Have yourself a raunchy Christmas
Raunchy comedies dominate the Christmas season lately
This year’s loveliest Christmas movie moment played in cinemas in June. If you saw The Nice Guys, a funny, buddy-detective comedy starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, you might recall the final scene in which the two colleagues pick through the aftermath of their catastrophic first case over hard liquor in a Mexican cantina.
Strung up between the pinatas are 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 Shane 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 realize just how many other filmmakers are bungling it.
Since the ’40s, 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.
Despite their many differences, each one of them fits with Black’s evaluation. The best Christmas films are 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 has inspired at least 20 films, the first of which was made in 1901. A handful are great — but only one has Muppets.
Which brings us to this year’s big contenders for a place in the pantheon: Office Christmas Party and Bad Santa 2. Both are raunchy adult comedies and feature 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 my family to watch either of these after Christmas lunch in years to come. And the 2015 crop — The Night Before, a stoner comedy, and Christmas with the Coopers, a shrill ensemble comedy — don’t seem much likelier.
In fact, the majority of the last 10 years’ Christmas films have been adult comedies about dysfunctional families or friendships flaring up.
There have been films for children, too, but almost none attempt to 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 (2011), which is 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.
“Christmas, but sad,” is a precarious pose for any film to strike, because it’s so close to mawkish — which is exactly where the last rash of more traditional Hollywoodmade Christmas films ended up. Love Actually is a perfect example: aside from the Alan RickmanEmma Thompson subplot, it’s like snorkelling through condensed milk.
And there’s the other major disincentive for Hollywood: recouping costs at the box office is relatively hard. You have to launch in late November at the earliest, while the market’s already crowded with year-end blockbusters and early Oscar contenders — and unlike those, you can guarantee public interest will flame out within a month.
Home Alone, which took US$475 million worldwide in 1990, remains the most commercially successful Christmas film of all time — and the only one to have come within US$120 million of it is Home Alone 2.