Tag: war movie

A Midnight Clear (1992)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joyeux Noel (2005)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.