30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

by Roger Ebert

  The Scots and the French are equally surprised by the trees, and by the sound of singing as Sprink and Sorenson sing “Silent Night” and “Adeste Fideles.” Slowly, tentatively, soldiers begin to poke their heads up over the ramparts, and eventually they lay down their arms and join in the cratered No Man’s Land to listen to the singing, and then to the bagpipes of the Scots, and then to celebrate mass. The next morning, Christmas Day, there is even a soccer game. Precious bits of chocolate are shared. And they bury their dead, whose bodies have been rotting between the lines.

  These men have much in common with one another. They come from the same kinds of homes, went to the same kinds of schools, and worship the same kinds of gods. They are required to fight, and most of them are required to die. In a remarkable moment of common interest, they share information about plans for artillery attacks, and all gather in one trench while the other is shelled, then switch trenches for the response. This is treason, I suppose.

  Joyeux Noel has its share of bloodshed, especially in a deadly early charge, but the movie is about a respite from carnage, and it lacks the brutal details of films such as Paths of Glory, A Very Long Engagement, and, from later wars, Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it and who mostly died soon enough afterward. But on one Christmas they were able to express what has been called, perhaps too optimistically, the brotherhood of man.

  Little Women ½

  PG, 115 m., 1994

  Winona Ryder (Jo March), Gabriel Byrne (Friedrich Bhaer), Trini Alvarado (Meg March), Susan Sarandon (Mrs. March). Directed by Gillian Armstrong. Produced by Denise Dinovi. Written by Robin Swicord. Based on the book by Louisa May Alcott.

  This is a surprisingly sharp and intelligent telling of Louisa May Alcott’s famous story, and not the soft-edged children’s movie it might appear. There’s a first-rate cast, with Susan Sarandon as the mother; Winona Ryder as the tomboy, Jo; Trini Alvarado as Meg; Kirsten Dunst and Samantha Mathis as Amy, younger and older; and Claire Danes as Beth. As the girls are courted by their neighbor (Christian Bale) and his tutor (Eric Stoltz), and as Jo comes under the influence of a German professor (Gabriel Byrne), the film is true to Alcott’s story about how all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we’re young, and how, through a series of choices, we choose and narrow our destiny.

  The very title summons up preconceptions of treacly do-gooders in a smarmy children’s story, and some of the early shots in Little Women do little to discourage them: In one of the first frames, the four little women and their mother manage to arrange their heads within the frame with all of the spontaneity of a Kodak ad.

  But this movie is not smarmy, not dogooding, and only a little treacly; before long I was beginning to remember, from many years ago, that Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was a really good novel—one that I read with great attention.

  Of course, I was 11 or 12 then, but the novel seems to have grown up in the meantime—or maybe director Gillian Armstrong finds the serious themes and refuses to simplify the story into a “family” formula. Little Women may be marketed for children and teenagers, but my hunch is it will be best appreciated by their parents. It’s a film about how all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we’re young, and how, through a series of choices, we narrow our destiny.

  The story is set in Concord, Massachusetts, and begins in 1862, in a winter when all news is dominated by the Civil War. The March family is on its own; their father has gone off to war. Times are hard, although it’s hard not to smile when we find out how hard: “Firewood and lamp oil were scarce,” we hear, while seeing the Marches living in what passes for poverty: a three-story colonial, decorated for a Currier and Ives print, with the cheerful family cook in the kitchen and the Marches sitting around the fire, knitting sweaters and rolling bandages.

  The movie doesn’t go the usual route of supplying broad, obvious “establishing” scenes for each of the girls; instead, we gradually get to know them, we sense their personalities, and we see how they relate to one another. The most forcible personality in the family is the tomboy daughter Jo, played in a strong and sunny performance by Winona Ryder. She wants to be a writer, and stages family theatricals in which everyone—even the long-suffering cat—is expected to play a role.

  The others include wise Meg (Trini Alvarado) as the oldest; winsome Amy (Kirsten Dunst) as the youngest, and Beth, poor little Beth (Claire Danes), as the sickly one who survives a medical crisis but is much weakened (“Fetch some vinegar water and rags! We’ll draw the fever down from her head!”). There isn’t a lot of overt action in their lives, but then that’s typical of the nineteenth-century novel about women, which essentially shows them sitting endlessly in parlors, holding deep conversations about their hopes, their beliefs, their dreams, and, mostly, their marriage destinies.

  The March girls have many other interests (their mother, played by Susan Sarandon, is what passed 130 years ago for a feminist), but young men and eligible bachelors rank high on the list. Their young neighbor is Laurie (Christian Bale), a playmate who is allowed to join their amateur theatricals as an honorary brother, and who eventually falls in love with Jo. Then there’s Laurie’s tutor, the pleasant Mr. Brooke (Eric Stoltz), who is much taken with Meg, but is dismissed by Jo as “dull as powder.”

  Jo, who moves to New York and starts to write lurid Victorian melodramas with titles like The Sinner’s Corpse, falls under the eye of a European scholar, Friedrich Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne), who takes her seriously enough to criticize her work. He knows she can do better—why, she could write a novel named Little Women if she put half a mind to it. “I’m hopelessly flawed,” Jo sighs.

  But she is not. And late in the film, when she tells Friedrich that, yes, it’s all right for him to love her, Ryder’s face lights up with a smile so joyful it illuminates the theater.

  Little Women grew on me. At first, I was grumpy, thinking it was going to be too sweet and devout. Gradually, I saw that Gillian Armstrong (whose credits include My Brilliant Career and High Tide) was taking it seriously. And then I began to appreciate the ensemble acting, with the five actresses creating the warmth and familiarity of a real family.

  The buried issues in the story are quite modern: How must a woman negotiate the right path between society’s notions of marriage and household, and her own dreams of doing something really special, all on her own? One day, their mother tells them: “If you feel your value lies only in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that’s all you really are. Time erodes all such beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind.” Quite so.

  Love Actually ½

  R, 129 m., 2003

  Hugh Grant (Prime Minister), Liam Neeson (Daniel), Colin Firth (Jamie), Laura Linney (Sarah), Emma Thompson (Karen), Alan Rickman (Harry), Keira Knightley (Juliet), Martine McCutcheon (Natalie), Bill Nighy (Billy Mack), Rowan Atkinson (Rufus), Billy Bob Thornton (The U.S. President), Rodrigo Santoro (Karl), Thomas Sangster (Sam), Lucia Moniz (Aurelia). Directed by Richard Curtis and produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Duncan Kenworthy. Screenplay by Curtis.

  Love Actually is a belly flop into the sea of romantic comedy. It contains about a dozen couples who are in love; that’s an approximate figure because some of them fall out of love and others double up or change partners. There’s also one hopeful soloist who believes that if he flies to Milwaukee and walks into a bar he’ll find a friendly Wisconsin girl who thinks his British accent is so cute she’ll want to sleep with him. This turns out to be true.

  The movie is written and directed by Richard Curtis, the same man who wrote three landmarks in recent romantic comedy: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. His screenplay for Love Actually is bursting with enough material for the next three. The movie’s only flaw is also a virtue: It’s jammed with characters, stories, warmth, and laughs,
until at times Curtis seems to be working from a checklist of obligatory movie love situations and doesn’t want to leave anything out. At 129 minutes it feels a little like a gourmet meal that turns into a hot dog–eating contest.

  I could attempt to summarize the dozen (or so) love stories, but that way madness lies. Maybe I can back into the movie by observing the all-star gallery of dependable romantic comedy stars, led by Hugh Grant, and you know what? Little by little, a movie at a time, Hugh Grant has flowered into an absolutely splendid romantic comedian. He’s getting to be one of those actors like Christopher Walken or William Macy who make you smile when you see them on the screen. He has that Cary Grantish ability to seem bemused by his own charm, and has so much self-confidence that he plays the British prime minister as if he took the role to be a good sport.

  Emma Thompson plays his sister, with that wry way she has with normality, and Alan Rickman plays her potentially cheating husband with the air of a lawyer who hates to point out the escape clause he’s just discovered. Laura Linney plays his assistant, who is shy to admit she loves her coworker Karl (Rodrigo Santoro), who is also shy to admit he loves her, and so you see how the stories go round and round.

  Oh, and the prime minister walks into 10 Downing Street his first day on the job and Natalie the tea girl (Martine McCutcheon) brings him his tea and biscuits, and the nation’s most prominent bachelor realizes with a sinking heart that he has fallen head over teapot in love. “Oh, no, that is so inconvenient,” he says to himself, with the despair of a man who wants to be ruled by his head but knows that his netherlands have the votes.

  Wandering past these lovable couples is the film’s ancient mariner, a broken-down rock star named Billy Mack, who is played by Bill Nighy as if Keith Richards had never recorded anything but crap, and knew it. By the time he is fifty, George Orwell said, a man has the face he deserves, and Nighy looks as if he spent those years turning his face into a warning for young people: Look what can happen to you if you insist on being a naughty boy.

  Billy Mack is involved in recording a cynical Christmas version of one of his old hits. The hit was crappy, the Christmas version is crap squared, and he is only too happy to admit it. Billy Mack is long past pretending to be nice just because he’s on a talk show. At one point he describes his song with a versatile torrent of insults of which the only printable word is “turd.” And on another show, when he’s told he should spend Christmas with someone he loves, he replies, “When I was young I was greedy and foolish, and now I’m left with no one. Wrinkled and alone.” That this is true merely adds to his charm, and Nighy steals the movie, especially in the surprising late scene where he confesses genuine affection for (we suspect) the first time in his life.

  Look who else is in the movie. Billy Bob Thornton turns up as the president of the United States, combining the lechery of Clinton with the moral complacency of Bush. After the president makes a speech informing the British that America is better than they are, America is stronger than they are, America will do what is right and the Brits had better get used to it, Hugh Grant’s PM steps up to the podium, and what he says is a little more pointed than he intended it to be because his heart is breaking: He has just glimpsed the president flirting with the delectable tea girl.

  The movie has such inevitable situations as a school holiday concert, an office party, a family dinner, a teenage boy who has a crush on a girl who doesn’t know he exists, and all sorts of accidental meetings, both fortunate and not. Richard Curtis always involves a little sadness in his comedies (like the funeral in Four Weddings), and there’s genuine poignancy in the relationship of a recently widowed man (Liam Neeson) and his wife’s young son by a former marriage (Thomas Sangster). Their conversations together have some of the same richness as About a Boy.

  The movie has to hop around to keep all these stories alive, and there are a couple I could do without. I’m not sure we need the wordless romance between Colin Firth, as a British writer, and Lucia Moniz, as the Portuguese maid who works in his cottage in France. Let’s face it: The scene where his manuscript blows into the lake and she jumps in after it isn’t up to the standard of the rest of the movie.

  I once had ballpoints printed up with the message, “No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough.” Love Actually is too long. But don’t let that stop you.

  The Muppet Christmas Carol

  G, 86 m., 1992

  Michael Caine (Scrooge), with the voices of Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmere, Jerry Nelson, and David Rudman. Directed By Brian Henson. Produced by Oz, Martin Baker, Brian Henson, and Jerry Juhl. Screenplay by Jerry Juhl. Based on the book by Charles Dickens.

  Curious that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol should be the most beloved of all fictional Christmas stories. It’s a tale of Gothic gloom relieved only at the end by the warmth of holiday cheer.

  In order to enjoy that Christmas turkey with Bob Cratchit and share in Scrooge’s redemption, we have to pay heavy dues: Marley’s ghost, the rattling of chains, lots of graveyards and skeletons, poverty and suffering, greed and cold, and finally the spirits of Christmas, climaxing with the Grim Reaper.

  No wonder when my dad read me the story I preferred the one about Rudolph. And no wonder Disney has tried to lighten up this latest of at least a dozen film versions of the story by adding the Muppets (in the mid-1980s, they made a version starring Mickey Mouse). Even the Muppets seem a little awed by the solemnity of the tale; “Isn’t this a little violent for some of the kids in the audience?” one of them asks, only to be reminded of the story’s artistic importance.

  The Muppet Christmas Carol is made with one principal human actor, Michael Caine, in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. There are a few more humans, including Scrooge as a youth, but most of the other roles, great and small, are played by Muppets, who are credited in the titles: “Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit . . . Miss Piggy as Mrs. Cratchit . . . the Great Gonzo as Charles Dickens . . . Rizzo the Rat as Himself.” This leads to some logical leaps of faith, as when we see the Cratchit household and realize all the boy children are frogs and all the girl children are pigs. But it also helps to introduce a Muppetian jollity into the story (when Scrooge’s bookkeeping rats complain about cold, for example, and he threatens to fire them, they switch immediately into beachwear and start singing “Island in the Sun”).

  Caine is the latest of many human actors (including the great Orson Welles) to fight for screen space with the Muppets, and he sensibly avoids any attempt to go for a laugh. He plays the role straight, and treats the Muppets as if they are real. It is not an easy assignment.

  Consider the moment when he is moved to tears by Tiny Tim. This scene plays one way when Tim is a lovable little tot on a crutch, and another way when he is a small frog made of green felt. Caine, whose technical skills on screen are the equal of any actor’s, does as well as he can under the circumstances. The movie, directed by Brian Henson, son of the late Muppet creator Jim Henson, follows the original fairly faithfully.

  Like the earlier three Muppet movies, it manages to incorporate the Muppets convincingly into the action; we may know they’re puppets, but usually we’re not much reminded of their limited fields of movement. Ever since Kermit rode a bicycle across the screen in The Muppet Movie in 1979, the Muppeteers have managed to bypass what you’d think would be the obvious limitations of the form. This time, they even seem to belong in Victorian London, created in atmospheric sets that combine realism and expressionism.

  Like all the Muppet movies, this one is a musical, with original songs by Paul Williams (my favorite is the early chain-rattling duet by the Marley brothers). It could have done with a few more songs than it has, and the merrymaking at the end might have been carried on a little longer, just to offset the gloom of most of Scrooge’s tour through his lifetime spent spreading misery.

  Will kids like the movie? The kids around me in the theater seemed to, although more for the Muppets than for the cautionary tale of Scrooge.


  Nothing Like the Holidays

  PG-13, 99 m., 1998

  Luis Guzman (Johnny), John Leguizamo (Mauricio), Freddy Rodriguez (Jesse), Alfred Molina (Eduardo), Jay Hernandez (Ozzy), Elizabeth Pena (Anna), Debra Messing (Sarah), Melonie Diaz (Marissa). Directed by Alfredo de Villa. Produced by Reid Brody, Paul Kim, Freddy Rodriguez, and Rene Rigal. Screenplay by Alison Swan and Rick Najera.

  Every once in a while, you sense you’re watching actors being allowed to do what they hoped to do when they got into show biz. That would playing characters familiar to their experience, in a warm-hearted story, without exploitation and without a “message” as much as the right kind of feeling. Oh, they wanted to make blockbusters, too, and cavort with superheroes and be in great love scenes and get to drive fast and dodge bullets and plunge into deep drama and tear their hearts out and win Oscars. But those things are less rare than such a movie as Alfredo de Villa’s Nothing Like the Holidays.

  Here is a story filmed almost entirely in a Chicago neighborhood, Humboldt Park, which has rich and poor, yuppies and welfare families, problems and solutions, all ages, all faiths, all races, all within several blocks of one another. In a nice-size house on a typical street live a Puerto Rican couple, Anna and Eduardo Rodriguez, who are not new to the neighborhood. In their home, for the first time in several years, all the members of their far-flung Boricua family gather for Christmas.

  The older son, Mauricio (John Leguizamo), is home from New York with his executive wife, Sarah (Debra Messing). A son (Freddy Rodriguez) is home from the war in Iraq. A daughter (Vanessa Ferlito) dreams of being a Hollywood star. There’s a know-it-all cousin (Luis Guzman). An ex-girlfriend of the military man (Melonie Diaz). A family friend (Jay Hernandez) since the good old days. Spouses in general. A houseful. All presided over by Anna (Elizabeth Pena) and the somehow absentminded Eduardo (Alfred Molina).