by Roger Ebert
Assuming as we must that The Thin Man is not about a series of murders and their solution (that entire mechanism would be described by Hitchcock as the MacGuffin), what is it about? It is about personal style. About living life as a kind of artwork. Of the early lives of Nick and Nora we learn little, except that he was once a famous San Francisco detective and retired after marrying Nora. As Nick explains vaguely to a friend, her father left her a small-gauge railroad and “Oh, a lot of other things,” and he looks after them. As a consequence, Nick and Nora have a lot of money and spent their time traveling, seeing old friends, making new ones, and drinking pretty much all day long.
At one point in the film, when Nora wakens Nick in the middle of the night, he immediately pours himself a drink and one for her, and then as she leaves the room he greedily drinks from her glass. They are alcoholics in any realistic definition of the term, but not in the terms of the movie, because their drinking has no particular effect on themselves or the plot. It is simply a behavior, like smoking, that gives them something to do with their hands, something to talk about, and an excuse to move around the room. Even when Nora appears with an ice bag on her head, it looks more like clowning than like a hangover.
Myrna Loy was a delightful foil to Powell, but in this film she is essentially just his playmate; Powell dominates the picture with his deep, rich voice, his gliding, subtly unsteady physical movements, and his little mustache that he hopes makes him look more grownup than he feels. For audiences in the middle of the Depression, The Thin Man, like the Astaire and Rogers musicals it visually resembles, was pure escapism: Beautiful people in expensive surroundings make small talk all the day long, without a care in the world, and even murder is only an amusing diversion.
Powell’s career began on the stage in 1912. He worked in silent films from 1922 and in talkies from their birth until 1955, when his last role was “Doc” in Mister Roberts. He was nominated for best actor for this film, the wonderful My Man Godfrey (1937) and Life with Father (1947). But he never won an Oscar. Powell lived until 1984, when he was ninety-two, and was fit and active until toward the end. All through the 1960s and 1970s his fans urged the Motion Picture Academy to give him an Oscar for lifetime achievement, but the Academy never did. To see The Thin Man is to watch him embodying a personal style that could have been honored, but could never be imitated.
This Christmas
PG-13, 120 m., 2007
Loretta Devine (Shirley Ann “Ma’Dere” Whitfield), Delroy Lindo (Joseph Black), Idris Elba (Quentin Whitfield), Regina King (Lisa “Sistah” Moore), Sharon Leal (Kelli Whitfield), Lauren London (Mel Whitfield), Columbus Short (Claude Whitfield), Chris Brown (Michael “Baby” Whitfield), Laz Alonso (Malcolm Moore), Keith Robinson (Devean Brooks), Mekhi Phifer (Gerald), David Banner (Mo). Directed by Preston A. Whitmore II and produced by Whitmore and Will Packer. Screenplay by Whitmore.
I’m not going to make the mistake of trying to summarize what happens in This Christmas. If you see it, you’ll know what I mean. I’m not even talking about spoilers; I’m talking about all the setups as the Whitfield family gathers for the first time in four years. Everybody walks in the door with a secret, and Ma’Dere (Loretta Devine), the head of the family, has two: She has divorced her husband and is living with her boyfriend, Joseph (Delroy Lindo). Almost everyone in the family secretly knows her secrets, but nobody knows most of the others’.
That makes This Christmas a very busy holiday comedy, where plot points circle and land on an overcrowded schedule. Once I saw what was happening, I started to enjoy it. Preston A. Whitmore II, the writer and director, must have sat up for long hours into the night in front of hundreds of three-by-five-inch index cards tacked to a corkboard to keep all this straight.
Ma’Dere has, let’s see—a son who is secretly married to a white woman (whoops, forgot to mention the Whitfields are African-American), a daughter who thinks she’s better than everyone else, a daughter who thinks she’s in love but may be mistaken, a daughter whose husband fools around on her, a son who owes big-time money to a couple of guys who yearn to break his legs, and a youngest son named “Baby” who is afraid to tell her about his deepest dream.
Ma’Dere is played by the irreplaceable Loretta Devine (Grey’s Anatomy, Dreamgirls, Down in the Delta). In order, the children I listed are played by Columbus Short, Sharon Leal, Lauren London, Regina King, Idris Elba, and Chris Brown. A strong cast, and we do begin to feel a sense of family, because for all their problems, they love one another and accept weaknesses they cannot ignore. They all talk so much, though, that they should get extra credit for having any secrets at all. You tell one person something in this family, and you might as well announce it on Oprah.
Every single cast member, and a few I didn’t mention, such as wives, boyfriends, and hoodlums, has a couple of big scenes as problems are revealed, reach crisis proportions, and are healed in one way or another. There is also a lot of eating going on, which is necessary at Christmastime, although this isn’t a movie like Soul Food where everyone is a champion cook.
But what I think audiences will enjoy most is the music. Baby Whitfield’s big secret from his mother is—don’t tell anyone—he wants to be a singer. She already has one musician son, the one being chased by gamblers, and wants her youngest to do something more respectable. Baby is played by Chris Brown, a hip-hop artist who can actually sing a traditional song in a classic and beautiful style, as he proves on the occasion when his mother finds out his big secret. At a church, gospel artist DeNetria Champ has another showstopper. And the sound track is alive.
This is a movie about African-Americans, but it’s not “an African-American movie.” It’s an American movie, about a rambunctious family that has no more problems than any other family but simply happens to discover and grapple with them in about forty-eight hours. What’s surprising is how well Whitmore, the director, manages to direct traffic. He’s got one crisis cooling, another problem exploding, a third dilemma gathering steam, and people exchanging significant looks about secrets still not introduced. It’s sort of a screwball comedy effect, but with a heart.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas ½
PG, 76 m., 1993
Chris Sarandon (Jack Skellington), Catherine O’Hara (Sally), Glenn Shadix (Mayor), Paul Reubens (Lock), William Hickey (Evil Scientist). Directed By Henry Selick. Produced By Tim Burton. Screenplay by Caroline Thompson and Michael McDowell.
The movies can create entirely new worlds for us, but that is one of their rarest gifts. More often, directors go for realism, for worlds we can recognize. One of the many pleasures of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is that there is not a single recognizable landscape within it. Everything looks strange and haunting. Even Santa Claus would be difficult to recognize without his red-and-white uniform.
The movie, which tells the story of an attempt by Halloween to annex Christmas, is shot in a process called stop-action animation.
In an ordinary animated film, the characters are drawn. Here they are constructed, and then moved a little, frame by frame, so that they appear to live. This allows a three-dimensional world to be presented, instead of the flatter universe of cel animation. And it is a godsend for the animators of Nightmare, who seem to have built their world from scratch—every house, every stick and stone—before sending their skeletal and rather pathetic little characters in to inhabit it.
The movie begins with the information that each holiday has its own town. Halloweentown, for example, is in charge of all the preparations for Halloween, and its most prominent citizen is a bony skeleton named Jack Skellington, whose moves and wardrobe seem influenced by Fred Astaire.
One day Jack stumbles into the wrong entryway in Halloweentown, and finds himself smack dab in the middle of preparations for Christmas. Now this, he realizes, is more like it! Instead of ghosts and goblins and pumpkins, there are jolly little helpers assisting Santa in his annual duty of bringing peace on earth and goodwill to men.
Back in Halloweentown, Jack Skellington feels a gnawing desire to better himself. To move up to a more important holiday, one that people take more seriously and enjoy more than Halloween. And so he engineers a diabolical scheme in which Santa is kidnapped, and Jack himself plays the role of Jolly Old St. Nick, while his helpers manufacture presents. (Some of the presents, when finally distributed to little girls and boys, are so hilariously ill-advised that I will not spoil the fun by describing them here.) Tim Burton, the director of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and the Batman movies, has been creating this world in his head for about ten years, ever since his mind began to stray while he was employed as a traditional animator on an unremarkable Disney project.
The story is centered on his favorite kind of character, a misfit who wants to do well, but has been gifted by fate with a quirky personality that people don’t know how to take. Jack Skellington is the soul brother of Batman, Edward, and the demon in Beetlejuice—a man for whom normal human emotions are a conundrum.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Tim Burton film in the sense that the story, its world, and its look first took shape in Burton’s mind, and he supervised their filming. But the director of the film, a veteran stop-action master named Henry Selick, is the person who has made it all work. And his achievement is enormous.
Working with gifted artists and designers, he has made a world here that is as completely new as the worlds we saw for the first time in such films as Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or Star Wars. What all of these films have in common is a visual richness, so abundant that they deserve more than one viewing. First, go for the story. Then go back just to look in the corners of the screen, and appreciate the little visual surprises and inspirations that are tucked into every nook and cranny.
The songs by Danny Elfman are fun, too, a couple of them using lyrics so clever they could be updated from Gilbert and Sullivan. And the choreography, liberated from gravity and reality, has an energy of its own, as when the furniture, the architecture, and the very landscape itself gets into the act.
Parental Advisory: The movie is rated PG, maybe because some of the Halloween creatures might be a tad scary for smaller children, but this is the kind of movie older kids will eat up; it has the kind of offbeat, subversive energy that tells them wonderful things are likely to happen. As an adult who was not particularly scared by the abduction of Santa (somehow I knew things would turn out all right), I found the movie a feast for the eyes and the imagination.
What’s Cooking? ½
PG-13, 106 m., 2000
Alfre Woodard (Audrey Williams), Dennis Haysbert (Ronald Williams), Ann Weldon (Grace Williams), Mercedes Ruehl (Elizabeth Avila), Victor Rivers (Javier Avila), Douglas Spain (Anthony Avila), A. Martinez (Daniel), Lainie Kazan (Ruth Seeling), Maury Chaykin (Herb Seeling), Kyra Sedgwick (Rachel Seeling), Julianna Margulies (Carla), Estelle Harris (Aunt Bea), Joan Chen (Trinh Nguyen), Will Yun Lee (Jimmy Nguyen), Kristy Wu (Jenny Nguyen), Jimmy Pham (Gary Nguyen), Brennan Louie (Joey Nguyen), Kieu Chinh (Grandma Nguyen). Directed by Gurinder Chadha and produced by Jeffrey Taylor. Screenplay by Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges.
Thanksgiving is not a religious or patriotic holiday, and it’s not hooked to any ethnic or national group: It’s a national celebration of the fact that we have survived for another year, we eat turkey to observe that fact, and may, if we choose, thank the deity of our choice. We exchange no presents and send few cards. It’s on a Thursday, a day not associated with any belief system. And it nods gratefully to American Indians, who have good reason to feel less than thrilled about the Fourth of July and Columbus Day.
What’s Cooking? celebrates the holiday by telling interlocking stories about four American families, which are African-American, Jewish, Latino, and Vietnamese. They all serve turkey in one way or another, surrounded by traditional dishes from their groups; some are tired of turkey and try to disguise it, while an Americanized Vietnamese girl sees the chili paste going on and complains, “Why do you want to make the turkey taste like everything else we eat?”
These families have been brought together by the filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, an Indian woman of Punjabi ancestry and Kenyan roots, who grew up in London and is now married to Paul Mayeda Berges, a half-Japanese American. Doesn’t it make you want to grin? She directed; they cowrote. All four of the stories involve the generation gap, as older family members cling to tradition and younger ones rebel. But because the stories are so skillfully threaded together, the movie doesn’t feel like an exercise: Each of the stories stands on its own.
Generation gaps, of course, go down through more than one generation. Dennis Haysbert and Alfre Woodard play the parents of a college student who would rather be a radical than a professional, but another source of tension at the table is the presence of Haysbert’s mother, who casts a practiced eye over her daughter-in-law’s menu, and is shocked that it lacks macaroni and cheese, an obligatory item at every traditional African-American feast.
The Vietnamese family runs a video store. Grandma Nguyen (Kieu Chinh) is of course less assimilated than her family, but in the kitchen her eye misses nothing and her strong opinions are enforced almost telepathically. There’s trouble because a younger sister has found a gun in her brother’s room. Joan Chen plays the mother, a peacemaker in a family with a father who rules too sternly.
The Latino Thanksgiving starts uneasily when the kids are at the supermarket and run into their dad (Victor Rivers), who is separated from their mom (Mercedes Ruehl). They invite him to dinner without asking her; on the other hand, she hasn’t told them she has invited her new boyfriend, a teacher.
The Jewish couple (Lainie Kazan and Maury Chaykin) greet their daughter (Kyra Sedgwick), her lover (Julianna Margulies), and Aunt Bea (Estelle Harris), one of those women who asks such tactless questions that you can’t believe she’s doing it by accident. The parents accept their daughter’s lesbianism, but are at a loss to explain it (should they have sent her to that kibbutz?).
During this long day secrets will be revealed, hearts will be bared, old grudges settled, new ones started, pregnancies announced, forgiveness granted, and turkeys carved. And the melting pot will simmer a little, for example when a Latino girl brings home her Asian boyfriend (her brother tries to make him feel at home with a hearty conversation about Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee). If the Asian boy feels awkward at his girlfriend’s table, he reflects that she is not welcome at all in his family’s home. Or is she?
All that I’ve said reflects the design of the film. I’ve hardly even started to suggest the texture and pleasure. There are so many characters, so vividly drawn, with such humor and life, that a synopsis is impossible. What’s strange is the spell the movie weaves. By its end, there is actually a sort of tingle of pleasure in seeing how this Thanksgiving ends, and how its stories are resolved. In recent years most Thanksgiving movies have been about families at war. Here are four families that have, in one way or another, started peace talks.
