks—then it might be a simplistic moral fable but at least I would understand why Kate = good and Jack = bad. As it is, the film’s values feel unfortunately like the echo of a ‘90s movie that presumes we know who the good and bad guys are without needing to actually make the case.

The holidayness of the movie is tough to calculate: again, I know that messages about family, etc., are often associated with this season of the year, but given how weird the movie’s ethics are, I’m not sure how much I want to credit it with having a meaningful message in that regard. The magic of Christmas Eve / Christmas morning is definitely central to the film’s opening and closing sequences, but in the middle it’s just January in New Jersey, and given how detached from reality Jack is (either because of his palatial life as a wealthy financier, or because it’s Christmas Day and he woke up in the wrong house in someone else’s underpants and he’s frantically trying to put it all together) we don’t get a ton of Christmas celebration to lean into. Add in the vagueness of the character Cheadle plays, who could easily have been more explicitly made an angel or an elf or Santa Claus or anything you like, and we lose even more chances to ground this experience in something more explicitly Yuletide.

I think in the end, this is a movie that feels like maybe it hooked Hollywood producers as a great premise, and then between that point and the final cut, neither the screenwriters (Diamond and Weissman, a partnership also responsible for….yikes, Evolution and Old Dogs, okay, some of this movie’s problems are making more sense now) nor the director (Brett Ratner, DOUBLE yikes, that man’s Wikipedia page has a whole section devoted to “sexual assault allegations”) figured out how to make it really work. And the more I’m looking at what I just found out about the three guys involved, yeah, their struggle to tell a magical, nuanced tale about love and family life is maybe just a bit more explicable. But here’s the thing: that premise is still really powerful. And Cage and Leoni are probably just about perfect casting for a movie like this, in this era. The second act may sag, and the third act may have a couple of unexpected curves in it, but ultimately their performances keep me hooked on the film, maybe in part because they make Jack and Kate alive enough that I don’t care too much about the screenplay not justifying why I should be rooting for them to be together again. I just want these two people who are clearly passionate about each other to be together again. That’s the kind of thing a movie can do, and this one does it well enough that it may be my most memorable takeaway.

I Know That Face: Saul Rubinek, who here plays the generally nebbish Alan Mintz, appears as Mr. Green in 2005’s Santa’s Slay, in which Mr. Claus is a demon who lost a bet with an angel. Jeremy Piven, who in this film is Jack’s suburban buddy Arnie, plays the titular father in 2020’s My Dad’s Christmas Date, which sure sounds like a winner from the title, eh? Nicolas Cage, Jack himself of course, was the surprising choice to voice Jacob Marley in a widely panned British adaptation of the classic story in 2001’s animated Christmas Carol: The Movie. And Don Cheadle, here portraying “Cash” (an angel?), is of course well known for his role in the MCU as Colonel James Rhodes, including in the film Iron Man 3, which is acclaimed by the Die Hard crowd as yet another action movie that counts as a Christmas flick….and yes, by the forgiving standards of this very blog, I have to give it to them. It counts.

That Takes Me Back: As a real fan of the paper map (who, yes, acknowledges that Google Maps has made everything simpler), I did love the chaos of Jack having to fumble with a paper map while driving his way around chaotically, like we used to. It was nostalgic, too, to see a CRT monitor the size of a destroyer on his office desk, not to mention a checkbook with a bunch of entries for deposits and withdrawals in its register. I wonder…do we even teach students to “balance a checkbook” in Home Economics these days, and if so, why? Lastly, I couldn’t help but think of September 11th and all that’s changed since—certainly when I got a brief and shocking glimpse of the Twin Towers in an establishing shot (like we always used to do when filming New York City in the 1990s), and also when I watched a character making that old movie classic, the impulsive sprint to the gate at the airport, which now of course is simply impossible.

I Understood That Reference: Other than one character’s quip, “Santa Claus, you’re half an hour late,” I didn’t spot anything.

Holiday Vibes (4/10): As I note above, there’s not enough Christmas in the screenplay, or on screen, to really make this movie feel like Christmas to me. But it’s in there enough that I can see this being a movie this time of year for some folks, and certainly any movie involving magic and snowfall has to get at least an extra half point, doesn’t it?

Actual Quality (8/10): Like I said at the outset, this movie defies numbers. I could watch Cage prancing and singing around his enormous walk-in closet for 45 minutes but that doesn’t make this movie a 10, you know? As it is, I’m trying to split the difference between my remaining really engaged with this movie throughout and my having a ton of notes about the ways I would have improved the film, given a chance.

Party Mood-Setter? Probably not? It’s hard to explain how weirdly intense the movie is—Jack’s outbursts are a lot to handle, even though I can generally track where they’re coming from. Not really background fare.

Plucked Heart Strings? There’s a moment or two that felt pretty authentic, but I’d be surprised if the film brought anybody to tears. The complicated combination of the multiverse angle and therefore the weird emotional truth/falsity of these moments makes it harder to relate to than it would otherwise have been, I think.

Recommended Frequency: I have to be honest: I feel like I’ll watch it again, although I think there are other films that cover this kind of material better. There’s something to this movie, and maybe after another watch or two, I’ll understand better what, if anything, it means to me?

If you’d like to watch The Family Man yourself, right now you’ve got some options. Subscribers to Peacock or to Amazon Prime will have an easy time. You can rent it from all the usual streaming services, and Barnes and Noble will sell you the film on Blu-ray or DVD. Public library users, Worldcat assures me you can snag this one from over 1,600 libraries in its database, so hopefully there’s a handy copy near you. Happy viewing to you!

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