by Roger Ebert
This is the setup for an Idiot Plot, in which all misunderstandings could be cleared up with one or two lines of dialogue. Yes, but some Idiot Plots are charming, while most are merely dumb. This one I enjoyed, mostly because the actors have so much quiet fun with it. Of course Mary the manager thinks Tina Pisati is the critic. Of course Tina thinks that handsome young Ray is her pen pal, not crusty old Joe. And of course when Stu O’Malley checks in, no one fingers him as the critic, because he is grumpy, unkempt, and half loaded; it’s M. Emmet Walsh, playing his usual role.
Tina is upgraded to a luxury corner suite. O’Malley gets shunted to a budget room, where he suffers from what passes for flu and may involve a large percentage of hangover. Tina has her eye on Ray. Ray thinks Tina is beautiful and sexy but refuses to cater to her because he is too ethical to kowtow to a critic. Old Joe knows the score but maintains a studious silence about his pen-pal correspondence, which no one at the resort knows about.
And then there is the matter of Earl (Graham Greene), the resort’s chef, who has become a devout vegetarian and tries to discourage the customers from eating meat. He has a disconcerting way of referring to the animals on the menu by their first names and grows sorrowful when someone orders the turkey, which is a beloved pet.
Old Joe dreams of winning a Jeep Cherokee in an approaching bingo tournament. Grumpy old O’Malley hauls out of bed to play bingo. Eventually the two old-timers both end up in the Cherokee, stranded in a blizzard, while misunderstandings pile up back at the resort.
There is nothing here of earthshaking originality, but Kate Montgomery, the writer-director, has such affection for these characters that we can feel it through the screen. They’re not simply pawns in the plot, we sense; they represent something she wants to say about the Native Americans she knows. And the actors, all with successful careers behind them, must be fed up with playing losers in social problem dramas; Greene, a natural comedian, expands magnificently as the vegetarian chef with an effortless line of patter about soy products, analogue foods, and healthy nutrition. There may be a sitcom job for him lingering somewhere near this role.
As for Ray and Tina, well, in all versions of basic romantic comedy, we want them to kiss, they want to kiss, and the plot perversely frustrates all of us. But at the end of Christmas in the Clouds, after everything has worked out more or less as we hoped it would, I felt a surprising affection and warmth. There will be holiday pictures that are more high-tech than this one, more sensational, with bigger stars and higher budgets and indeed greater artistry. But there may not be many with such good cheer.
A Christmas Story
PG, 94 m., 1983
Peter Billingsley (Ralphie), Darren McGavin (The Old Man), Melinda Dillon (Mother), Ian Petrella (Randy), Zack Ward (Scut Farcas). Directed by Bob Clark and produced by Clark, Rene Dupont, and Gary Goch. Screenplay by Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown, and Clark.
One of the details that A Christmas Story gets right is the threat of having your mouth washed out with Lifebouy soap. Not any soap. Lifebouy. Never Ivory or Palmolive. Lifebouy, which apparently contained an ingredient able to nullify bad language. The only other soap ever mentioned for this task was Lava, but that was the nuclear weapon of mouth-washing soaps, so powerful it was used for words we still didn’t even know.
There are many small but perfect moments in A Christmas Story, and one of the best comes after the Lifebouy is finally removed from Ralphie’s mouth and he is sent off to bed. His mother studies the bar, thinks for a moment, and then sticks it in her own mouth, just to see what it tastes like. Moments like that are why some people watch A Christmas Story every holiday season. There is a real knowledge of human nature beneath the comedy.
The movie is based on the memoirs of Jean Shepherd, the humorist whose radio programs and books remembered growing up in Indiana in the 1940s. It is Shepherd’s voice on the soundtrack, remembering one Christmas season in particular, and the young hero’s passionate desire to get a Daisy Red Ryder 200-shot Carbine Action BB Gun for Christmas—the one with the compass in the stock, “as cool and deadly a piece of weaponry as I had ever laid eyes on.”
I owned such a weapon. I recall everything about it at this moment with a tactile memory so vivid I could have just put it down to write these words. How you stuffed newspapers into the carton it came in to use it for target practice. How the BBs came in a cardboard tube with a slide-off top. How they rattled when you poured them into the gun. And of course how everybody warned that you would shoot your eye out.
Ralphie’s life is made a misery by that danger. He finds that nobody in northern Indiana (not his mother, not his teacher, not even Santa Claus) is able to even think about a BB gun without using the words “shoot your eye out.” At one point in the movie, in a revenge daydream, he knocks on his parents’ door with dark glasses, a blind man’s cane and a beggar’s tin cup. They are shocked, and ask him tearfully what caused his blindness, and he replies coolly, “Soap poisoning.”
The movie is not only about Christmas and BB guns, but also about childhood, and one detail after another rings true. The school bully, who, when he runs out of victims, beats up on his own loyal sidekick. The little brother who has outgrown his snowsuit, which is so tight that he walks around looking like the Michelin man; when he falls down he can’t get up. The aunt who always thinks Ralphie is a four-year-old girl, and sends him a pink bunny suit. Other problems of life belong to that long-ago age and not this one: clinkers in the basement coal furnace, for example, or the blowout of a tire. Everybody knows what a flat tire is, but many now alive have never experienced a genuine, terrifying loud instantaneous blowout.
A Christmas Story was released in the Christmas season of 1983, and did modest business at first (people don’t often go to movies with specific holiday themes). It got warm reviews and two Genie Awards (the Canadian Oscars) for Bob Clark’s direction and for the screenplay. And then it moved onto home video and has been a stealth hit season after season, finding a loyal audience. “Bams,” for example, one of the critics at the hip Three Black Chicks movie review Web site, confesses she loves it: “How does one describe, in short form, the smiles and shrieks of laughter one has experienced over more than 15 years of seeing the same great movie over and over, without sounding like a babbling, fanboyish fool who talks too much?”
The movie is set in Indiana but was filmed mostly around Toronto, with some downtown shots from Cleveland, by Clark, whose other big hits were Porky’s and Baby Geniuses. It is pitch-perfect, telling the story through the enthusiastic and single-minded vision of its hero Ralphie, and finding in young Peter Billingsley a sly combination of innocence and calculation.
Ralphie’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Parker, are played by Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon, and they exude warmth, zest, and love: They are about the nicest parents I can remember in a non-smarmy movie. Notice the scene where Mrs. Parker gets her younger son, Randy, to eat his food by pretending he is “mommy’s little piggie.” Watch the delight in their laughter together. And the enthusiasm with which the Old Man (as he is always called) attacks the (unseen) basement furnace, battles with the evil neighbor dogs, and promises to change a tire in “four minutes flat—time me!” And the lovely closing moment as the parents tenderly put their arms around each other on Christmas night.
Some of the movie’s sequences stand as classic. The whole business, for example, of the Old Man winning the “major award” of a garish lamp in the shape of a woman’s leg (watch Mrs. Parker hiding her giggles in the background as he tries to glue it together after it is “accidentally” broken). Or the visit by Ralphie and Randy to a department store Santa Claus, whose helpers spin the terrified kids around to bang them down on Santa’s lap, and afterward kick them down a slide to floor level. Or the sequence where a kid is not merely dared but Triple-Dog-Dared to stick his tongue onto a frozen lamp post, and the fire department has to be called. And the deep disillusionment with which Ralphie finally gets his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ri
ng in the mail, and Annie’s secret message turns out to be nothing but a crummy commercial.
There is also the matter of Scut Farcas (Zack Ward), the bully, who Ralphie assures us has yellow eyes. Every school has a kid like this, who picks on smaller kids but is a coward at heart. He makes Ralphie’s life a misery. How Farcus gets his comeuppance makes for a deeply satisfying scene, and notice the perfect tact with which Ralphie’s mom handles the situation. (Do you agree with me that Dad already knows the whole story when he sits down at the kitchen table?)
In a poignant way, A Christmas Story records a world that no longer quite exists in America. Kids are no longer left unattended in the line for Santa. The innocence of kids’ radio programs has been replaced by slick, ironic children’s programming on TV. The new Daisy BB guns have a muzzle velocity higher than that of some police revolvers, and are not to be sold to anyone under sixteen. Nobody knows who Red Ryder was, let alone that his sidekick was Little Beaver.
So much has been forgotten. There is a moment when the Old Man needs an answer for the contest he is entering. The theme of the contest is “Characters in American Literature,” and the question is: “What was the name of the Lone Ranger’s nephew’s horse?”
Victor, of course. Everybody knows that.
A Christmas Tale ½
NO MPAA RATING, 151 m., 2008
Catherine Deneuve (Junon), Jean-Paul Roussillon (Abel), Anne Consigny (Elizabeth), Mathieu Amalric (Henri), Melvil Poupaud (Ivan), Hippolyte Girardot (Claude), Emmanuelle Devos (Faunia), Chiara Mastroianni (Sylvia), Laurent Capelluto (Simon). Directed by Arnaud Desplechin and produced by Pascal Caucheteux. Screenplay by Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu.
A Christmas Tale skates on thin ice across a crowded lake, arrives safely on the far shore, and shares a cup of hot cocoa and marshmallows with Death. It stars Catherine Deneuve as a woman dying of liver cancer and considering a bone marrow transplant, which could also kill her. Because she is almost weirdly resigned to her fate and doesn’t seem to worry much, her serenity prevents the film from being a procession into dirgeland.
What it is, instead, is a strangely encompassing collection of private moments among the members of a large family with a fraught history. Some of the moments are serious, some revealing, some funny, some simply wry in the manner of a New Yorker story about small insights into the lives of characters so special as to deserve to be in the story.
The family involves parents, children, grandchildren, spouses, a girlfriend, and others. I will not name all of them and their relationships because what use is that kind of information if you haven’t seen them and don’t know who I’m talking about? For example, Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) and her husband, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), have had four children, each one arriving with a different emotional meaning, but even in explaining this the movie grows murky, like a cousin at a family reunion telling you who the great-aunts of the in-laws are.
More to the point is the quietly playful approach of the director, Arnaud Desplechin, who seems to be demonstrating that A Christmas Tale is a movie that could have been made in several different tones, and showing us how he would have handled each of them. That leads to a wide range of musical genres, mood swings from solemn to the ribald, and always the peculiarity of the Deneuve character’s cheerful detachment from her fate. She’s like someone preparing for a familiar journey.
Desplechin doesn’t focus on her troubles with a grim intensity. Sometimes he seems to be looking for ways to distract himself. For example, he is obviously familiar with Hitchcock’s greatest film, Vertigo, which has no themes in common with this one. If you happen to have a video on hand, go to twenty-five minutes and fifty-two seconds into it, and watch what follows in the art gallery, as Jimmy Stewart stealthily approaches Kim Novak from behind. While you’re at it, watch the whole film.
When you’re watching A Christmas Tale, Desplechin’s homage to that scene is unmistakable. It’s not a shot-by-shot transposition, nor is the score a literal lift from Bernard Herrmann. They’re evocations, uncannily familiar. The proof is, you’ll see exactly what I saw when I watched the film. Now why does Desplechin do that? For fun, I think. Just showing off, the way I sneaked some e. e. cummings lines into my Answer Man column this week, for no better reason than that I could. Of course, an homage has to work just as well if you don’t know its source. In fact, it may work better because you’re not distracted by the connection. But nothing like a little value-added, as the British say.
Here’s another way Desplechin pleases himself. He begins with the happy fact that Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni were the parents of Chiara Mastroianni. In A Christmas Tale, Chiara Mastroianni plays Deneuve’s daughter-in-law, a little poke in the ribs because when they’re in the same movie they are invariably playing mother and daughter. OK, so we know that.
But look where he goes with it. It’s obvious that Chiara has a strong facial resemblance to her mother. Desplechin doesn’t make any particular effort to make the point, although he can hardly avoid showing her full face sometimes. Here’s what he does. He almost makes it a point to demonstrate how much Chiara looks like her father. Luckily, her parents, when they conceived her, were the two most beautiful people in the world.
When he films her in profile and from very slightly below and behind, we’re looking at the essence of Mastroianni. The images burned into our memories from La Dolce Vita and elsewhere are of a sad, troubled man, resigned to disappointment and all the more handsome because of it. I always feel tender toward Mastroianni. No actor—no actor—was more loved by the camera. So here he is, and the character he is sad about is played by Catherine Deneuve. I imagine Desplechin and his cinematographer, Eric Gautier, discussing these shots sotto voce in a far corner of the sound stage.
The film must be packed with Desplechin’s invisible self-indulgences. Those we can see allow us to see the movie smiling to itself. Mastroianni smoked all the time. So does his daughter here, the same moody way. Desplechin has Deneuve smoking long, thin cigarettes, like Virginia Slims. When was the last time you saw anyone smoking those in a movie? Every time you see one, it’s a tiny distraction. I’ll tell you when. The last time was also Deneuve. They are the cigarettes she really smokes.
For long stretches A Christmas Tale seems to be going nowhere in particular and using a lot of dialogue to do so. These are not boring stretches. The movie is 151 minutes long and doesn’t feel especially lengthy. The actors are individually good. They work together to feel like a family. Subplots threaten to occupy the foreground. All the while, something is preparing itself beneath the surface. In the film’s last scene (in the final two shots, as I recall) all the hidden weight of the film uncoils and pounces. It really was about something, and it knew it all the time.
I recommend you seek other reviews to orient you to the actual plot. These words have been sort of value-added. If you have Vertigo, arm yourself before you attend.
Comfort and Joy ½
PG, 106 m., 1984
Bill Paterson (Alan), Eleanor David (Maddy), Clare Grogan (Charlotte), Alex Norton (Trevor). Directed by Bill Forsyth. Produced by Davina Belling, Paddy Higson, and Clive Parsons. Screenplay by Forsyth.
In the midst of the Halloween season, when the movies are mostly about murders with power drills, it’s time to observe that cheerful, good-hearted people do still exist on the screen. It’s just that they’re all Scottish. Here, for example, is Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy, one of the happiest and most engaging movies you are likely to see this year, and it comes from a Glasgow director who has made a specialty out of characters who are as real as you and me, and nicer than me.
Forsyth makes small movies about small events in the lives of man. His That Sinking Feeling was about some amateur thieves who came into the possession of a warehouse fill of stainless-steel sinks, right in the middle of an astonishingly slow market for sinks. Gregory’s Girl was about a kid who fell in love with a girl who was a better soccer player than he was. L
ocal Hero was about some oil company executives who tried to buy the drilling rights to the most beautiful beach in Scotland, and ended up being charmed out of their socks by the local citizenry.
And now comes Comfort and Joy, about disc jockeys and ice cream wars. The hero, Alan Bird, is a radio announcer from 6:00 to 9:00 every morning. His nickname is “Dickey Bird,” and he specializes in the 6:10 a.m. traffic report (“There’s not one single car on the road.”) It is the Christmas season, time to be jolly, but then his girlfriend leaves him and he is deeply depressed until he catches a sparkle of dark eyes from the back of an ice cream truck.
He follows the truck, and when it stops he buys an ice cream and a candy bar from the pretty brunette inside. Just then, thugs pull up in a car, pile out, and smash the ice cream truck with cricket bats. They stop only long enough to recognize Dickey Bird and make a request for a record dedication.
Dickey’s new BMW has been injured in the fray. His troubles are only beginning. He is visited by representatives of Mr. McCool, a large Glascow ice cream chain, and they explain that the city has been carved up into territories, and that the notorious Mr. Bunny (operators of the brunette’s truck) are poachers. Partly because they force him and partly because he’s smitten with the girl, Dickey becomes a negotiator between the two sides in the ice cream wars, and the movie escalates into the kind of modulated insanity that Forsyth does so well.
