by Roger Ebert
What is just right about Home for the Holidays is that none of the characters act as if they are experiencing any of this for the first time. Even when Aunt Glady drinks too much and announces that her sister’s husband kissed her the first time they met, all she draws is a resigned silence; we get the notion she may make this revelation several times a year.
Foster directs the film with a sure eye for the revealing little natural moment. And she realizes that although the Holly Hunter character supplies the movie’s point of view, it is up to Durning and Bancroft to supply the center—just as parents do at real family celebrations. Bancroft and Durning have each been guilty, from time to time, of overacting, but here they both beautifully find just the right notes of acceptance, resignation, wounded but stubborn pride—and romance. There are moments when they dance together that help to explain why families do get together for the holidays, and Durning describes a memory of one perfect moment in the family’s history, and we understand that although life may not give us too much, it often gives enough.
The story of Tommy, the gay brother, provides a counterpoint to the mainline madness. Foster and her writer, W. D. Richter, do not commit the mistake of making his character be about homosexuality. He is gay, but what defines him for the family is more his quasi-obnoxious personality, his way of picking on his boring brother-in-law, his practical jokes, his wounding insights, and finally his own concealed romanticism. Downey brings out all the complexities of a character who has used a quick wit to keep the world’s hurts at arm’s length. And in bringing along his friend, the mysterious Leo Fish, he has prepared a surprise that no one, certainly not Claudia, could have anticipated.
Holly Hunter is a wonderful actress. Here she has a more human and three-dimensional role than in her other current movie, Copycat, but her performance in Copycat is even better, maybe because it stands alone, and in Home for the Holidays, she reacts and witnesses as much as she initiates. It’s not hard to guess that with her stature and presence she represents, to some degree, Jodie Foster. Indeed there are probably autobiographical elements scattered here and there throughout the cast, but that’s not the point: What Foster and Richter have created here is a film that understands the reality expressed by Robert Frost when he wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
The Ice Harvest
R, 88 m., 2005
John Cusack (Charlie), Billy Bob Thornton (Vic), Connie Nielsen (Renata), Randy Quaid (Bill Guerrard), Oliver Platt (Pete Van Heuten). Directed by Harold Ramis. Produced by Richard Benton, Albert Berger, and Thomas Busch. Written by Richard Russo and Benton. Based on the novel by Scott Phillips.
It’s a busy Christmas Eve for Charlie Arglist, who visits his former in-laws, steers his drunken buddy out of trouble, buys toys for his kids, waives the stage rental for a stripper at his topless club, and cheats, lies, steals, and kills. Perhaps of all actors only John Cusack could play Charlie and still look relatively innocent by Christmas Day. He does look tired, however.
Charlie is a mob lawyer in Wichita, Kansas. He is in fact the best mob lawyer in all of Kansas. We know this because his friend Pete (Oliver Platt) announces it loudly almost everywhere they go. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Charlie says, but Pete is beyond discretion. Pete is married to Charlie’s former wife and has inherited Charlie’s former in-laws, a circumstance that inspires in Charlie not jealousy but sympathy. They are fascinated that the woman they have both married is the only adult they know who still sleeps in flannel jammies with sewn-on booties.
Charlie’s holiday has begun promisingly. He and his associate Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) have stolen $2.2 million belonging to Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), the local mob boss. They think they can get away with this. They certainly hope so, anyway, for as Charlie tells Vic, “I sue people for a living. You sell pornography. Bill Guerrard kills people.” Charlie also manages a topless bar and is attracted to its manager, Renata (Connie Nielsen), who has suggested that Charlie’s Christmas stocking will be filled with more than apples and acorns if certain conditions are met.
It is all very complicated. There is the matter of the photograph showing a local councilman in a compromising position with Renata. The problem of Roy Gelles (Mike Starr), a hit man for Bill Guerrard, who has been asking around town for Charlie, probably not to deliver his Christmas bonus. The question of whether good old Vic can be trusted. And the continuing problem of what to do with Pete, who is very drunk and threatens a dinner party with a turkey leg, which in his condition is a more dangerous weapon than a handgun.
The Ice Harvest follows these developments with the humor of an Elmore Leonard project and the interlocking violence of a Blood Simple. The movie, directed by Harold Ramis, finds a balance between the goofy and the gruesome, as in a rather brilliant scene in which a mobster who is locked inside a trunk is nevertheless optimistic enough to shout out muffled death threats. For some reason, there is always humor in those crime scenarios where tough guys find it’s easy to conceive diabolical acts, exhausting to perform them. It’s one thing to lock a man in a trunk, another to get the trunk into the back seat of a Mercedes, still another to push it down a dock and into a lake. If the job ended with locking the trunk, you’d have more people in trunks.
The key to the movie’s humor is Cusack’s calm patience in the face of catastrophe. He has always been curiously angelic—the last altar boy you’d suspect of having stolen the collection plate. In The Ice Harvest, he is essentially a kind man. Consider his concern for Pete, a friend who has gotten very drunk on Christmas Eve because, as he confesses, he’s not man enough to fill his chair at the family dinner table. That Charlie takes time to bail his friend out of tight spots and give him good advice speaks well of a man so heavily scheduled with stealing and killing.
Vic, the Thornton character, is one of those Billy Bob specials whose smile is charming but not reassuring. Consider the moment after he and Charlie obtain the briefcase filled with the loot, and Vic drops Charlie off at home and Charlie reaches for the case and Vic reaches for it first, and they realize they have not discussed who will keep the case for the time being, and Vic asks if this is going to be a problem, and you know that if Charlie takes the case, it is definitely going to be a problem.
Nielsen has a bruised charm as the sexy Renata. She’s sexy, but weary of being sexy. It is such a responsibility. The movie has a quiet in-joke when Charlie asks her, “Where are you from, anyway?” He doesn’t think she sounds like she’s from around here. Of Nielsen’s last sixteen movies, all but one was American, and she has a flawless American accent, but in fact she is Danish. She never does answer Charlie’s question. The obvious answer is: “A long way from Kansas.”
I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal, and spectacularly complicated ways to die. I liked it for Charlie’s essential kindness, as when he pauses during a getaway to help a friend who has run out of gas. And for the scene-stealing pathos of Oliver Platt’s drunk, who like many drunks in the legal profession achieves a rhetorical grandiosity during the final approach to oblivion. And I liked especially the way Roy, the man in the trunk, keeps on thinking positively, even after Vic puts bullets through both ends of the trunk because he can’t remember which end of the trunk Roy’s head is at. Maybe it’s in the middle.
It's a Wonderful Life
NO MPAA RATING, 129 m., 1946
James Stewart (George Bailey), Donna Reed (Mary Hatch), Lionel Barrymore (Mr. Potter), Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy), Henry Travers (Clarence), Beulah Bondi (Mrs. Bailey), Frank Faylen (Ernie), Ward Bond (Bert), Gloria Grahame (Violet Bick), H.B. Warner (Mr. Gower). Produced and directed by Frank Capra. Written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Capra, and Jo Swerling, based on “The Greatest Gift,” by Philip Van Doren Stern.
The best and worst things that ever happened to It’s a Wonderful Life are that it fell out of copyright protection and into the shadowy no-man’s
-land of the public domain. Because the movie is no longer under copyright, any television station that can get its hands on a print of the movie can show it, at no cost, as often as it wants to. And that has led in the last decade to the rediscovery of Frank Capra’s once-forgotten film, and its elevation into a Christmas tradition. PBS stations were the first to jump on the bandwagon in the early 1970s, using the saga of the small-town hero George Bailey as counter-programming against expensive network holiday specials. To the general amazement of TV program directors, the audience for the film grew and grew over the years, until now many families make the movie an annual ritual.
That was the best thing that happened to It’s a Wonderful Life, bringing cheer into the lives of director Frank Capra and star James Stewart, who both consider it their favorite film. The worst thing—which has inspired Stewart to testify before a congressional committee and Capra to issue a sickbed plea—is that the movie has been colorized. Movies in the public domain are so defenseless that you could cut one up to make ukulele picks, and who could legally prevent you? And so a garish colorized version—destroying the purity of the classic original black-and-white images—has been seen on cable, is available for local syndication, and is sold on cassette.
It is a great irony that the colorized version has been copyrighted, and so many stations are paying a great deal for the rights to an inferior version of a movie that they could show for free in black and white. If I were a local television program director with taste and a love of movies, I would find out when my competitor was going to air his colorized version, and counter-program with the original black-and-white movie, patting myself on the back for a public service. Maybe it could be promoted with a clip of Jimmy Stewart telling Congress, in his inimitable way, “I tried to look at the colorized version, but I had to switch it off—it made me feel sick.”
What is remarkable about It’s a Wonderful Life is how well it holds up over the years; it’s one of those ageless movies, like Casablanca or The Third Man, that improves with age. Some movies, even good ones, should only be seen once. When we know how they turn out, they’ve surrendered their mystery and appeal. Other movies can be viewed an indefinite number of times. Like great music, they improve with familiarity. It’s a Wonderful Life falls in the second category.
I looked at the movie once again recently, on the splendid video laserdisk edition from the Criterion Collection. The movie works like a strong and fundamental fable, sort of a Christmas Carol in reverse: Instead of a mean old man being shown scenes of happiness, we have a hero who plunges into despair.
The hero, of course, is George Bailey (Stewart), a man who never quite makes it out of his quiet birthplace of Bedford Falls. As a young man he dreams of shaking the dust from his shoes and traveling to far-off lands, but one thing and then another keeps him at home—especially his responsibility to the family savings and loan association, which is the only thing standing between Bedford Falls and the greed of Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the avaricious local banker.
George marries his high school sweetheart (Donna Reed, in her first starring role), settles down to raise a family, and helps half the poor folks in town buy homes where they can raise their own. Then, when George’s absentminded uncle (Thomas Mitchell) misplaces some bank funds during the Christmas season, it looks as if the evil Potter will have his way after all. George loses hope and turns mean (even his face seems to darken, although it’s still nice and pink in the colorized version). He despairs, and is standing on a bridge contemplating suicide when an Angel 2nd Class named Clarence (Henry Travers) saves him and shows him what life in Bedford Falls would have been like without him.
Frank Capra never intended It’s a Wonderful Life to be pigeonholed as a “Christmas picture.” This was the first movie he made after returning from service in World War II, and he wanted it to be special—a celebration of the lives and dreams of America’s ordinary citizens, who tried the best they could to do the right thing by themselves and their neighbors. After becoming Hollywood’s poet of the common man in the 1930s with an extraordinary series of populist parables (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take It With You), Capra found the idea for It’s a Wonderful Life in a story by Philip Van Doren Stern that had been gathering dust on studio shelves.
For Stewart, also recently back in civilian clothes, the movie was a chance to work again with Capra, for whom he had played Mr. Smith. The original trailer for the movie (included on the Criterion disk) played up the love angle between Stewart and Donna Reed and played down the message—but the movie was not a box office hit, and was all but forgotten before the public domain prints began to make their rounds.
It’s a Wonderful Life is not just a heart-warming “message picture.” The conclusion of the film makes such an impact that some of the earlier scenes may be overlooked—such as the slapstick comedy of the high school hop, where the dance floor opens over a swimming pool, and Stewart and Reed accidentally jitterbug right into the water. (This covered pool was not a set but actually existed at Hollywood High School). There’s also the drama of George rescuing his younger brother from a fall through the ice, and the scene where Donna Reed loses her bathrobe and Stewart ends up talking to the shrubbery. The telephone scene—where an angry Stewart and Reed find themselves helplessly drawn toward each other—is wonderfully romantically charged. And the darker later passages have an elemental power, as the drunken George Bailey staggers through a town he wants to hate, and then revisits it through the help of a gentle angel. Even the corniest scenes in the movie—those galaxies that wink while the heavens consult on George’s fate—work because they are so disarmingly simple. A more sophisticated approach might have seemed labored.
It’s a Wonderful Life did little for Frank Capra’s postwar career, and indeed he never regained the box office magic that he had during the 1930s. Such later films as State of the Union (1948) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961) have the Capra touch but not the magic, and the director did not make another feature after 1961. But he remained hale and hearty until a stroke slowed him in the late 1980s; and he died in 1991. At a seminar with some film students in the 1970s he was asked if there were still a way to make movies about the kinds of values and ideals found in the Capra films.
”Well, if there isn’t,” he said, “we might as well give up.”
Joyeux Noel
PG-13, 110 m., 2006
Diane Kruger (Anna Sorensen), Benno Furmann (Nikolaus Sprink), Guillaume Canet (Lieutenant Audebert), Dany Boon (Ponchel), Bernard Le Coq (General Audebert), Gary Lewis (Father Palmer), Daniel Bruhl (Horstmayer), Alex Ferns (Gordon), Steven Robertson (Jonathan), Robin Laing (William). Directed by Christian Carion and produced by Christophe Rossignon. Screenplay by Carion.
On Christmas Eve 1914, a remarkable event took place in the trenches where the Germans faced the British and the French. There was a spontaneous cease-fire, as the troops on both sides laid down their weapons and observed the birth of the savior in whose name they were killing one another. The irony of this gesture is made clear in the opening scenes of Joyeux Noel, in which schoolchildren of the three nations sing with angelic fervor, each in their own language, about the necessity of wiping the enemy from the face of the earth.
The Christmas Eve truce actually happened, although not on quite the scale Christian Carion suggests in his film. He is accurate, however, in depicting the aftermath: Officers and troops were punished for fraternizing with the enemy in wartime. A priest who celebrated mass in No Man’s Land is savagely criticized by his bishop, who believes the patriotic task of the clergy is to urge the troops into battle and reconcile them to death.
The trench warfare of World War I was a species of hell unlike the agonies of any other war, before or after. Enemies were dug in within earshot of each other, and troops were periodically ordered over the top so that most of them could be mowed down by machine-gun fire. They were being ordered to stand up, run forward, and be shot
to death. And they did it. An additional novelty was the introduction of poison gas.
Artillery bombardments blew up the trenches so often that when they were dug out again, pieces of ordnance, bits of uniforms, shattered wooden supports, and human bones interlaced the new walls. A generation lost its leaders. European history might have been different if so many of the best and brightest had not been annihilated. Those who survived were the second team. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves is the best book I have read about the experience.
Carion’s film, a 2006 Oscar nominee, is a trilingual portrait of a short stretch of the front lines, a small enough microcosm of the war that we’re able to follow most of the key players. We meet some of them as they volunteer for service. There is a German tenor named Sprink (Benno Furmann), who leaves the opera to serve in uniform. Two Scottish brothers sign up, Jonathan and William (Steven Robertson and Robin Laing), who agree, “At last, something’s happening in our lives!” They are joined by their parish priest, Father Palmer (Gary Lewis), who follows them into uniform as a stretcher bearer. The French are led by Lieutenant Audebert (Guillaume Canet), whose father (Bernard Le Coq) is the general in charge of these lines. Audebert throws up before leading his men into battle, but that’s to be expected.
On Christmas Eve, the Danish singer Anna Sorensen (Diane Kruger) is brought to a support area to sing for German officers and the crown prince, but she insists on being taken to the front lines. She says she wants to sing for the ordinary troops, but her real hope is to see Sprink, her lover. Reaching the lines, she is surprised to find that thousands of little Christmas trees have been supplied by Berlin and form a decoration on top of the German trenches.
