Tag: drama

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!

Carol for Another Christmas (1964)

Review Essay:

At the outset, I’ll remind you that Sundays at FTTH are Christmas Carol days.  Each Sunday, as I did last year, I’ll be bringing you a different adaptation of Dickens’s absolutely timeless classic.  Like last year also, I’m aiming for a mix of versions, some of them more traditional and some more experimental: today’s film, a 1964 television movie entitled Carol for Another Christmas, definitely belongs in the latter camp.  Anyone familiar with The Twilight Zone will immediately recognize the layered depth of a Rod Serling screenplay, as one of the masters of television suspense and speculative fiction creates something uniquely American out of the classic English story.  And you may notice as the film progresses that it feels a lot more cinematic than television movies normally would, especially those of this era: that’s because this is a film directed by four-time Academy Award winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz, director of The Philadelphia Story, of All About Eve, and, maybe most crucially for our purposes, of 1938’s A Christmas Carol, a faithful and widely-beloved adaptation of Dickens’s novella starring Reginald Owen.  Mankiewicz, who never directed another TV movie, knows the right ways to evoke the spirit of the tale even as this version of it does away with almost all of the trappings we normally expect from this story, and what remains here is truly powerful, even unsettling, on a level that I think everyone should watch, and maybe especially every American living in 2025 should.

The premise of this film unfolds in the following way: wealthy American industrialist Dan Grudge is essentially alone in his enormous mansion on Christmas Eve, attended only by a couple of servants who know to steer clear of him in his current bleak mood.  He is mourning, as he seemingly always does, the loss of his beloved son, Marley Grudge, who died serving in WWII on Christmas Eve, 1944, and whose spirit hovers underneath this film even if he does not make himself visible and audible as an apparition in the way we might expect.  A knock at the front door brings a visitor—Dan’s nephew Fred, who mourns his cousin also—and Dan and Fred find themselves immediately at odds as two people who agree on nothing but their fondness for the absent Marley.  Fred is a liberal idealist, someone working for international cooperation and peace, which Dan dismisses as dangerous foolishness.  Grudge thinks the world can go hang itself, and let America take care of Americans…are you getting restless, yet?  Rod Serling’s not going to let you off the hook here, politically—to the contrary, the politics of all this are its point.  Dan acts and speaks like someone who thinks America belongs to him and not to Fred; that, moreover, America needs someone like Dan to protect itself from Fred.  When Fred tries to soften his uncle by wishing him a “merry Christmas,” Dan’s reply is that he is “in no mood for the brotherhood of man.”  Each man is sure that the other one’s ideology will lead to conflict, to global war, to the calamity that threatens the lives of the whole world’s peoples.  And while Fred does not issue any ominous prophecies—much like Dickens’s nephew Fred, he merely leaves with words of compassion and hope—something about the exchange ignites the visitations that will haunt Grudge this night (and haunt him they do).  Fred leaves and Dan suddenly thinks he can see his son’s reflection in a window.  There is a figure who disappears the moment Dan tries to focus on him.  The record player in Marley’s room fires up the Andrews Sisters, whose harmonious glee is suddenly eerie, almost unearthly…only, when Grudge runs upstairs to turn it off, he finds that it is all in his head.  The player is silent.  And then we are in the fog, with him.

The DVD cover for Carol for Another Christmas is in black and white. At the top it reads "the Lost Rod Serling Science Fiction Classic". Below that, Serling appears on the right half of the image, facing inwards, while the tagline next to him reads, "Where the future meets the past...and our world collides." Below this, six small portrait photographs stretch across the screen depicting members of the cast.

The Past / Present / Future structure of the story is retained, but each sequence is radically altered from what we know in Dickens.  In the past, Grudge finds himself on a naval transport ship in an endless dark mist-covered ocean, a vessel carrying the bodies of the dead.  The vessel’s pilot is the only other seemingly living soul aboard, played by a young Steve Lawrence in maybe the only dramatic role he ever took, but he’s cast well here.  His youthful face and voice take Dan back to the end of WWI, a war that he’s still angry about as one that killed a bunch of “suckers” we sent to die for democracy.  When the Ghost asks him if Marley was a “sucker”, Dan is startled into understanding the meaning of what he’s been saying.  He backs down a little but struggles to explain what he really thinks, and he and the Ghost argue over what really led to a second global conflict, and what he thinks will keep us from a third.  The solemn, mournful reality of the dead soldiers around them contextualizes everything they say, and ultimately it’s too much for Dan, who leaves the ship, only to find that the Ghost has brought him to his own past more directly….to Dan Grudge, a commander in the U.S. Navy, with his WAVE driver, a young woman named Lt. Gibson, at Hiroshima in September 1945, one month after the bomb fell.  Haunting doesn’t begin to cover how intense and horrifying it is to watch Grudge confront his own memories of the Japanese school girls he encounters there, bandaged and faceless, so wrapped in gauze they resemble mummies, if not the shrouded dead on the transport he just left.  He and Gibson, both profoundly shaken by what they are seeing and hearing, argue over the morality of what has happened here, with Grudge defending the necessity, even the morality, of the A-Bomb, and Gibson demanding that he set aside his “simple arithmetic” and deal with the human cost of the conflagration, even quoting the Bible at him in her desperate attempt to waken him into sharing her outrage.

I don’t want to narrate the whole film to you because I want you to watch it – to encounter it with eyes and ears that are ready for (but not guarded against) what Serling and Mankiewicz are trying to say.  Dan Grudge, in an attempt to escape the horrors of the past, finds his way to the Present and a new Ghost….but only by walking through the doorway at Hiroshima that led into the room where the Japanese children were being housed.  The film rarely misses an opportunity for symbolism of this kind—we can only understand the present by literally walking through the doorway of the horrors committed in the past.  The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Dan to the realities of an America in the 1960s that, my friend, I wish I could tell you did not feel like America in 2025.  It is a sobering and troubling experience to understand how little our society learned from the 1960s, as Dan encounters the world’s needs and is forced to make sense of how little is being done about them.  He and the new Ghost find themselves just as at odds as he was in the Past, with the narrative of a wealthy American man repeatedly wrecking itself on the truth of the reality he has chosen to ignore.  It was powerfully convicting stuff, for me.  And the Future is maybe the most audacious reimagining possible, as a new Ghost leads him into a post-nuclear-conflict America, where the town meeting hall Grudge knows well is now a shattered ruin, inhabited only by the Cult of the Imperial Me, a sect devoted to the “truth” that there is only one person who matters, and it is Me.  The Me at the head of all these disheveled, chattering Mes is played by Peter Sellers at that level of manic, malicious energy that maybe only he could have delivered in 1964—the performance is astonishing, as is the world Serling imagines.  Dan Grudge has to reckon with the chaos and violence of a world in which “looking out for yourself” has become the one watchword of humankind—a hellscape so bleak that, when one character unexpectedly advances the argument that we can have law and ethics and honor and decency because “these things were not destroyed by the bomb”, the appeal is not only laughable to the other survivors, they find the suggestion that humanity can be good so insane that it amounts to treason against the “non-government” of the Me People.  The violent conclusion of this sequence is not visually graphic (this is a TV movie from 1964, after all), but in emotional terms it could hardly be more unsettling.  Grudge is so tormented by what he has seen and heard that he throws himself at the Ghost of Christmas Future’s feet, begging to know what happened to him in this desolate future and whether these events could be altered or whether Fate had already committed the world to this end.  And then he is looking up at the curtains, and the picture of his son Marley.  The bells are ringing.  It is Christmas morning.

In the same way that the film thus far has been a dramatically altered version of the Dickensian events, the conclusion to the film is different also—Grudge is not a gleeful, celebratory presence in this epilogue as much as he is a chastened, bewildered, shaken version of himself, a man still reconstructing his own sense of himself and his world in the unexpectedly gentle morning light.  We do not entirely see beneath his surface, but it is clear from what little he says and does that something has happened to him, and that something is happening to him, still.  Perhaps the same thing that Serling and Mankiewicz hope is happening to us, the viewers, as we reflect on what we have just experienced.  The film offers no easy answers, but the door that Serling holds open to the future is clearly one that assumes Fred has won the argument with Dan about what it will take for the world to live in true and lasting peace.

What, then, is this American Christmas Carol in another guise—who is it for?  My feeling is that it’s for all of us.  In a way, I think Serling has given us what we no longer really encounter in the Dickens versions of this story—a genuinely convicting and unsettling understanding that WE are being haunted by these ghosts also, that the message of peace and brotherhood is not some easygoing “let’s all hug at Christmas” lark but a truly daunting and monumental undertaking that demands more from us than we might ever otherwise be willing to give.  This version of the story, unlike so many others, offers us very little in the way of transformation and hope because Serling does not know from the vantage point of 1964 whether we really will transform ourselves, and therefore cannot offer us too much in the way of encouragement that it will, in fact, all work out for the good.  Speaking from the vantage point of 2025, I think perhaps his reluctance was warranted.  We learned too little from the 20th Century, and much of what we “learned” as a society was, I think, clearly the wrong lesson, something that has led us into what I will euphemistically call our current predicament.  There is an honesty to this version of the story that is not always easy to sit with, but perhaps the time has come again (as it did in 1964) for us to sit with the honesty that art can give us and ask, what next?  What now?  Will we learn, as Scrooge does in the original novella, to let “the Spirits of Past, Present, and Future strive within me,” so that “the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled”?  I think we can, and that, muted as it is, this version of the story expresses the kind of hope that we can really believe in—the conviction that all of us, or at least enough of us, may be able to change the course of the future, and bring a better Christmas into being than we would otherwise receive.

I Know That Face:

As I mentioned, the young pop singer Steve Lawrence appears as this film’s version of the Ghost of Christmas Past: later in life, he plays Peter Medoff in The Christmas Pageant.  Eva Marie Saint, who in this movie portrays the ethically convicted WAVE, Lt. Gibson, makes appearances as Martha Bundy in 1988’s I’ll Be Home for Christmas (note: ‘90s kids, this is NOT the Jonathan Taylor Thomas flick you’re thinking of) and as Emma Larson in A Christmas to Remember, and IMDB claims that her first ever film role was in 1947’s TV A Christmas Carol, though it gives no indication of her role (I’m assuming one of the Cratchit kids, most likely?).  And Pat Hingle, the irritatingly (to Grudge) persistent Ghost of Christmas Present, will later play the Bus Driver in One Christmas, and Joe Hayden in Sunshine Christmas.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present:

This is maybe a weird claim to make (given that he never addresses the film’s “Scrooge” aloud, as the character obviously does in the original), but Marley’s initial ghostly haunting is really incredibly effective here, more so than in many more straight adaptations.  It’s obvious why Grudge would be shaken by the manifestations he hears and sees, and it establishes the basis of the ghost story effectively.  To the extent that the original novella is about giving us an emotionally resonant series of confrontations with Scrooge’s underlying moral sense, this movie is knocking it out of the park: at times, honestly, it’s even more affecting than anything Scrooge undergoes, or maybe I should say that I feel the conviction of it more keenly than I do when Scrooge is the one under the microscope.  In a way, then, this adaptation is faithful to the underlying reality of the original story, even if it gets there by making some pretty radical alterations to the text.  And of course we do get the consistency of our “Scrooge” character waking up on Christmas morning, clutching the curtain that had been Future’s robe.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent:

I don’t get into this as much in the review because I’m more excited to talk about what works in this adaptation, but I do have to be honest: there are elements missing from the story that I do think hurt it dramatically to some extent.  The moral weight of the dead Marley doesn’t really pay off in the long run here—there’s just not a lot of things for Dan to make amends for in terms of personal harms done, and therefore we don’t really have the sense on Christmas morning that he has a lot of people to settle up accounts with (other than nephew Fred).  If Grudge’s servant Charles (who does appear in some of the ghostly portion of the movie) is this version’s Bob Cratchit, that story’s been shaved a little too lean to make it work.  We don’t have the same thrill of recognition when Charles shows up, and we don’t see much of a reckoning on Christmas morning, since they just don’t have the same relationship dynamic.  And maybe most importantly, one of the most central planks to any Christmas Carol rendering is the idea that Scrooge has some kind of joy in his past (his love of his sister, and his romance with Belle, even just his genuine joy at the overly festive generosity of his old employer Fezziwig) that he can rediscover and re-awaken within himself, which he does on Christmas morning.  But if Dan Grudge was ever more idealistic, we don’t see it, and I think therefore we are less sure of his transformation than we might otherwise have been.  I think the Past section of this screenplay could have been structured to give us more of an idea that Dan had something to recapture about himself, but either Serling doesn’t really believe that about the American avatar he’s writing, or else he dropped the ball.

—

Christmas Carol Vibes (6/10): This is a fun adaptation in that it does sit between the really faithful examples and the ones that are borrowing nothing more than a couple of names or moments from the classic story.  We’ve got a rich old guy haunted by someone named Marley and challenged by an idealistic nephew Fred who encounters three ghosts on Christmas Eve and is affected by them – that’s really effective at making it feel like A Christmas Carol.  But the changes to the structure (the loss of the Cratchits in particular as a way of externalizing and dramatizing both the risk and the potential reward of a future that might go one of two ways) and simply the look and feel of the film take it to a very different place.  This is much more comprehensible, in a lot of ways, as a long-form Twilight Zone episode than it is as an adaptation of a work by Charles Dickens.

Actual Quality (9/10): In terms of how much this connected with me as an audience member, I’m probably selling it short.  This was a profoundly affecting viewing experience, and one that I think worked on me in exactly the ways Serling intended it to, so as an act of persuasion (some might call it propaganda, even), it’s a 10/10.  In terms of its quality as a dramatic work, I have to rein it in just a little, since if I stop and think about the loose ends, or the ways the Past/Present/Future sequences do or don’t sync up, I can see ways in which I would improve the film.  A fair amount of the dialogue is not especially realistic, as characters argue more as representatives of an ideology or way of thinking than they do as real people with more subtle understanding of the world (though of course the Ghosts are not “real people” per se, so I think that’s less of an issue in this film than it would be elsewhere).  But the difference between a 9 and a 10 here is not all that material—whether or not this is flawless film-making (I don’t think it is), it’s a movie that is not throwing away its shot, and that matters.  And it’s grown in its power the more I’ve thought about it since watching it, which I think is always the sign of a really good work of art.

Scrooge?  As rich American businessman (and former naval officer) Daniel Grudge, Sterling Hayden is playing a role he’s probably born to play, to some extent.  I’d say that in this work, he’s effective but often one-note as a stern, jaw-clenching expression of America First thinking circa 1964.  His performance is pretty restrained, sometimes so much so that he feels a little limited by the writing, but I think it’s also true that the world around him (both the Ghosts themselves and the theatricality of the visions they present to him) impacts the viewer in a stunning way that’s bound to overshadow almost anyone in the Grudge role.

Supporting Cast?  I have to say, I think that all three ghosts are solidly cast and often riveting when they talk.  It’s hard to say how much of that charisma is in the writing versus in the acting but it may not matter that much: it’s certainly true that that’s where the power is here, dramatically speaking.  Charles and Ruby, Grudge’s servants, are almost wasted in roles that feel like they’re either underwritten or else sequences involving them maybe ended up on the cutting room floor.  And nephew Fred is really effective up front as Grudge’s interlocutor and the advocate for a different future, but man, I wish we got more out of him in the finale—either Serling doesn’t know how to use him to draw Grudge out or he just didn’t think that Fred would have done such a thing on Christmas morning, with the bells calling him to his (presumably liberal mainline) church service and testy Uncle Dan seeming unsettled but not anxious for advice.  

Recommended Frequency?  I think that, if we can stand it, everyone ought to watch this film once, and encounter its artful confrontation of America in the world.  It was tough enough to face that one time that I am not sure when I will do it again, but I know that what upsets me as a viewer is not the film, but my own complacency, my fear that in little ways I am a Daniel Grudge who neither thinks enough nor does enough for people suffering in the world, perhaps because I cannot see them from my dinner table in the way that the Ghost of Christmas Present forces Grudge to see them in his vision.  I think that until the lessons of this particular carol have been learned, not just by me but by American society, it will always be a text to which we must return, to ask ourselves how much closer we are to peace and understanding than we were in 1964; to challenge ourselves to learn even better than Scrooge did what it means to honor Christmas in our hearts and try to keep it all the year.
If you’re persuaded (as I hope you are) to take the time this year to watch Carol for Another Christmas, I’m afraid that it’s exclusively licensed for streaming to HBO Max, which of course some folks subscribe to via Hulu or Amazon Prime.  These days I normally offer DVD/Blu-ray links to Barnes and Noble (given some Amazon business practices many of us, I think very fairly, object to), but only Amazon has a DVD version….and the reviews suggest that the audio and video quality are terrible, so you may not want to drop cash on that.  Even more disappointingly, that appears to be the only version available, held on disc (according to Worldcat) by a mere 11 libraries worldwide.  I would never normally suggest accessing the film in other ways, since usually we have lots of options for access, but under the circumstances, perhaps you’ll be glad to know that there are some small accounts (surely illegally) uploading copies of this film on YouTube…I assume the copyright holders will take action sooner or later and that link will break, but for now, it’s there.  I don’t know where they got their copy, but it doesn’t have the video/audio quality issues folks report about the DVD.

Nothing Like the Holidays (2008)

Review Essay

I feel like there’s a fine line to walk when you’re writing an “awkward family gathering for the holidays” movie. It can be easy to load up the gathering with a bunch of profound emotional revelation that feels almost unbearably intense, or conversely to turn the family scenes into such broad, slapstick comedy that the people involved no longer feel human. (Or, if you’re Happiest Season, you flip back and forth between the two like a yo-yo: it’s not a bad movie, as I said last year, but it sure can be a tough hang.)  In the case of Alfredo De Villa’s Nothing Like the Holidays, alas, we encounter yet another film that hasn’t quite worked out this balancing act.  But there’s some fun to be had along the way, here and there.

The premise of Nothing Like the Holidays is part of what drew me to it—this is a film about a Puerto Rican family living on Chicago’s west side (Humboldt Park, to be precise) in the late Aughts.  It’s sold as a movie about immigrant culture and American pride; about the violence of the city and of the world beyond it; about the ways we keep secrets from each other and what it takes to finally be honest.  It seemed more than a little bit like the kind of movie I, as a former resident of Chicago (in the early ‘Teens) and a proud one, would really love to trumpet to you all here in 2025, at the end of a series of months in which the city has been under attack by its own national government’s forces.  But this is, first and foremost, a blog where I talk to you about movies and how they work (or don’t), and I have to be honest.  This one mostly doesn’t.

The DVD cover of the movie Nothing Like the Holidays looks like a framed photograph that is tied up with a red ribbon and bow. Nine cast members are all posed and smiling at the camera as though a family photograph is being taken. The title appears above their faces, and below them on the ribbon is the tagline "They're just a typical American family. Minus the typical."

The movie’s power comes out of the gate hot, early on: we’re welcoming home an Iraq war vet, Jesse Rodriguez.  His brother and sister, Mauricio and Roxanna, are excited to see him…but in all honesty they’re probably more preoccupied with their own baggage than with helping Jesse through what’s clearly a painful transition back into civilian society.  They all have complicated relationships to their parents, the cheerful though muted Edy and his acidic, glowering wife Anna, but then they have complicated relationships with everybody: Mauricio with his very-not-Puerto Rican wife Sarah; Roxanna with long-time friend of the family Ozzy (who’s cute but maybe too much trouble); Jesse with his old flame (and Roxanna’s best friend) Marissa.  And things spiral outwards—Sarah’s tough relationship to her in-laws, Ozzy’s desire for revenge on the man who murdered his brother, etc.—to the point where it would have been hard for a really brilliantly written screenplay to fully pay all these things off, and this is, alas, not a really brilliantly written screenplay.  But again, before all of these tangled webs are woven, the film seems strong—it’s about Jesse and his relationship to this home he’s been away from in such a bleak place.  It’s about the color and the sound and the life here in Humboldt Park that’s really winning me over from the opening shots, as I see some things I recognize about a city I came to love in my time there.  If what you want most is that kind of cultural immersion, with music and architecture, food and domino games, all adding up to giving you the feeling of a place and a time, the movie is going to deliver the goods to some extent.

The challenge is that, authentic as the streets sometimes feel, these main characters often end up seeming less than authentic, like caricatures written by folks who don’t really know Humboldt Park.  Sarah plays the white outsider so fully that sometimes it feels like she’s never met Mauricio’s family, even though the text of the film makes it clear she knows them all pretty well.  The explosive relationship between Edy and Anna seems to have been written for the convenience of the screenplay but not anyone’s actual human life.  Somehow the violence of the streets is both too intense—it’s hard to make sense of why Ozzy, based on everything else we know about him, seems so committed to the violent murder of the guy he spotted in the park—and also too muted, since if that IS how people like Ozzy live, it seems like it should have affected far more of the people in this story than give any evidence of their having been impacted.  Most dialogue feels less like it’s revealing qualities of character, and more like it’s setting up the next set of dominos just in time to be knocked over so that the plot can move forward.  It’s hard to pin down what a character cares about or wants, other than maybe Jesse and his father Edy (the two best performances, for me), since the things characters say and do are for the script’s convenience and not emerging from their own desires.  And even those two have their struggles at conveying clear motivation: Edy, for instance, spends most of the movie claiming he’s going to chop down the tree in their yard to “improve the view”…but, this is Humboldt Park, Edy.  You don’t have a view of ANYTHING other than other people’s houses.  Chopping down a gorgeous old deciduous tree isn’t improving your view: it’s taking away your view of the tree.  So, does the movie know that, and this is a crazy distraction Edy’s using to deflect attention from himself?  Or did they actually think this was logical?  It’s so hard to know.

I think part of what’s tough about ensemble holiday movies is that somehow you have to avoid being a caricature while successfully being a memorable character.  In this film, when characters aren’t going over the top, often I feel like they’re underplaying moments too much: even if the person they’re playing would in real life struggle to emote to those around them, an actor has to do more to connect us to the moment as an audience, or we will lose contact with the movie entirely.  The big reveals that eventually unfold in the movie run into these same problems: too often they’re either not supported by how the character has been behaving, or they’re so outlandish that it strains credibility to think of any normal person or family coming to grips with them.  The movie clearly wants an ending in which I (and the rest of the audience) feel comfort that things worked out for these people.  But I don’t know them well enough to know that…and I don’t like half of them enough to care if it does “work out” for them.  And I’m not even really sure that it DID work out, you know?  They end up in new places by the end of the movie, but it’s hard to know how much better it is for any of them.

What else did I like, looking back?  The depiction of the parranda as a vibrant cultural tradition in Humboldt Park is pretty cool even if it arrives out of nowhere.  Sarah, once she loosens up (and drinks a little), draws some good things out of the family around her and helps create some of the more meaningful conversations in the film.  The stretches where everyone’s not standing in a room being mean and aggressive to each other are all at least indicative of the kind of film this might have been in someone else’s hands.  And when is Alfred Molina not fun?  I mean, to be clear, Molina is not Puerto Rican, which is one very fair criticism to make about the casting.  But he’s so enjoyable to watch on screen.  Ultimately I think what I appreciate most about the story is the character of Jesse and the growth he achieves, particularly in relationship to his father.  For all that the movie’s an ensemble, the one arc that makes any sense as a narrative is his.  But I also never really felt like the film could take the time to do his life experiences justice, which therefore limits how much character development is really possible.  File this one among the other holiday movies I really wanted to like but couldn’t quite get there.

I Know That Face: Alfred Molina, the Rodriguez family patriarch, elsewhere performs as the voice of Francis Church in the movie Yes, Virginia, and, maybe appropriately (in the light of Yes, Virginia’s message), is later the voice of Santa Claus in an episode of Santiago of the Seas. John Leguizamo, the incredibly stiff and frankly off-putting elder brother Mauricio, voices Sid, of course, in Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas.  Jay Hernandez, here playing family friend/love interest Ozzy, plays Jessie in A Bad Moms Christmas, which has an incredibly stacked cast.  And Claudia Michelle Wallace, who in this film chews the scenery in a small role as an employee at Edy’s bodega, plays a Child Services Agent in Fred Claus, and follows that up with the role of Mrs. Colvin in Once Upon a Christmas Wish.

That Takes Me Back: This will be nostalgic for nobody else, but when a character gives the driving direction, “Turn on Sacramento,” I’m back in our Albany Park apartment, where on my walk to the nearest L stop (or, later, when taking my infant out for a stroller walk around Ravenswood Manor) I would turn south on Sacramento to cross Lawrence.  We didn’t live that near to Humboldt Park, but Chicago’s flat, extensive grid of streets mean these names cross through all sorts of communities, and it was fun to imagine how closely I was once connected to Edy Rodriguez’s bodega.  Nostalgia, too, was there for me, and maybe you too, to see the era of the flip-phone at its height: wild to me now, in an age where phones get larger and larger as they become the one true screen for all entertainment and productivity, that we once prized making these devices as compact and tiny as possible.  And I won’t call it nostalgic, but it was sobering to get this plain a reminder of the Iraq war, and the devastating effects that lingered after that conflict: it’s hard not to think of the conflicts around the world today (some of which we perpetuate needlessly, as a country) and the toll they’ll leave in their wake.

I Understood That Reference: Santa appears, as he does in many a holiday film: there’s a Santa suit worn by Spencer and a brief dialogue exchange about “Black Santa”. Later in the film, Christmas’s religious underpinnings surface when, having brought a priest to the family’s dinner table in an attempt to settle some of the internal conflicts, a character asks the priest, “How about a little sermon about Jesus being born so we can be forgiven for our sins?”  

Holiday Vibes (9/10): I cannot deny that this film really makes the holidays present – these are characters going through a very painful, hostile version of the more widely-experienced challenge of occupying space at the holidays with family members you rarely see or haven’t seen in years.  The decorations, the food, the energy of the city, the passive aggression from a mom who wants grandkids, the heightened strain on an interracial marriage…it all tracks as the holidays to me, even if it’s a lot more intense and uneasy than holiday memories of mine.  If you want a Christmas movie, it is showing up.

Actual Quality (6/10): I really wrestle with how high to rank this film: I wanted to love a Chicago Christmas movie so badly this year, especially one with such a diverse cast, set in a neighborhood that has been under siege by taxpayer-financed agents of violence for months now. (You may disagree with that characterization: respectfully, if you do, you may not always love the blog this year.  I live in a borderline authoritarian state and if I feel like acknowledging and challenging it, I’m gonna.)  Anyway, as I said earlier in this review, in the end, what this blog is mostly about is the experience of these movies for me, and I can’t pretend I had a good time with this one: it was really uneven.  There are some hilarious lines of dialogue and some pretty heavy but resonant scenes where characters are unpacking some tough baggage.  The movie surrounding all that, though, too often felt silly when it needed to be serious, and flat when it needed to be funny, and the total effect was to make me feel restless.  I can imagine someone getting more out of the movie than I did, but not enough that I can call it even “good”.

Party Mood-Setter? Part of what sucks here is I wish you could just put it on for the vibes of Humboldt Park at Christmas, with the parranda and all the rest, but the tone of the family arguments is so bitter and so often unresolved that I just don’t think it would be all that fun to have on in the background of holiday merriment.

Plucked Heart Strings? It’s definitely a film that wants to get you to that emotional space where you feel for Jesse (who has gone through some serious PTSD-triggering horror in Iraq) and maybe also for the parents in their separate distresses, but for me the characters are too badly served by the screenplay for me to really feel the emotion with them.  I was never close to misty-eyed, though some folks (especially people with their own Iraq memories, or people close to people who have that background) might.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t imagine watching it again.  There’s a great film to be made out of material like this, but I think it needs a screenwriting team that actually knows the place—this is what sets a film like Boxing Day, which is written by someone from the community being shown, apart from this more generically Hollywoodized version of a family in an ethnic/cultural enclave.

If you’re curious to see if you’ll enjoy it more than I did, it looks like this December you can stream Nothing Like the Holidays on Tubi, Fandango at Home, or the Roku Channel for free—all of them are ad-supported, of course.  It’s available for rent at all the usual places (pretty cheap at some of them, too: YouTube and Google Play are offering it for about $2 as of this writing), the DVD is inexpensive also, and almost 900 libraries worldwide hold a copy.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Review Essay

Folks, welcome back for another season of holiday movies and musings: it was such fun last year to share some media experiences (both the sublime and the ridiculous…and whatever the heck Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was) with so many of you, and if you’re new to Film for the Holidays, a special welcome to you!  As a reminder, these film reviews will be appearing once a day like clockwork from now through the morning of Christmas Eve.  You can just remember to pop back here to see them, or click that floating Subscribe button you hopefully see somewhere on your screen to receive the posts via email.  All of last year’s categories for notes and ratings are sticking around this season, which I hope will help you both figure out how (or if) to add some films to your holiday experiences and encourage you to explore some titles not even on this year’s list.  With all that said, let’s get on with the review of this truly classic motion picture.

My approach to Miracle on 34th Street is definitely influenced by the fact that I know it to be the #1 Christmas movie on the recommendation list constructed by Connie Willis.  Willis is one of my favorite authors of all time, on any subject but especially on the subject of Christmas, which she has used extensively as a setting for short stories for decades now, and her passion for this particular movie in the various Christmas anthologies she’s edited is unrivaled.  I had the chance to talk with Willis this summer (on many subjects, including the subject of holiday movies), and since then I’ve been asking myself how I would rank Miracle, myself, as someone who absolutely grew up with this film as an annual tradition, but who I think never had quite the same passion for it that its true fans express.  The conclusion I’ve come to is that the movie is essentially a perfect object in that it achieves exactly what it sets out to accomplish, and my only issue with it is that the thing I go to holiday media to hear isn’t quite what it sets out to say.

What’s the nature of this perfect object, first of all, if somehow I’m talking to a reader who’s never seen this film?  The premise is both simple and silly once you write it all down: Miracle on 34th Street posits that, by the mid-1940s, Kris Kringle (Santa Claus) is living in an old folks’ home in Long Island, taking regular jaunts into New York City to breathe some fresh air, harass shop assistants who are trying to dress their windows for the holiday season, and give pointers to performing Santas as he meets them in the street.  Our story begins when, having exposed an unfit Santa on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Kris is hired by Doris Walker, a hard-working single mother and Macy’s employee, to not only take part in the parade but to work the “photos with Santa” line inside their flagship store on West 34th Street in the middle of bustling midtown Manhattan.  Kris immediately busies himself with improving the lives of basically everyone he encounters, from Alfred, who sweeps up the locker rooms in the Macy’s employee changing area, to Peter, a kid who wants a fire truck that squirts water but which he will promise only to use in the backyard, to Peter’s mother who, let’s face it, seems like a lady near the end of her rope.  Most centrally, Kris’s goal is to convince both Doris, an incredibly hard-boiled divorcee who has seemingly learned to shut out all hope or faith from her live, and Doris’s daughter Susan, a child raised on such pure common sense that the concept of an “imagination” is unfamiliar to her, to believe in him.  In this, he has the enthusiastic help of Doris and Susan’s neighbor, a bright young lawyer named Fred Gailey who’s hot for Doris and sweet to Susan, and who is at least willing to play along with Kris’s eccentric notion that he is the real, the one and only, Santa Claus.  Wild stuff.

This is the poster for the theatrical release of the movie, Miracle on 34th Street. The background is bright yellow. From the left and right sides of the poster, the lead actors, Maureen O'Hara and John Payne, face each other, smiling. Between their faces but far more distant in the background is the image of Natalie Wood as Susan being embraced by Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle.

The story as presented feels like it might make a sweet children’s movie—believe in Santa, young folks, and all will be well—but Miracle manages a deeper level of resonance than that, and I think a big portion of the credit clearly goes to the incomparable Edmund Gwenn in the role of Kris Kringle.  Gwenn, who wins an Academy Award for the performance, seems to have been born to play Santa Claus, with a warmly smiling and almost cherubic face (if cherubs could grow beards), and perhaps the perfect voice for the part: both cheerful and chiding, he manages to hold a tone that sounds constantly ready to celebrate niceness but also unhesitant to let the naughty know they’ve really stepped in it.  It’s that balancing act, a Santa Claus who seems capable not only of genial indulgence but also of genuine moral candor and outright confrontation of the unworthy, that transforms the film into something robust.  There’s a wisdom to this Kris Kringle that seems to take at least a note or two from the character’s ancient roots in the stories of Saint Nicholas of Myra, a countercultural force, a figure whose principles are more important than his presents.  Though he does love giving the perfect present.

In some ways, Gwenn’s perfection in the role is a liability: it is so easy to believe this man to be Santa Claus that Doris and Susan Walker (Doris especially) can seem to be dragging their heels needlessly.  Natalie Wood’s Susan is a genuinely charismatic performance by a child actress.  She has the range to not only emote successfully on screen, but even to play the part of a child who cannot act, as she does when she fumbles slightly her attempts to pretend to be inviting Fred Gailey to Thanksgiving dinner, or struggles to convincingly play a make-believe monkey.  So I think to some extent she sells us on Susan as a real kid who would wrestle with the problem—a child who is so indoctrinated against Santa Claus that believing in him might spark an identity crisis.  She also gets the slightly easier task of being the first of the two Walkers to open up to the possibility of Kris’s telling the truth, in famous scenes where she tests the reality of his beard or listens in as he effortlessly switches to speaking Dutch to offer greetings to a recently adopted refugee.  Maureen O’Hara’s Doris has to be the rigid one, and it’s no criticism of O’Hara when I say that it does become just a little difficult to believe in a woman who refuses to let a primary schooler read fairy tales or pretend to be an animal for fun: I think that’s a challenge for the (admittedly Oscar-winning) screenplay, which has somehow to make this premise work, and if it’s stretched a little thin there, well, at some point we have to accept that this is a movie about Santa Claus and not a hard-hitting realistic drama.

The message of Miracle is, as I’ve noticed revisiting it as an adult, surprisingly complicated in its politics.  The film seems to wear its anticapitalist leanings on its sleeve: you notice even as a kid that Kris courageously stands up for sending parents to get toys from other stores, and as you get older, perhaps you pick up on the fact that Macy and Gimbel only embrace the idea because they realize it’ll turn even more of a profit, and not out of any real belief in the ideal.  Alfred, the sweetly naive custodian, observes mournfully early on in the film that these days the worst of the “isms” floating around the world is “commercialism”.  It’s all “make a buck, make a buck,” even in his native Brooklyn, he laments.  Fred Gailey throws away his job for the sake of a higher principle, and Judge Harper risks his chances at re-election for the sake of his own principles (somewhat different from Fred’s).  And yet.  This is also a movie that never really takes Macy or Gimbel to task—to the contrary, you’ll come away from the movie feeling a great deal of sentimentality and even sweetness in connection with “Mr. Macy”, a person who did not exist (at least, not in 1947, by which time no Macy had owned the company for over half a century).  It’s a movie that treats the material desires of its characters as laudable: nobody is ever told that the “real meaning of the holiday” is something other than getting the right present, and even the movie’s final climactic moment of awe-struck belief is something only occurring because a character thinks she’s just been “given” an extraordinarily expensive “gift” (that others will have to work rapidly behind the scenes to actually buy for her).  This is a movie about faith, yes, and love, but it’s one that has no problem assuming that these things can co-exist happily with thriving post-war American commercialism and not encounter the slightest trace of a conflict.  This is odd for an American holiday movie: we just don’t tend to think about it because for most of us we can’t remember a time when this movie wasn’t a Christmas classic.

To be clear, I am in sympathy with this film’s moral compass to a large extent.  The truly odious Sawyer, who at the film’s start is an industrial psychology staffer for Macy’s, is a monster measured along any possible axis: narcissistic, cruel, misogynist, selfish, and vindictive.  Violence may not be the answer but I can’t claim to be disappointed when Kris Kringle beats him over the head with an umbrella.  Kris is a huge proponent of learning to love not only yourself but those around you, whether it’s getting Susan to realize that she can connect with the kids playing in the courtyard or opening Doris up to the idea that romance hasn’t passed her by forever.  I like that: who wouldn’t (other than Mr. Sawyer)?  And the movie is a huge believer in accidental grace, which I love as an undercurrent: good things happen despite people’s intentions rather than because of them.  Doris Walker and Mr. Shellhammer hire a Santa Claus thinking he’ll be good for business, not for their hearts.  Macy and Gimbel help beleaguered parents as a marketing scheme.  Even the movie’s most famous sequence, the arrival at the courthouse of an endless stream of letters to Santa Claus that win Kris’s freedom, is of course the self-interested action of two overwhelmed postal employees who have realized it’s a pretty slick solution to an overcrowded warehouse.  This is a truth about the world, and the ways in which goodness manages to survive even among people who are not trying in any particular way to be good.  It makes me smile.

I know this review’s running long, and it’s a holiday weekend, so I’ll stop here, though I could say a lot more about this film: it’s a rich text and there’s a lot to find (and like) in it!  To me, again, the movie undeniably does what it sets out to do basically perfectly—you wouldn’t think that you could merge a fantasy about Santa Claus working in a department store with a surprisingly high-minded courtroom drama, but it works incredibly well.  I think what ultimately leaves me just short of calling the movie a masterpiece is my sense that its message isn’t quite profound enough for me.  When Kris tells Fred, early on, that “those two [Doris and Susan Walker] are a couple of lost souls, and it’s up to us to help them,” that feels really true in my heart.  And it’s weird to realize, at the end of the story, that they accomplish this by means of Fred dating Doris (I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but how is this “saving her soul”?) and Kris persuading Doris by means of his sincerity and Susan by means of an incredibly unlikely gift that he’s the real Santa Claus.  They have learned to be a little less hard-headed about the world, but not in a way that feels inspiring to me, let alone soul-restored.  It’s a sweet movie, a holiday treat, and I could watch Edmund Gwenn chew bubble gum or sing a song about Sinterklaas any day of the week and be happy about it.  But it’s not a fable that speaks to my heart at quite its resonant frequency.  If it does that for you though, dear reader, I am genuinely and unreservedly delighted for you, and I’m certainly happy to celebrate it as a worthwhile member of the Christmas motion picture canon here at the start of the FFTH season.

I Know That Face: Jerome Cowan, who in Miracle appears as the district attorney, Mr. Mara, plays the role of Fred Collins in 1950’s Peggy, a movie set around the Tournament of Roses Parade that rings in the new year in Southern California.  Percy Helton, who here performs uncredited as a Santa Claus so inebriated that he’s pulled off the Thanksgiving Day parade float, makes a similarly uncredited appearance as a train conductor in another midcentury holiday classic, White Christmas, which I covered last year on the blog.  And Alvin Greenman, memorable in his uncredited role as the sweet and simple young Alfred, is the only member of the 1947 film’s cast to appear in the 1994 remake: in that movie, he plays a doorman (also named “Alfred”).

That Takes Me Back: It’s a little wild when Doris tells Shellhammer that she won’t miss the parade since she can see it from her apartment building: this is near the very end of the era in which a person could not watch the parade on television (it was first televised locally in New York City the year after this film was released, and has been televised nationally since 1953).  I think of these parades so much as a television spectacle that it’s kind of amazing to consider the decades in which they were an in-person only event.  Susan saves her chewing gum overnight, which is kind of amazing to me: I remember doing that as a kid, but gum is such a cheap commodity that I’d never think of doing it now.  I wonder if it’s just my age that affects this (or my income), or if this is something nobody does anymore?  Would a modern kid relate at all to the song “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Overnight)”?

I Understood That Reference: In terms of references to other Christmas stories or media, obviously this movie is chock full of Santa lore.  There are references to the North Pole, of course, and Kris Kringle’s next of kin on his employment card consist of all eight reindeer (including the accurately spelled “Donder”).  Donder’s name will be permanently altered in the public memory in just two years after the release of the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which refers to him as “Donner”.  Rudolph’s omission from a Santa film is probably also a “That Takes Me Back” moment really—though the character of the scarlet-snouted reindeer who guides Santa’s sleigh had been created back in 1939, it’s not until a 1948 cartoon short and the 1949 song that he springs into the limelight so completely that he’ll be inextricably tied to Santa from then on.

Holiday Vibes (9/10): From the parade that (for many of us) kicks off the holiday season to a party with not one but two Santa Clauses dispensing gifts next to an enormous and lavishly decorated tree, this movie touches on so many aspects of the season (busy department stores, children making lists of desired gifts, etc.).  And, as with a few other true classics, I just think this film is so embedded in my memory that even its less Christmassy elements are associated with the season somehow, from Mrs. Shellhammer and her triple-strength martinis to Fred Gailey’s facts about the United States Postal Service.  It maybe doesn’t hit on every single element I’d look for in a holiday movie but it does really well on this front.

Actual Quality (9/10): And again, I don’t want to be mistaken: it’s doing a great job on the “quality” front, as well.  Despite my critiques, I think it’s a really well-crafted piece of entertainment, and one with a lot of heart—it more than deserved three Academy Awards and a Best Picture nomination, and it’s a worthy addition to the list of films that we treat as more or less mandatory to be shown and shared at Christmastime.  That scene where the mail shows up at the courthouse is thrilling every time.

Party Mood-Setter?  A film so familiar to so many of us more or less HAS to work in this setting—especially because it’s a movie with key moments you can check in for and then a lot of fairly low-key scenes that work fine in the background of cookie decorating or catching up with old friends.  It’s better if you pay full attention but it is very pleasant company if that’s all you’re after.

Plucked Heart Strings?  I’d say we get close, in a moment or two, where Doris’s faith in Kris is sincere and that’s moving, but it’s more a fantasy story than it is one that wants a lot of sincere heartfelt emotion.

Recommended Frequency: Oh, come on now, you know this is an every year kind of movie, or at least it sure is for me.  If you’ve somehow made it this far in life without seeing it, it’s time to dive in.  If you haven’t watched it since you were a kid, I think you’ll find it bigger than you remember: how much you find yourself connecting with the themes it advances will obviously vary, but I think it’s a movie that rewards re-watching, and I hope you’ll give it your time this holiday season.

Luckily for you, it should be fairly easy to watch Miracle on 34th Street.  Right now, it appears to be streaming for subscribers on Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.  If you want to rent a streaming copy, it looks like Google, Apple, and Fandango at Home would all be happy to help you out (for a small price).  Barnes & Noble will gladly sell you a copy on Blu-ray or DVD, and Worldcat’s data suggests that nearly every conceivable library system has access to a copy if you just want to borrow one.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Review Essay

It’s so hard to talk about It’s a Wonderful Life, since for some of us every single scene is imprinted on our memories from childhood, the strangeness and wonder of this fable about life and hope and worth so indelibly associated with Christmas that it would be very difficult to say anything new or original.  And for others, the film is unfamiliar — a “holiday classic” but one that’s long enough and black-and-white enough that you haven’t picked it up yet, perhaps especially because the movie’s fans tell you it’ll put you through the emotional wringer and that’s not necessarily something we all want to sign up for.  What can I say about a movie many of you have either memorized or else long avoided?  Well, it’s Christmas Eve and I guess there’s no reason to say anything other than what I think and hope it connects with you, wherever you’re coming from.  If you’ve come here to spend any of these important holiday minutes with me, I owe you nothing less.

The premise of this film is well known, I think: a man named George Bailey is shown the world as it would have been without him, as though he was never born, and it transforms him.  And it has something to do with Christmas, though I imagine when folks who’ve not seen it hear these summaries, it’s always a little puzzling what the connection really is.  So, I’ll offer a different way of seeing this film, if that’s all right.  The author of the short story on which this movie is based always acknowledged a debt to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, and I think it’s evident here: the movie’s three great sections are George Bailey’s Past, Present, and a grim vision of what will become of the world without him (though, of course, to be precise, it’s the world as though he had never been).  George is no Ebenezer Scrooge — the real “covetous old sinner” of this piece, Scrooge’s counterpart, is the malevolent spider in his web, Henry F. Potter, whom this film can neither explain nor redeem.  Instead, our attention is on an ordinary man in so many respects, both kind and hot-tempered, both ambitious and loyal, a good man and a flawed one.  We see him at his triumphs and at his most desperate.  And so we learn alongside him as people more able to put ourselves in his shoes than most of us can ever fit into Scrooge’s.  It’s a carol for an American life.

The poster for It's A Wonderful Life shows a painting of Donna Reed held high in the air by a smiling Jimmy Stewart -- they gaze into each other's eyes lovingly.

It carries with it that same background of Christmas religious observance that Dickens employs in his novella: we open on a snowy Christmas Eve in the town of Bedford Falls, and all we know is that behind every closed door and window, simple and heartfelt prayers are being offered for a man named George Bailey, whom we have not yet seen.  And then, in the movie’s weirdest device, we are in some astronomical photograph, as blinking galaxies and stars represent God, Joseph (whether an angel or the adoptive father of Jesus is unclear), and of course, Clarence Odbody, AS2 (Angel, Second Class).  Clarence is tasked with assisting George Bailey out of a terrible condition — far worse than being sick, God observes, George is discouraged.  He is contemplating suicide.  The next hour and a half, then, unfold for Clarence the life of George Bailey, with a particular emphasis on Christmas Eve, 1945, the day of George’s profound despair, as this novice angel tries to “win his wings,” a metaphysical situation that is never really explained further.

I think what must surely be challenging or even off-putting to a new viewer is the character of George Bailey himself — Capra plans to take full advantage of the fact that, as I observed in writing about The Shop Around the Corner, Stewart had developed this screen persona by the 1940s that allowed him to play characters who were irascible and difficult and rude without losing the audience’s trust.  Capra extends that quality down into the boy actor playing the younger version, as from the beginning we understand that George is brash and ambitious and self-confident to a fault…but he’s also wise beyond his years at times, and loyal to his sense of ethics, and always willing to make a sacrifice for someone in need.  It’s why he taunts his kid brother Harry into a daredevil sled ride that forces George to leap into an icy lake to save him.  He’s condescending about coconut and bragging about his membership “in the National Geographic Society” but one glance at a telegram and he realizes his boss is grieving — and he risks anger and even violence to save Gower, the druggist, from his own despair.  Those scenes are hard to watch, but what’s hard to watch in them is what’s most human — some of us have known griefs as profound as Gower’s, a pit so deep we cannot see out of it, in which every human voice wakes further to agony.  Some of us have had to be as brave as George, standing up to someone’s pain knowing it may cause us pain, ourselves — for the sake of helping them, of helping others.  The emotions that come home in the movie’s justifiably famous closing scene are all laid in us here, bit by bit, as George’s life unfolds.  We come to care about the people he cares about, and through them, we care for him.

If you’re a newcomer to this movie, please don’t feel it’s all death and sadness: there’s a liveliness to so much of the film.  We get it from the banter of Bert and Ernie, the policeman and the cab driver (no, despite Internet rumors to the contrary, as far as we know Henson did not name two roommates on Sesame Street for these men).  It shows up in the Bailey home, with criss-crossing dialogue and Harry balancing a pie on his head and Annie, the family’s maid, very rightly referring to the Bailey boys as “lunkheads”.  Even if you’ve never really watched the film, I’m guessing you might know about the Charleston contest, as George and Mary accidentally dance their way into a swimming pool.  What’s great about their flirtations that night is that George is just as complicated as ever, but Mary sees through him to the man he’s going to become.  She’s not planning on “fixing” George Bailey, but she knows better than he does who George Bailey really is.  What I love about the movie, though, is how it weaves its deeper ideas into the fun moments.  Ernie the cabbie is George’s wisecracking friend, but it’s also a loan to him that becomes a rhetorical football between George’s idealism about the common man and Potter’s domineering sneers about the working class’s need to learn “thrift”.  The chaos of that dining room scene at the Baileys surrounds a really serious conversation in which Peter Bailey (who, without knowing it, is having the last conversation he’ll ever have with his son) tries to convey to George what matters in life…and George both knows in his heart his dad is right and doesn’t want to give up his dreams for it anyway.  And of course, George’s relationship to Mary is the hinge on which the whole movie turns, at every step.

I’ve heard complaints about the movie, over the years, about the ways it handles some gender dynamics, and I won’t defend any 1940s movie as wholly innocent of those charges: we just know better now, or at least some of us do.  This is, I should note, still a lot better at giving women agency than much more modern films like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, but that’s a low bar to clear.  I do think, though, that sometimes those critiques have been misplaced.  For instance (and apologies for spoilers, but so much of this movie’s success is about its final half hour that I cannot avoid them all), Mary Hatch doesn’t end up an “old maid” librarian because the movie’s punishing her for not having George in her life — this is what she’s said from the beginning, telling George at one point very plainly that if it hadn’t been for him, there wasn’t anyone else in town she wanted to marry.  And the movie’s also not arguing that being an “old maid” or a librarian is a fate worse than death — it’s a fate that feels like death to George, because it IS his death.  Or rather, it’s damning proof that Clarence is right, and that this is a world in which he was never born, never did anything, never kissed Mary Hatch Bailey on their wedding night or built a life with her.  It’s not Mary he’s grieving: it’s himself.

I’ve heard complaints also about George’s outbursts at his kids, and certainly I can understand that depending on your own experiences, it may be very painful to watch the movie’s “hero” act so dismissively and harshly to his children, shouting at them and smashing things.  I don’t want to minimize the harm there, but again, I think the movie doesn’t either.  That Christmas Eve, George is facing the ruination of his entire life — he sacrificed everything for the sake of Bedford Falls and the building and loan, and now the business will fail and the town will slip into Potter’s cruel hands and his own family life will be destroyed by scandal and prison, he expects.  He’s barely holding it together until those moments when he’s not holding it together at all.  But I think it’s clear from the ways the children react that this is not the father they know — that they expect support and love from him, and it is a startling betrayal to find those things missing.  That doesn’t make an evening of borderline abusive conduct “okay”, but I think it reframes the situation for us — we have to believe that we’re seeing a man prepare to commit suicide because he believes the world is better off without him.  So he has to wreck himself and that family’s peace enough to have that moment where he’s stammering apologies and trying to command them to restore the home he’s terrified of losing, and his wife and children look at him with such fear that he feels they’ll be happier without him.  It is not the well but the sick who need a doctor, as the Gospels remind us: for George Bailey to be saved, he’s got to realize the harm he’s done.  If you don’t want to roll with that, I get it.  But for those of us willing to take that journey with George, it’s the movie’s power.

I refuse to spoil any more of the movie’s final half hour, much of which plays out like a Twilight Zone episode, but of course it’s a Twilight Zone episode that follows 100 minutes of establishing scenes, so that we know every single minor character on screen and we can feel the depths of George’s confusion and ultimate agony as he explores a world without him in it.  The movie’s values are on its sleeve throughout, and say what we will about Capra, he understood what endangered American freedom and joy.  It’s what endangers it still.  This sequence is an indictment of Potter, and of a society resigned to letting the Potters of the world have their way.  And the whole time, I know, a new viewer will keep saying to themselves, “okay, this is all happening on Christmas Eve.  But where’s this movie that’s supposed to be so holiday-inspirational that it moves me to tears?”

And then you get the ten minutes that either work for you or don’t.  If it’s too sentimental for you, too neatly resolved, too implausible, then I get it.  There are other movies that maybe will kindle hope for you, if hope’s something you’re willing to take from a world that rarely seems to reward it.  For the rest of us, this is where the movie breaks us open.  I watched this film for what I am sure is at least the 40th time this December, preparing for this blog post.  And I wept like a child for most of its final sequence, even though I could also probably recite it to you by heart.  Gratitude is overwhelming like that, I think — when we confront the fact that we can be grateful for life even at its darkest extremes, even when we feel most lost.  And what the film is urgent in reminding us is that we are more loved than we know; there is more joy than we’ve yet found.  No man is a failure who has friends, as Clarence says, which is both glib and profound.  I get that that’s not a comfort to everyone out there, but I hope that the movie’s argument speaks even to those who feel friendless, reminding them that any life has touched so many other lives, and we have given so much more love than pain, those of us who aren’t Potters, at least.  Half the people we see in the film’s finale are not George Bailey’s friends.  They are people who have known the worth of his life, and who are ready to return blessing for blessing.  That’s the Christmas magic of this movie, and the reason that, despite being a film that spends only about half its running time on Christmas Eve and very little of its Christmas Eve time doing anything that feels connected to the holiday, it remains not just a holiday classic, but to many folks THE holiday classic, the film we cannot do without.  It’s so powerful for me that there have been Decembers I couldn’t take watching it, because it would have hit me too hard.  Whether or not it’s that kind of movie for you, I wish you this movie’s sense of gladness and of hope, of joy at being alive, of the discovery of friendship and fellowship in those places in your life you least expected them.  For those preparing for Christmas or Hanukkah tomorrow, or Kwanzaa the next day, or simply preparing for a break in life’s chaos here at the turning of the year, peace to you, and thank you for reading this little blog.

I Know That Face: Henry Travers, who here plays the angel Clarence Odbody, plays the businessman Horace Bogardus in The Bells of St. Mary’s, one of those movies that has a Christmas sequence and is therefore a holiday movie, as well as playing Matey, the brother to Anne Shirley’s landlord, in Anne of Windy Poplars…another movie that has a Christmas sequence and is therefore a holiday movie.  Ward Bond, who here plays Bert the policeman, plays a different kind of cop in 3 Godfathers, a loose Western retelling of the three wise men (and at least partial inspiration for Tokyo Godfathers), in which Bond plays Sheriff Buck Sweet.  And of course we’ve already seen Beulah Bondi, here Mrs. Bailey, in Remember the Night, as well as Jimmy Stewart, here our George Bailey, in both The Shop Around the Corner and Bell, Book and Candle.

That Takes Me Back: As someone who remembers being mesmerized by the spinning of a record on our record player, I love the sight of the phonograph that, while playing, can also turn the spit to roast two chickens on George’s wedding night.  My guess is that my daughter would barely understand the phrase “a long distance telephone call” other than from context clues, and therefore would have absolutely no chance at understanding what it means that Harry’s “reversing the charges”.  Some things have changed a lot since I was young.  This is where I’d normally make a quip about how the movie takes me back to when we held greedy, amoral men with too much money and absolutely no conscience accountable under the law, but in this case there’s nothing at all nostalgic about It’s a Wonderful Life — Potter seemingly will get away with having stolen eight thousand dollars from the Baileys, and go on being the man in Bedford Falls with the most power and capital, even if Harry Bailey is right (as I hope he is) in calling his brother George “the richest man in town,” speaking on a human level.

I Understood That Reference: Speaking of Henry Travers’s filmography (as I was just a moment ago), we see in a couple of shots that The Bells of St. Mary’s is playing at the theater in Bedford Falls that Christmas Eve.  Tommy is, I think, wearing a Santa mask when he tries to scare his father and George in his panic doesn’t know what to do other than hug him frantically…but honestly, I could be misreading it, it’s a weird mask.

Holiday Vibes (7/10): This is another one where there’s no easy rating: give it a 10 and a new viewer will, 45 minutes in, wonder what the heck is so Christmassy about it, but give it some low number and that’ll underplay how powerfully this movie’s scenes and its message have taken up residence in millions of people’s experiences of December and the holidays.  I think a 7 is fair, given that half the film’s on Christmas Eve, and we encounter enough of it (from decorations to music to the movie’s themes) that it’s playing an important role.  Plus the big finish.  Knocks me flat, every time.

Actual Quality (10/10): This film has, for some reason, long had a reputation as being underappreciated by critics, but I don’t think that’s true — sure, a few pieces have knocked it for its sentimentality, but it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, and in recent years it has placed high on almost every kind of movie list from the organizations that put these things out on both sides of the Atlantic.  For me, it’s absolutely top tier: those of you I’ve made aware of Flickchart are probably asking where this one ranks, and while it’s moved around a little over the years, I think it’s solidly a top 25 movie for me (and it’s currently sitting at #20).  But the movies I love aren’t always the ones I think have the greatest quality, so let me double down here on this movie’s artistry: the cast is tremendous, and the film successfully sweeps us through half a century of American life, touching on the influenza epidemic, the roaring 20s, the crash that started the Great Depression, the second World War, etc., without feeling cheap or cheesy in the ways it uses those contexts.  It is hard to pull off this movie’s intended outcomes, mixing some comic moments with a classic romance featuring two stars but wrapping all of it in one of the most fantastic premises you’ll find in a major Hollywood release of that era.  The fact that it succeeds on all fronts leaves me feeling there’s no way I can dock it even half a point.

Party Mood-Setter? So, it really shouldn’t work in this setting, since the film is complicated and has a pretty wild premise, and then the emotion at the end hits like a truck.  But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t households that know this film so well that it can be a Christmas vibe you’re only half paying attention to — how many of us, indeed, remember Christmas Eves where this movie was just on in the background while our families did other things?  If it works that way for you, though, you’ll already know it: for folks newer to the movie, I wouldn’t recommend using it in that fashion.

Plucked Heart Strings? I know sometimes we say things like “I cried” and mean them only metaphorically, so I want to be clear: I cried human tears while rewatching this.  A lot of them.  Tissues were involved.  I think it may have hit harder because it’s 2024 and I have a lot of feelings about the Potters of the world and the bravery of communities banding together to protect each other from them.  It may also have hit harder just because I was thinking in such detail about the film that its themes really reached me.  But I think it’s also just a movie that does this to people — I ran into a “reaction video” on YouTube about It’s a Wonderful Life, where a woman (I think a Millennial) filmed herself watching it for the first time.  Yeah, I know, I don’t really get this genre of video either, folks, but I was curious.  She got within about 5 minutes of the end and was remarking at how confused she was that her viewers had told her she’d cry at this movie, because it just doesn’t hit like that.  And then she spent the last five minutes in full, heaving sobs as the movie came crashing down around her — it hit her so hard that afterwards, in conversation with her off-screen partner, she tells him she feels so embarrassed by her reaction that she’s not sure if she should post it.  I share all that just to say, I think that’s how this film works.  It surprises us with joy in a way that gets past our defenses.  Maybe it doesn’t hit you like that, but I’d come to it, if you are approaching it for the first time or the first time in a long time, ready to let yourself feel this way.

Recommended Frequency: As I mention above, to me, this is only kept off of the “every single year” list by the fact that it’s powerful enough to be hard to take some years.  It’s still easily a 9 out of 10 years movie for me, and if you’ve not seen it even in just the last few, I’d tell you you’re overdue.  I hope you get a lot of joy out of it.

Before I tell you about where you can watch this movie, I do want to note: this is the last Film for the Holidays movie review of 2024.  It might be the last one ever!  But the day after Christmas, if you want, I’ll be posting a survey here.  It’s intended to get a better understanding of what the blog’s viewers might care about if I was thinking of doing this again — what to keep the same and what to change.  It’ll be very short and obviously totally up to you which questions to answer if any.  But I hope, if you’ve come here at all regularly, you’ll pop back here and tell me what you think: even if what you think is “yeah, James, failed experiment, use your free time for something else”.

If you want to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, you can go very old school and watch it over the air tonight, Christmas Eve, on NBC at 8pm Eastern / 5pm Pacific.  You can stream it on Amazon Prime if you’re a subscriber, or stream it for free (with ads) on the Roku Channel or Plex.  It looks like you can rent it from Google Play or Apple TV or Fandango at Home (as well as Amazon, I expect, if you’re not a Prime subscriber).  This is a classic, folks, and if you want to own it, I think you should — Blu-ray and DVD copies are really inexpensive (in my opinion) at Barnes & Noble right now.  And of course Worldcat assures me it’s in thousands of libraries, so I think you should go check out your local library’s film collection.

If you don’t swing back through here for the survey, folks, it was a delight sharing this journey from Thanksgiving to Christmas with you.  Whatever holidays you are or aren’t celebrating, I appreciate you giving me a little time during a stretch of the year where free time is often hard to come by.  Perhaps I’ll be back in 2025 and so will you, but if either (or both) of us are not, happy film watching to you, and a happy new year regardless!

Carol (2015)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Holly and the Ivy (1952)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Midwinter’s Tale (1995)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)

Review Essay

There will be other films in this blog project that I describe as more intense, serious, or challenging than what we think of on average as a “holiday movie”, but I can’t emphasize enough: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is the most difficult movie to watch of anything I’ve seen in this very loosely defined genre, and while I think the film has a lot to recommend it, I don’t particularly encourage you to watch it at this time of year.  Though maybe you’re looking for something unexpected, and if so, this movie (starting with its innocent, seemingly cheerful title) is a real bait and switch from the get-go in a way that’s undeniably compelling and also deeply unsettling.

The movie orbits around a small handful of men encountering one another in a Japanese POW camp in World War II.  Our primary characters are Japanese officers who show varying levels of compassion and cruelty to the prisoners in their charge, and British prisoners who show varying levels of capacity to understand and communicate with their captors.  I do hear you asking, “James, you’re sure this is a Christmas movie?”  But yeah, it is, on some level — the title’s no throwaway, at least.  Maybe the movie’s most surprising act of mercy occurs on Christmas Day, with a character explicitly identifying his reasoning as being connected to the holiday.  And the phrase “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” is spoken not once but twice: the gap between those two moments in every respect, from power dynamic to emotional intent to camera angle and edit, is huge and meaningful, with the line’s second appearance coinciding with the film’s final scene and argument.  Die Hard is a Christmas movie, after all, but where that action film revels in the more traditional Hollywood use of stylized and sanitized violence to provide a palette from which the hero can paint, this arthouse war movie devotes itself to an unflinching and grim depiction of what violence really looks like, especially when the object of violence is essentially powerless to resist.  If Christmas is about redemption, about hope, about light shining in the dark, this movie seems to say, what is it about humanity that needs those things — what is it about humanity that strives to oppose them?

The poster for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence features the tagline "Java, 1942 -- A Clash of Cultures, A Test of the Human Spirit" on the left, and drawings of the faces of five of the movie's stars, clustered around an unsheathed sword, on the right.

I wouldn’t want anyone to go into this film without being forewarned, too — a lot of its interest is in masculinity (especially mid-20th century Japanese ideas about masculinity) and therefore the film often depicts both homeroticism and homophobia, with crude and cruel violence done to men who are apparently in violation of its code.  It might easily seem to the viewer like it’s a condescending white Euro-American attack on Japan, since a lot of the script puts critique of Japanese society in the mouths of the British prisoners.  But this is a film co-written and directed by a Japanese film-maker, Nagisa Oshima, who was known for his daring and sometimes controversial films that criticized what he saw in society around him — in other words, what we’re seeing is a Japanese man’s film about his own nation, and the world he grew up in, as he understood it. When the movie knocks arguments about  “honor” or the idea that suicide by sword (which we see, vividly and graphically, on screen) might be the only way to restore one’s manhood and dignity, this is Oshima’s arm taking the swing.

But this isn’t just a film about Japan.  Oshima (and his collaborators) have infused it with a lot of things — David Bowie (at perhaps the height of his considerable physical charisma) plays the main character of Jack Celliers with so much pathos that it’s not hard at all to see the Christ imagery that surrounds him (starting with those “J.C.” initials), including being chained in a crucifixion pose at one point, and later in the film engaging in a dialogue with the camp’s commander, Yonoi, that so deeply parallels the confrontation between Jesus and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, that this started to feel more like an Easter film than a Christmas movie.  There are other moments of Christ imagery, too, that I think would spoil too much to mention here.  And, to consider another of its angles, so much of the film is interested in power — the “commanding officer” of the British POWs is a man named Hicksley, but he cannot speak Japanese while another POW, the titular Mr. Lawrence, can.  Which means that when there are delicate matters to discuss or negotiate, it’s often Lawrence talking with Commander Yonoi, or Sergeant Hara, and not Hicksley.  Or, to take another example, it’s obvious from the moment we see Yonoi meet Jack Celliers that the Japanese officer nearly collapses with desire at the sight of a man that lovely.  So, when Yonoi tries to assert his (very real) power over Celliers as the camp’s senior military official, and Celliers starts to realize how dangerous it would be for Yonoi to be discovered as gay (and, too, how much Yonoi wants on some level to protect and even win over Celliers)?  In either of these situations, who’s actually in control?

I’ve said a lot about the film and yet I intentionally haven’t revealed much about it — there’s a lot packed into the relatively brief days depicted in the movie, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for someone ready for the intensity it offers.  As a guy raised on somewhat less realistic and more “plucky” POW movies from the mid-20th Century, I went into this viewing experience expecting something with a little more humor, more moments of triumph.  But even the movie’s kindnesses and mercies are tinged with loss and fear.  As were the war’s, I expect, for the men who on both sides were called upon to do violence to one another.  Those moments of gentle connection are still there, though — if you are ready for the film’s violence and for the characters’ often callous treatment of gay men, all through it I think there are instances of real compassion and insight.  Whatever we want to argue the “Christmas message” is, I think it cannot be too far from this film’s central claims about the corruptibility of power, about the idea that love is more enduring than the forces that seek to blot it out, about the possibility for mercy and the power it wields.  That’s why, to me, this movie belongs here, and why, though I would never advise someone to add it to their Christmas mix, its words and images loom in the shadows of these long winter nights for me, in ways that I think do add meaningfully to my thinking about why humans make these festivals of light on the darkest days of our year.

I Know That Face: Jack Thompson (who here plays the British POWs’ commanding officer, Hicksley) later appears as Bandy in 2007’s December Boys, a film set on a Christmas vacation trip for four orphans in the Australian outback.  And of course David Bowie (the charismatic Jack Celliers, here) is closely associated with Christmas for many of us from his performance singing “The Little Drummer Boy” on television with Bing Crosby in 1977. But we may also remember Bowie from another holiday context, since it’s his filmed introduction that appeared before the incredibly lovely animated short film The Snowman when it was shown to American audiences (in 1982, the year prior to this film’s release), replacing the introduction offered to British viewers by Raymond Briggs, the author of the original picture book that the film’s based on (since apparently it was assumed Americans wouldn’t know or care about Briggs).

That Takes Me Back: Nothing here really takes me back anywhere, thank goodness: the few scenes in this film that occur outside a POW camp depict similarly abusive/oppressive spaces, and there wasn’t anything really for me to hang my hat on for nostalgia.  I was reminded, at times, of conversations with my WWII veteran grandfather, who served in the Pacific, and whose most haunted memories were of the liberation of POW camps at the end of the war.  But that’s not really what this category is for.

I Understood That Reference: A drunken Japanese officer’s act of mercy is, he says, his way of playing “Father Christmas” — a strange twist on a familiar childhood image, and one that I think heightens my sense that Christmas means something to the filmmaker, Oshima, that he is trying to work with as a part of this film’s thematic material.

Holiday Vibes (0.5/10): I mean, again, I think if we pay close attention, on a deep level there’s a message here that’s resonant with the holiday.  But I have to be honest: the movie’s violence is so gutting and gripping that it’s very hard to have that experience in the moment — if you want a movie with holiday vibes, this ain’t it.

Actual Quality (8.5/10): I wouldn’t call this a lost masterpiece (as some do), but the film is extraordinarily powerful for much of its running time.  I think there are moments where the sequence of events (and their causation) is a little too murky, and I think fundamentally it loses its way a little bit in the final 5-10 minutes — even though I like some individual lines at the closing, overall I think the movie wants to argue it’s made a case that I don’t think it really has.  But the acting and the music are really tremendously successful, and a lot of the writing and direction lives up to that standard.  If you’d normally watch an intense arthouse movie from the 1980s, I think this one should definitely go on your list of things to consider.

Party Mood-Setter? I mean, you saw what I wrote earlier, I’m guessing, about how the movie depicts a man committing suicide by sword on screen?  If you’re throwing a party that this would set the tone for, just playing in the background, I don’t want to be invited.

Plucked Heart Strings? Truthfully, yes, assuming you can hang in there with the movie: the fate of more than one of its characters is both bleak and heart-wrenching, but I think no one’s final outcome is devoid of meaning (that is, this isn’t just suffering for suffering’s sake).  If you’re watching this, you’d want to be ready for a real emotional ride.

Recommended Frequency: To be totally honest, I doubt I will be in the mood for this any holiday season: it’s just too far from where I want to go with my December media consumption.  But I might watch this film again, since I think it’s undeniably well made.  It’s just very grim, and I would be really selective about when I watched it and who I watched it with.  Speaking to you, though, if you’ve time and attention enough for it right now and it’s calling you on some level, as I said above, there’s a Christmas narrative here, mostly subtext and very challenging.  And if it doesn’t sound like the kind of film you can stomach, I get it, and this blog is fortunately full of all sorts of alternative options!

If you decide to take on the intensity of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the only ways to stream it that I know of are either to be a subscriber to the Criterion Channel or else to rent it from Amazon Prime. The folks at Amazon will also sell you the movie on disc.  Honestly, I push libraries all the time, but this particular movie is maybe most readily available from us librarians — Worldcat says well over 500 libraries hold it on disc, including (I bet) a public library somewhere near you.

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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