Seasonal movies with rough edge
THIS year’s loveliest Christmas movie moment was in a Shane Black movie The Nice Guys, starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as two private detectives.
The final scene is one in which the two colleagues pick through the aftermath of their catastrophic first case over hard liquor in a Mexican cantina strung up with fairy lights and tinsel.
And the music playing in the background isn’t mariachi, but seasonal swing. Those trimmings give an otherwise not-conventionally-festive scene a tragicomic glow that, if you squint a bit, could almost be Dickensian.
The Nice Guys is the latest film from Black, a director and screenwriter whose life’s work has been largely dedicated to mining authentic Christmas cheer from unlikely sources. (See also: Lethal Weapon , Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and more.)
Black’s heartfelt understanding of the power of Christmas in the movies – it “represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect [sic] our lives”, was how he put it in a recent interview – makes you realise just how many other filmmakers are bungling it.
Since the Forties, a canon of Christmas films has steadily blown in around the season like a snowdrift.
Ernst Lubitsch was arguably the first to really skewer it, in 1940, with The Shop Around the Corner and classics such as Holiday Inn, It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street quickly followed in its wake.
The best Christmas films are ultimately about time – the beauty and sadness of its onward flow, the thrill when it stops just long enough for a flake of snow to settle. They make us reflect on what’s passed, savour the present, and anticipate what’s yet to come.
As such, the genre owes everything to Charles Dickens, whose 1843 novel A Christmas Carol had Scrooge and his spirits walk us through the drill.
That book itself has inspired at least 20 films, the first of which was made in 1901, and is the oldest surviving literary adaptation cinema. A handful are great – but only one has Muppets.
Which brings us to this year’s big contender for a place in the pantheon: Office Christmas Party, which is on circuit in East London. It is a raunchy comedy, and carries an age restriction of 16.
The certification report details such festive set-pieces as “a man snorting lines of cocaine and another man accidentally ingesting some when it is sprayed out of a snow machine”.
It’s hard to imagine settling down with family to watch this after Christmas lunch in years to come. And the 2015 crop – The Night Before, a throwaway stoner comedy, and Christmas with the Coopers ,a shrill ensemble one – don’t seem much likelier.
In fact, the majority of the last 10 years’ Christmas films have been adult comedies – mostly crude ones – about dysfunctional families or friendships flaring up.
There have been films for children too – but almost none attempt to meaningfully connect with old and young viewers alike: a must if you want to secure a place in Christmas film history.
One that does – and succeeds – is Aardman Animations’ Arthur Christmas, which is exciting, funny and the right kind of sentimental, with a little dusting of melancholy you don’t initially expect. Few films get the balance right: Elf (2003) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) are among the relatively recent very few to succeed.
Home Alone, which took $475million (R6.6-billion) worldwide in 1990, remains the most commercially successful Christmas film of all time – and the only one to have come within $120-million (R1.6-billion) of it is Home Alone 2.
It has since dawned on Hollywood that films don’t have to be about Christmas to feel like it: often, the mere act of drawing an audience of all ages together brings with it a seasonal shiver. The Lord of the Rings trilogy are not-Christmas-but-Christmassy classics – when else would you have the time to watch them? – and Disney’s Enchantedwould feel festive even if it were set on a space station.
Many of the Harry Potter films take a brief Christmas detour, while in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Christmas signals that Aslan’s afoot.
In fact, perhaps that’s all you need: a redemptive storyline and a lot of snow. My own favourites all fit the pattern, from Groundhog Day to Frozen , Fargo, The Thing and, as of last year, The Hateful Eight. — The Daily Telegraph