Other Books by Roger Ebert

An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life

A Kiss Is Still a Kiss

Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook

Behind the Phantom’s Mask

Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary

Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion (annually 1986–1993)

Roger Ebert’s Video Companion (annually 1994–1998)

Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook (annually 1999–2007, 2009–2012)

Questions for the Movie Answer Man

Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing from a Century of Film

Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary

I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

The Great Movies

The Great Movies II

Your Movie Sucks

Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007

Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert

Scorsese by Ebert

Life Itself: A Memoir

A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length

With Daniel Curley

The Perfect London Walk

With Gene Siskel

The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas

DVD Commentary Tracks

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Citizen Kane

Dark City

Casablanca

Crumb

Floating Weeds

Other Ebert’s Essentials

33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity

25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart

27 Movies from the Dark Side

25 Great French Films

30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays copyright © 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC

an Andrews McMeel Universal company

1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

ISBN: 978-1-4494-2148-9

All the reviews in this book originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Attention: Schools and Businesses

Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: specialsales@amuniversal.com

Contents

Introduction

Key to Symbols

Bad Santa

Bridget Jones’s Diary

Christmas in the Clouds

A Christmas Story

A Christmas Tale

Comfort and Joy

The Dead

Disney’s A Christmas Carol

Elf

Fanny and Alexander

Gremlins

Hannah and Her Sisters

Home for the Holidays

The Ice Harvest

It’s a Wonderful Life

Joyeux Noel

Little Women

Love Actually

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Nothing Like the Holidays

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

The Polar Express

Prancer

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

The Ref

Scrooge

The Thin Man

This Christmas

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas

What’s Cooking?

Introduction

The notion of movies to “get you through the holidays” sounds rather dour, especially since some of my choices are about people who are having problems getting through the holidays.

Many of these films have one thing in common: The holidays represent the only time of the year when families, especially those with buried issues, get together at all. A typical family film in the genre airs all the dirty laundry and opens all the old wounds.

One curiosity I’ve noticed is that Thanksgiving films are more likely to tilt toward the emotionally fraught, and Christmas films are more likely to be comedies and heart-warmers.

Setting that aside, some of these titles are just plain great films, no matter what. For example, What’s Cooking?; The Thin Man; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; and John Huston’s heartbreaking final film, The Dead.

One of these is just plain bizarre—Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Bad Santa pushes right through the boundaries of good taste.

The real sleeper here is Nothing Like the Holidays, about a Hispanic family in Chicago.

And the gob-smacker is The Polar Express, with Robert Zemeckis showing a virtuoso command of motion-capture animation. Yes, there’s a reason so many characters look like Tom Hanks.

ROGER EBERT

Key to Symbols

A great film

G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17: Ratings of the Motion Picture Association of America

G

Indicates that the movie is suitable for general audiences

PG

Suitable for general audiences but parental guidance is suggested

PG-13

Recommended for viewers 13 years or above; may contain material inappropriate for younger children

R

Recommended for viewers 17 or older

NC-17

Intended for adults only

141 m.

Running time

2011

Year of theatrical release

Bad Santa ½

R, 93 m., 2003

Billy Bob Thornton (Willie T. Soke), Tony Cox (Marcus), Bernie Mac (Gin Slagel), Lauren Graham (Sue), John Ritter (Mall Manager), Brett Kelly (The Kid), Cloris Leachman (Grandma). Directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by Sarah Aubrey, John Cameron, and Bob Weinstein. Screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra.

The kid gives Santa a carved wooden pickle as a Christmas present.

“How come it’s brown?” Santa asks. “Why didn’t you paint it green?”

“It isn’t painted,” the kid says. “That’s blood from when I cut my hand while I was making it for you.”

Santa is a depressed, alcoholic safecracker. The kid is not one of your cute movie kids, but an intense and needy stalker; think of Thomas the Tank Engine as a member of the Addams Family. Oh, and there’s an elf, too, named Marcus. The elf is an angry dwarf who has been working with Santa for eight years, cracking the safe in a different department store every Christmas. The elf is fed up. Santa gets drunk on the job, he’s screwing customers in the Plus Sizes dressing room, and whether the children throw up on Santa or he throws up on them is a toss-up, no pun intended.

Bad Santa is a demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Santa in a performance that’s defiantly uncouth. His character is named Willie T. Soke; W. C. Fields would have liked that. He’s a foul-mouthed, unkempt, drunken louse at the beginning of the movie, and sticks to that theme all the way through. You expect a happy ending, but the ending is happy in the same sense that a man’s doctors tell him he lost his legs but they were able to save his shoes.

There are certain unwritten parameters governing mainstream American movies, and Bad Santa violates all of them. When was the last time you saw a movie Santa kicking a department store reindeer to pieces? Or using the f-word more than Eddie Griffin? Or finding a girlfriend who makes him wear his little red hat in bed because she has a Santa fetish? And for that matter, when was the last movie where a loser Santa meets a little kid and the kid doesn’t redeem the loser with his sweetness and simplicity, but attaches himself like those leeches on Bogart in The African Queen?

Movie critics have been accused of praising weirdo movies because we are bored by movies that seem the same. There is some justice in that. But I didn’t like this movie merely because it was weird and different. I liked it because it makes no compromises and takes no prisoners. And because it is funny.

The director is Terry Zwigoff. He made the great documentary Crumb, about R. Crumb, the cartoonist who is a devoted misanthrope. (Crumb drew the American Splendor comic books about Harvey Pekar, his equal in misanthropy.) Zwigoff also directed the quirky Ghost World, with its unlikely romantic alliance between a teenage girl (Thora Birch) and a sour, fortyish recluse (Steve Buscemi). This is a director who makes a specialty of bitter antisocial oddballs. That he does it in comedy takes more guts than doing it in tragedy.

Zwigoff worked from an original screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. And what is their track record, you are wondering? They cowrote Cats and Dogs (2001), with its parachuting Ninja cats. Maybe screenwriters who do sweet, PG-rated movies like Cats and Dogs have a script like Bad Santa in the bottom desk drawer, perhaps in a lead-lined box.

When Billy Bob Thornton got the script, he must have read it and decided it would be career suicide. Then he put the script to his head and pulled the trigger. For him to play Hamlet would take nerve; for him to play Willie T. Soke took heroism. Wandering through the final stages of alcoholism, he functions only because of the determination of Marcus, who is played by Tony Cox as a crook who considers stealing to be a job, and straps on his elf ears every morning to go to work. Willie and Marcus always use the same MO: They use the Santa gig to get into the store, stay after closing, and crack the safe. Alas, this year the store’s security chief (Bernie Mac, also pissed off most of the time) is wise to their plan and wants a cut. Because it’s in his interest to keep Bad Santa in the store, he doesn’t report little incidents like the reindeer kicking to the store manager, played by the late John Ritter.

Willie becomes distracted by the arrival in his life of Sue (Lauren Graham), the Santa fetishist, who picks him up at a bar. Then there’s the kid (Brett Kelly), who sits on his lap, tells him he isn’t Santa Claus, and then doggedly insists on treating him as if he is. The kid is desperately lonely because his parents are away for reasons we understand better than he does, and he’s being looked after by his comatose grandmother (Cloris Leachman). I know, I know—I disapproved of the cruel treatment of the comatose babysitter Mrs. Kwan in The Cat in the Hat, and here I am approving of the way they treat the kid’s grandmother. The differences are: (1) This film is funny and that film was not, and (2) that one was intended for family audiences, and this one is not.

Is it ever not. I imagine a few unsuspecting families will wander into it despite the “R” rating, and I picture terrified kids running screaming down the aisles. What I can’t picture is who will attend this movie. Anybody? Movies like this are a test of taste. If you understand why Kill Bill is a good movie and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not, and Bad Santa is a good movie and The Cat in the Hat is not, then you have freed yourself from the belief that a movie’s quality is determined by its subject matter. You instinctively understand that a movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it. You qualify for Bad Santa.

Bridget Jones’s Diary ½

R, 95 m., 2001

Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones), Colin Firth (Mark Darcy), Hugh Grant (Daniel Cleaver), Honor Blackman (Penny), Crispin Bonham-Carter (Greg), Gemma Jones (Bridget’s Mum), Jim Broadbent (Bridget’s Dad), James Callis (Tom), Embeth Davidtz (Natasha). Directed by Sharon Maguire and produced by Tim Bevan, Jonathan Cavendish, and Eric Fellner. Screenplay by Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, and Helen Fielding, based on the novel by Fielding.

Glory be, they didn’t muck it up. Bridget Jones’s Diary, a beloved book about a heroine both lovable and human, has been made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it. The book, a fictional diary by a plump, thirty-something London office worker, was about a specific person in a specific place. When the role was cast with Renée Zellweger, who is not plump and is from Texas, there was gnashing and wailing. Obviously the Miramax boys would turn London’s pride into a Manhattanite, or worse.

Nothing doing. Zellweger put on twenty-something pounds and developed the cutest little would-be double chin, as well as a British accent that sounds reasonable enough to me. (Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, has an ear for nuances and says the accent is “just a little too studiedly posh,” which from them is praise.)

As in the book, Bridget arrives at her thirty-second birthday determined to take control of her life, which until now has consisted of smoking too much, drinking too much, eating too much, and not finding the right man, or indeed much of any man. In her nightmares, she dies fat, drunk, and lonely, and is eaten by Alsatian dogs. She determines to monitor her daily intake of tobacco and alcohol units, and her weight, which she measures in stones. (A stone is fourteen pounds; the British not only have pounds instead of kilos but stones on top of pounds, although the other day a London street vendor was arrested for selling bananas by the pound in defiance of the new European marching orders; the next step is obviously for Brussels to impound Bridget’s diary.)

Bridget’s campaign proceeds unhappily when her mother (who “comes from the time when pickles on toothpicks were still the height of sophistication”) introduces her to handsome Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who is at a holiday party against his will and in a bad mood and is overheard (by Bridget) describing her as a “verbally incontinent spinster.” Things go better at work, where she exchanges saucy e-mails with her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). His opener: “You appear to have forgotten your skirt.” They begin an affair, while Darcy circles the outskirts of her consciousness, still looking luscious but acting emotionally constipated.

Zellweger’s Bridget is a reminder of the first time we really became aware of her in a movie, in Jerry Maguire (1996), where she was so cute and vulnerable we wanted to tickle and console her at the same time. Her work in Nurse Betty (2000) was widely but not sufficiently praised, and now here she is, fully herself and fully Bridget Jones, both at once. A story like this can’t work unless we feel unconditional affection for the heroine, and casting Zellweger achieves that; the only alternate I can think of is Kate Winslet, who comes close but lacks the self-destructive puppy aspects.

The movie has otherwise been cast with dependable (perhaps infallible) British comic actors. The first time Hugh Grant appeared on-screen, I chuckled for no good reason at all, just as I always do when I see Christopher Walken, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, or Jack Nicholson—because I know that whatever the role, they will infuse it with more than the doctor ordered. Grant can play a male Bridget Jones (as he did in Notting Hill), but he’s better as a cad, and here he surpasses himself by lying to Bridget about Darcy and then cheating on her with a girl from the New York office. (An “American stick insect,” is what Bridget tells her diary.)

Colin Firth, on the other hand, must unbend to become lovable, and when we do finally love him, it’s largely because we know what an effort it took on his part. Bridget Jones’s Diary is famously, if vaguely, patterned after Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Firth played Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of the novel, and now plays another Darcy here. I didn’t see the TV version but learn from the critic James Berardinelli that Firth “plays this part exactly as he played the earlier role, making it evident that the two Darcys are essentially the same.”

It is a universal rule of romantic fiction that all great love stories must be mirrored by their low-comedy counterpoints. Just as Hal woos Katharine, Falstaff trifles with Doll Tearsheet. If Bridget must choose between Mark and Daniel, then her mother (Gemma Jones) must choose between her kindly but easy-chair-loving husband (Jim Broadbent) and a dashing huckster for a TV shopping channel.

The movie strings together one funny set piece after another, as when Bridget goes in costume to a party where she thought the theme was “Tarts and Vicars.” Or when she stumbles into a job on a TV news show and makes her famous premature entrance down the fire pole. Or when she has to decide at the beginning of an evening whether sexy underwear or tummy-crunching underwear will do her more good in the long run. Bridget charts her own progress along the way, from “tragic spinster” to “wanton sex goddess,” and the movie gives almost unreasonable pleasure as it celebrates her bumpy transition.

Christmas in the Clouds

PG, 97 m., 2005

Tim Vahle (Ray Clouds on Fire), Mariana Tosca (Tina Pisati Little Hawk), Sam Vlahos (Joe Clouds on Fire), M. Emmet Walsh (Stu O’Malley), Graham Greene (Earl), Sheila Tousey (Mary), Rosalind Ayres (Mabel Winright), Jonathan Joss (Phil). Directed by Kate Montgomery and produced by Montgomery and Sarah Wasserman. Screenplay by Montgomery.

Christmas in the Clouds is part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part historic breakthrough. The history is made because the movie is about affluent Native American yuppies. So many movies about American Indians deal in negative stereotypes that it’s nice to find one that takes place at an upscale Indian-owned ski resort. The only alcoholic in the cast is a white undercover investigator for a guidebook.

The romance begins through a misunderstanding. Through an online dating service, Joe Clouds on Fire (Sam Vlahos) is paired off with Tina Pisati (Mariana Tosca). She’s a chic New York professional woman whose name sounds Italian but whose family name is Little Hawk. He’s a likable codger whose son, Ray Clouds on Fire (Tim Vahle), manages the resort. Joe has not been entirely honest about his age and is about thirty years older than Tina. Meanwhile, the resort is expecting a surprise visit from the critic of luxury hotels, and Mary the reservations manager (Sheila Tousey) keeps an eagle eye for anyone checking in who looks like he can spell Zagat.

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 Ring 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. Local 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.

I suppose a movie could be made about American ice cream wars, but the truck drivers would all be movie stars. Forsyth finds ordinary people. The star of Comfort and Joy is Bill Paterson, an offhand, pleasant chap who is always polishing his car. The other actors—including the Italians who own Mr. McCool—are the kind of low key caricatures that Forsyth knows how to draw so carefully that they never go over the edge. This is a wonderful movie, even apart from the standard Forsyth running gag about people who think they look like somebody else (this movie’s examples are the losers of a Bob Hope and Fred Astaire look—alike contest).

The Dead

PG, 83 m., 1987

Donal McCann (Gabriel Conroy), Anjelica Huston (Gretta Conroy), Donal Donnelly (Freddy Malins), Frank Patterson (Bartell D’Arcy), Dan O’Herlihy (Mr. Brown), Cathleen Delany (Aunt Julia), Maria McDermottroe (Molly Ivors). Directed by John Huston. Produced by Chris Sievernich and Wieland Schulz-Keil. Screenplay by Tony Huston, based on the short story “The Dead” by James Joyce.

John Huston was dying when he directed The Dead. Tethered to an oxygen tank, hunched in a wheelchair, weak with emphysema and heart disease, he was a perfectionist attentive to the slightest nuance of the filming. James Joyce’s story, for that matter is all nuance until the final pages. It leads by subtle signs to a great outpouring of grief and love, but until then, as Huston observed, “The biggest piece of action is trying to pass the port.” He began shooting in January 1987, finished in April, and at the end of August, he died. He was 81.

All of this I have from The Hustons, by Lawrence Grobel, a biography that charts a scattered and troubled family, yet one that gathered Oscars in three generations, for Walter, John, and Anjelica. John’s daughter won hers for a supporting role in his previous film, Prizzi’s Honor (1985), and now she was playing the crucial role in The Dead. John’s son Tony, then thirty-seven, was nominated for his screenplay for The Dead, and served as his father’s assistant, aware of the secret being kept from the world, which was how ill John really was.

Joyce’s The Dead is one of the greatest short stories in the language, but would seem unfilmable. Its action takes place in Dublin in 1904 at a holiday party given by two elderly sisters and their niece, who have spent their lives performing or teaching music. The guests arrive, we observe them as they observe one another and listen to talk that means more than it says. At the end of the long evening, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), nephew of the Misses Morkan, leaves with his wife, Gretta (Anjelica Huston), to go back to the hotel where they will spend the night before going home to a far suburb in the morning.

All was prologue to their cab ride and an hour or so in the hotel. She tells him a story he has never heard, about a boy who was sweet on her when he was seventeen, a boy named Michael Furey, who died. He was a sickly boy, who stood in the rain on the night before she was to leave Galway and go to a convent school. “I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain,” she remembers. “But he said he did not want to live.” When she was only a week in the convent school, he died. “What was it he died of so young?” asks Gabriel. “Consumption, was it?” She replies, “I think he died from me.” In his final pages, Joyce enters the mind of Gabriel, who thinks about the dead boy, about his wife’s first great love, about how he has never felt a love like that, about those who have died, and about how all the rest of us will die as well—die, with our loves and lusts, our hopes and regrets, our plans and secrets, all dead.

Read with me James Joyce’s last paragraph:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There is, as John Huston realized, no way to translate this epiphany into the action of a movie script. It exists resolutely as thoughts expressed in words. He and Tony in their screenplay did what they had to do, and made it an interior monologue, spoken by the actor Donal McCann, as his wife, having wept, now sleeps on their bed. We note that he thinks of “his” journey, although she will accompany him. He thinks of himself as alone. When I first saw The Dead, I thought it brave and deeply felt but “an impossible film,” and I wrote: “There is no way in the world any filmmaker can reproduce the thoughts inside Gabriel’s head.” But of course there was. Huston could do the same thing Joyce did, and simply tell us what Gabriel was thinking.

The film follows the story with almost complete fidelity. A few details are transposed; Gabriel’s story about his grandfather’s horse is moved forward in the story, and given to Freddy Malins (Donal Donnelly), who arrives drunk but, as Gabriel reassures Mrs. Malins, “nearly all right.” Line for line and scene for scene, the movie faithfully reflects the book, even to such details as two young men slipping into the next room for a drink during a piano recital and then returning at its close to applaud loudly.

The turning point comes as everyone is leaving. Gabriel has already descended the stairs when the famous tenor Bartell D’Arcy (Frank Patterson) is finally prevailed upon to sing. Gabriel looks up and sees a figure paused listening on the stair, and eventually realizes it is his wife: “There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something,” and he thinks, “if he were a painter, he would paint her in that attitude.” John Huston is a painter, and does. The song is the same one Michael Furey used to sing, and awakens Gretta’s whole sad train of memory.

There is one line in the story that neither Huston nor anyone else could get into a film, because it is not the thought of Gabriel, but of Joyce. He tells us that as Gabriel regards his sleeping wife in the hotel, “a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul.” That is the phrase upon which the whole story wheels. He has been married for years and thinks he knows her, but suddenly he sees Gretta not in terms of wife, lover, or their history together, but as another human being, one who will also be alone on her journey westward.

The Dead ends in sadness, but it is one of the great romantic films, fearless in its regard for regret and tenderness. John Huston, who lived for years in Ireland and raised Anjelica there until she was sixteen, had an instinctive sympathy for the kindness with which the guests at the Misses Morkan’s party accepted one another’s lives and failings. They have all fallen short of their hopes, and know it. Freddy Malins is a drunk, but as we see him seated beside his mother, we suspect that she has forced him to pursue defeat. Mr. Brown (Dan O’Herlihy) is a drunk in the classic mold, because of uncomplicated alcoholism. Molly Ivors (Maria McDermottroe), who supports the Republican cause, hurries off early to a meeting, still convinced their problems have political solutions. Aunt Julia (Cathleen Delany), who confesses she had a decent voice years ago, is persuaded to sing, and does so, not very well. Freddy lurches forward to blurt out praise that is so effusive, it embarrasses her in front of the party, but everyone understands that Julia’s voice has failed, and that Freddy means well.

Gabriel is the witness to it all. An early shot shows the back of his head, regarding everyone in the room. Later he will see his wife, finally, as the person she really is and always has been. And he will see himself, with his ambitions as a journalist, the bright light of his family, the pride of his aunts, as a paltry fellow resting on unworthy accomplishments. Did these thoughts go through John Huston’s mind as he chose his last film and directed it? How could they not? And if all those sad things were true, then he could at least communicate them with grace and poetry, in a film as quiet and forgiving as the falling snow.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol

PG, 95 m., 2009

Jim Carrey (Scrooge/Ghosts of Christmas), Robin Wright Penn (Belle/Fan), Gary Oldman (Cratchit/Marley/Tiny Tim), Colin Firth (Fred), Cary Elwes (Dick Wilkins/Fiddler/Businessman), Bob Hoskins (Fezziwig/Old Joe), Fionnula Flanagan (Mrs. Dilber). Directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Zemeckis, Steve Starkey, and Jack Rapke. Screenplay by Zemeckis, based on the story by Charles Dickens.

A Christmas Carol by Robert Zemeckis (and Charles Dickens, of course) is an exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time he’s one of the few directors who knows what he’s doing with 3-D. The story that Dickens wrote in 1838 remains timeless, and if it’s supercharged here with Scrooge swooping the London streets as freely as Superman, well, once you let ghosts into a movie there’s room for anything.

The story I will not repeat for you. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future will not come as news. I’d rather dwell on the look of the picture, which is true to the spirit of Dickens (in some moods) as he cheerfully exaggerates. He usually starts with plucky young heroes or heroines and surrounds them with a gallery of characters and caricatures. Here his protagonist is the caricature: Ebenezer Scrooge, never thinner, never more stooped, never more bitter.

Jim Carrey is in there somewhere beneath the performance-capture animation; you can recognize his expressive mouth, but in general the Zemeckis characters don’t resemble their originals overmuch. In his Polar Express, you were sure that was Tom Hanks, but here you’re not equally sure of Gary Oldman, Robin Wright Penn, and Bob Hoskins.

Zemeckis places these characters in a London that twists and stretches its setting to reflect the macabre mood. Consider Scrooge’s living room, so narrow and tall just as he is. The home of his nephew, Fred, by contrast, is as wide and warm as Fred’s personality.

Animation provides the freedom to show just about anything, and Zemeckis uses it. Occasionally, he even seems to be evoking the ghost of Salvador Dali, as in a striking sequence where all the furniture disappears and a towering grandfather clock looms over Scrooge, a floor slanting into distant perspective.

The three starring ghosts are also spectacular grotesques. I like the first, a little elfin figure with a head constantly afire and a hat shaped like a candlesnuffer. Sometimes he playfully shakes his flames like a kid tossing the hair out of his eyes. After another (ahem) ghost flies out through the window, Scrooge runs over to see the whole street filled with floating spectral figures, each one chained to a heavy block, like so many Chicago mobsters sleeping with the fishes.

Can you talk about performances in characters so much assembled by committee? You can discuss the voices, and Carrey works overtime as not only Scrooge but all three of the Christmas ghosts. Gary Oldman voices Bob Cratchit, Marley, and Tiny Tim.

I remain unconvinced that 3-D represents the future of the movies, but it tells you something that Zemeckis’s three 3-D features (also including Beowulf) have wrestled from me eleven of a possible twelve stars. I like the way he does it. He seems to have a more sure touch than many other directors, using 3-D instead of being used by it. If the foreground is occupied by close objects, they’re usually looming inward, not out over our heads. Note the foreground wall-mounted bells we look past when Scrooge, far below, enters his home; as one and then another slowly starts to move, it’s a nice little touch.

Another one: The score by Alan Silvestri sneaks in some traditional Christmas carols, but you have to listen for such as “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” when its distinctive cadences turn sinister during a perilous flight through London.

So should you take the kiddies? Hmmm. I’m not so sure. When I was small, this movie would have scared the living ectoplasm out of me. Today’s kids have seen more and are tougher. Anyway, A Christmas Carol has the one quality parents hope for in a family movie: It’s entertaining for adults.

Elf

PG, 95 m., 2003

Will Ferrell (Buddy), James Caan (Walter), Zooey Deschanel (Jovie), Mary Steenburgen (Emily), Edward Asner (Santa Claus), Bob Newhart (Papa Elf), Daniel Tay (Michael), Faizon Love (Elf Manager). Directed by Jon Favreau and produced by Jon Berg, Todd Komarnicki, and Shauna Weinberg. Screenplay by David Berenbaum.

If I were to tell you Elf stars Will Ferrell as a human named Buddy who thinks he is an elf and Ed Asner as Santa Claus, would you feel an urgent desire to see this film? Neither did I. I thought it would be clunky, stupid, and obvious, like The Santa Clause or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It would have grotesque special effects and lumber about in the wreckage of holiday cheer, foisting upon us a chaste romance involving the only girl in America who doesn’t know that a man who thinks he is an elf is by definition a pervert.

That’s what I thought it would be. It took me about ten seconds of seeing Will Ferrell in the elf costume to realize how very wrong I was. This is one of those rare Christmas comedies that has a heart, a brain, and a wicked sense of humor, and it charms the socks right off the mantelpiece.

Even the unexpected casting is on the money. James Caan as the elf’s biological father. Yes! Bob Newhart as his adoptive elf father. Yes! Mary Steenburgen as Caan’s wife, who welcomes an adult son into her family. Yes! Zooey Deschanel as the girl who works in a department store and falls for his elfin charm. Yes! Faizon Love as Santa’s elf manager—does it get any better than this? Yes, it does. Peter Dinklage, who played the dwarf in The Station Agent, has a brief but sublime scene in which he cuts right to the bottom line of elfhood.

Elf, directed by Jon Favreau and written by David Berenbaum, begins with a tragic misunderstanding on a Christmas long ago. As Santa is making his rounds, a human orphan crawls into his sack and accidentally hitches a ride to the North Pole. Raised as an elf by Papa Elf (Newhart), he knows he’s at least four feet taller than most of the other elves, and eventually he decides to go to New York and seek out his birth father.

This is Walter (Caan), a hard-bitten publisher whose heart does not instantly melt at the prospect of a six-foot man in a green tunic and yellow stretch tights who says he is his son. But when Buddy drops the name of Walter’s long-lost girlfriend, a faraway look appears in the old man’s eyes, and soon Buddy is invited home, where Mary Steenburgen proves she is the only actress in America who could welcome her husband’s out-of-wedlock elf into her family and make us believe she means it.

The plot is pretty standard stuff, involving a crisis at the old man’s publishing company and a need for a best-selling children’s book, but there are sweet subplots involving Buddy’s new little brother, Michael (Daniel Tay), and Buddy’s awkward but heartfelt little romance with the department store girl (Deschanel). Plus heart-tugging unfinished business at the North Pole.

Of course there’s a big scene involving Buddy’s confrontation with the department store Santa Claus, who (clever elf that he is) Buddy instantly spots as an imposter. “You sit on a throne of lies!” he tells this Santa. Indeed, the whole world has grown too cynical, which is why Santa is facing an energy crisis this year. His sleigh is powered by faith, and if enough people don’t believe in Santa Claus, it can’t fly. That leads to one of those scenes where a flying machine (in this case, oddly enough, the very sleigh we were just discussing) tries to fly and doesn’t seem to be able to achieve takeoff velocity, and . . . well, it would be a terrible thing if Santa were to go down in flames, so let’s hope Buddy convinces enough people to believe. It should be easy. He convinced me this was a good movie, and that’s a miracle on 34th Street right there.

Fanny and Alexander

R, 188 m., 1983

Gunn Wallgren (Helena Ekdahl), Ewa Froling (Emile Ekdahl), Jarl Kulle (Gustav Adolf Ekdahl), Mona Malm (Alma Ekdahl). Jan Malmsjo (Bishop Edvard Vergérus). Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Produced by Jörn Donner. Screenplay by Ingmar Bergman.

Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) was intended to be his last film, and in it, he tends to the business of being young, of being middle-aged, of being old, of being a man, woman, Christian, Jew, sane, crazy, rich, poor, religious, profane. He creates a world in which the utmost certainty exists side by side with ghosts and magic, and a gallery of characters who are unforgettable in their peculiarities. Small wonder one of his inspirations was Dickens.

It is 1907, in an unnamed Swedish town. The movie plunges into the Christmas Eve celebration of an enormous family, introducing the characters on the fly as they talk, drink, flirt, and plot. They are surrounded by voluptuousness; the Ekdahl family is wealthy and the matriarch, Helena, lives in an enormous home crowded with antique furniture, rich furnishings, paintings, sculptures, tapestries, rugs, flowers, plants, and clocks—always clocks in a Bergman film, their hours striking in a way that is somehow ominous. One room spills into another, as we see when the half-drunk guests join hands for a song while parading through the flat.

Family intrigues are revealed: Gustav Adolf, Helena’s third son, is a philanderer whose adventures are forgiven by his merry, buxom wife, Alma, because she likes him as he is. The second son, Carl, is a failed professor, married to a German woman no one likes (although they should), deeply in debt to his mother. The first son, Oscar, runs the family theater, and is moved to tears in his Christmas Eve speech to the staff before joining the party. Oscar is married to Emilie, a grave beauty, and they have two children, Fanny and Alexander. Much of the film is seen through their eyes, especially Alexander’s, but other moments take place entirely within the imaginations of the characters.

Gustav’s marriage is eccentric, Carl’s is sad, and Oscar’s is filled with love—for his family, and the theater. We learn quickly that Gustav is having an affair with Maj, Oscar and Emilie’s lame, plump young maid. Alma knows it; indeed, it is openly discussed by everyone in the family. We also learn that Helena, a widow, has been the lover and is still the best friend of Isak Jacobi, a Jewish art dealer and money lender. (Bergman has said there is a little of himself in all the male characters.)

A day or two later, during a rehearsal at the theater, Oscar is playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father when he loses his place, forgets his lines, doesn’t know where he is. Within a day or so, he is dead of a stroke. All of this is witnessed by the solemn Alexander, who is awakened in the middle of the night by his mother’s animal cries of grief.

And then it is summer, and everything has changed, and his mother is engaged to marry the Lutheran bishop, Edvard Vergerus, who is a tall and handsome man, everyone agrees, but as Helene sees them leaving after the wedding, she says, “I think we will have our Emilie back before long.”

The first third of the story, taking place in winter, was filled with color and life, even life in death. Now Fanny and Alexander are taken to a new world, the bishop’s house, which he inhabits with his mother, his sister and his aunt, and which is whitewashed and barren, with only a few necessary pieces of furniture, locks on every door, bars on the windows.

The maid tells the children that the bishop’s first wife and two daughters drowned in the river; Alexander says he has been visited by their ghosts, who told him they drowned trying to escape after being locked up for five days without food and water. The faithless maid reports this story to the bishop, who whips Alexander, but not before a struggle in which the boy stubbornly makes clear his hatred for the bishop.

Already in the film, we have seen the ghost of Oscar more than once, morose, pensive, worried about his children. There is a touching scene where his mother wakes from a dream on the veranda of her summer cottage and has a loving conversation with him. (If elements of Hamlet creep in, with the ghost of Alexander’s father and his mother’s hasty remarriage, they are not insisted on, and coil casually beneath the surface of the action.)

Now we see another bit of magic. Isak Jacobi, acting for his friend Helena, enters the bishop’s house and offers to buy a trunk, and then smuggles her grandchildren out of the house in the trunk—and yet how can it be, when the bishop runs upstairs to look for them, that the children also apparently in their room?

Perhaps it all has something to do with the magic arts of the Jacobi family. Isak has two nephews, Aron, who helps in the business, and Ismael, who is “not well” and is kept in a locked room and can be heard singing at night. Brought back to Isak’s vast house, which is stacked to the ceiling with treasures to sell or barter, Alexander awakens in the middle of the night to urinate, loses his way back to his room, is startled by a conversation with God, and discovers that God is actually a puppet being manipulated as a joke by Aron. Then he is taken to meet Ismael (played, without explanation, by a girl), and it appears that Ismael can “see” what happens in the bishop’s house and can control events there so that the bishop dies horribly by fire.

There are fairy-tale elements here, but Fanny and Alexander is above all the story of what Alexander understands is really happening. If magic is real, if ghosts can walk, so be it. Bergman has often allowed the supernatural into his films. In another sense, the events in Fanny and Alexander may be seen through the prism of the children’s memories, so that half-understood and half-forgotten events have been reconstructed into a new fable that explains their lives.

What’s certain is that Bergman somehow glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams. Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality. The scenes at night in the Jacobi house are as intriguing and mysterious as any I have seen, quiet and dreamy, and then disturbing when the mad Ismael calmly and sweetly shows Alexander how everything will be resolved.

The movie is astonishingly beautiful. The cinematography is by Bergman’s longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist, who surrounds the Ekdahls with color and warmth, and bleeds all of the life out of the bishop’s household.

The enormous cast centers on Helena, the grandmother, played by Gunn Wallgren (in a role once intended for Ingrid Bergman). Wallgren is full-lipped, warm and sexy, and her affection for Isak is life-giving; she was the best thing in the film, Bergman believed.

Emilie (Ewa Froling) is the most conflicted character in the story; she marries the bishop for love, is tragically mistaken about what kind of man he is, thinks she can protect her children, and cannot. Her visit to Helena is heartbreaking. The marriage of Gustav (Jarl Kulle) and Alma (Mona Malm) is open enough to permit an extraordinary scene in which Gustav discusses his affair with his wife and Emilie, and they all try to decide what would be best for the maid. The bishop (Jan Malmsjo) is a tragic and evil man, strict because he is fearful and insecure, cruel because he cannot stop himself, in agony because, he confesses to Emilie, he thought everyone admired him, and he realizes he is hated.

This is a long film, at 188 minutes plus an intermission. But the version Bergman prefers is longer still, the 312-minute version he made for Swedish television. Both are available on a Criterion DVD, which includes Bergman’s feature-length documentary on the making of the film. To see the film in a theater is the way to first come to it, because the colors and shadows are so rich and the sounds so enveloping.

At the end, I was subdued and yet exhilarated; something had happened to me that was outside language, that was spiritual, that incorporated Bergman’s mysticism; one of his characters suggests that our lives flow into each other’s, that even a pebble is an idea of God, that there is a level just out of view where everything really happens.

Note: When Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, asked the world’s directors and critics to select the best films of the last twenty-five years, Fanny and Alexander was third, after Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.

Gremlins

PG, 106 m., 1984

Zach Galligan (Billy Peltzer), Phoebe Cates (Kate Beringer), Hoyt Axton (Randall Peltzer), Frances Lee McCain (Lynn Peltzer). Directed by Joe Dante. Produced by Michael Finnell, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by Chris Columbus.

Gremlins is a confrontation between Norman Rockwell’s vision of Christmas and Hollywood’s vision of the blood-sucking monkeys of voodoo island. It’s fun. On the one hand, you have an idyllic American small town, with Burger Kings and Sears stores clustered merrily around the village square, and on the other hand you have a plague of reprehensible little beasties who behave like a rodent road company of Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang in The Wild One.

The whole movie is a sly series of send-ups, inspired by movie scenes so basic they reside permanently in our subconscious. The opening scene, for example, involves a visit to your basic Mysterious Little Shop in Chinatown, where, as we all know, the ordinary rules of the visible universe cease to operate and magic is a reality. Later on, after a kid’s father buys him a cute little gremlin in Chinatown, we have a new version of your basic Puppy for Christmas Scene. Then there are such basic movie characters as the Zany Inventor, the Blustering Sheriff, the Clean-Cut Kid, the Cute Girlfriend, and, of course, the Old Bag.

The first half of the movie is the best. That’s when we meet the little gremlins, which are unbearably cute and look like a cross between a Pekingese, Yoda from Empire, the Ewoks from Jedi, and kittens. They have impossibly big eyes, they’re cuddly and friendly, and they would make ideal pets except for the fact that they hate bright lights, should not be allowed to get wet, and must never be fed after midnight. Well, of course, it’s always after midnight; that’s the tip-off that this isn’t a retread of E.T. but comes from an older tradition, the fairy tale or magic story. And in the second half of the movie, after the gremlins have gotten wet, been fed after midnight, etc., they turn into truly hateful creatures that look like the monster in Alien.

The movie exploits every trick in the monster-movie book. We have scenes where monsters pop up in the foreground, and others where they stalk us in the background, and others when they drop into the frame and scare the Shinola out of everybody. And the movie itself turns nasty, especially in a scene involving a monster that gets slammed in a microwave oven, and another one where a wide-eyed teenage girl (Phoebe Cates) explains why she hates Christmas. Her story is in the great tradition of 1950s sick jokes, and as for the microwave scene, I had a queasy feeling that before long we’d be reading newspaper stories about kids who went home and tried the same thing with the family cat.

Gremlins was hailed as another E.T. It’s not. It’s in a different tradition. At the level of Serious Film Criticism, it’s a meditation on the myths in our movies: Christmas, families, monsters, retail stores, movies, boogeymen. At the level of Pop Moviegoing, it’s a sophisticated, witty B movie, in which the monsters are devouring not only the defenseless town, but decades of defenseless clichés. But don’t go if you still believe in Santa Claus.

Hannah and Her Sisters

PG-13, 107 m., 1985

Woody Allen (Mickey), Michael Caine (Elliot), Mia Farrow (Hannah), Carrie Fisher (April), Barbara Hershey (Lee), Lloyd Nolan (Hannah’s Father), Maureen O’Sullivan (Hannah’s Mother), Daniel Stern (Dusty), Max von Sydow (Frederick), Dianne Wiest (Holly). Directed by Allen and produced by Robert Greenhut. Screenplay by Allen.

Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, the best movie he has ever made, is organized like an episodic novel, with acute self-contained vignettes adding up to the big picture.

Each section begins with a title or quotation on the screen, white against black, making the movie feel like a stately progression through the lives of its characters. Then the structure is exploded, time and again, by the energy and the passion of those characters: an accountant in love with his wife’s sister, a TV executive who fears he is going to die, a woman whose cocaine habit has made her life a tightrope of fear, an artist who pretends to be strong but depends pitifully on his girlfriend.

By the end of the movie, the section titles and quotations have made an ironic point: We try to organize our lives according to what we have read and learned and believed in, but our plans are lost in a tumult of emotion.

The movie spans two years in the lives of its large cast of characters—New Yorkers who labor in Manhattan’s two sexiest industries, art and money. It begins and ends at family Thanksgiving dinners, with the dinner in the middle of the film acting as a turning point for several lives.

It is hard to say who the most important characters are, but my memory keeps returning to Elliot, the accountant played by Michael Caine, and Lee, the artist’s girlfriend, played by Barbara Hershey. Elliot is married to Hannah (Mia Farrow), but has been blindsided with a sudden passion for Lee. She lives in a loft with the tortured artist Frederick (Max von Sydow), who treats her like his child or his student. He is so isolated from ordinary human contact that she is actually his last remaining link with reality.

Lee and Hannah have a third sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest). They form parts of a whole. Hannah is the competent, nurturing one. Lee is the emotional, sensuous earth mother. Holly is a bundle of tics and insecurities. When they meet for lunch and the camera circles them curiously, we sense that in some ways the movie knows them better than they will ever know themselves. And to talk about the movie that way is to suggest the presence of the most important two characters in the movie, whom I will describe as Woody Allen and Mickey.

Mickey is the character played by Allen; he is a neurotic TV executive who lives in constant fear of death or disease. He was married to Hannah at one time. Even after Hannah’s marriage to Elliot, Mickey remains a member of the family, circling its security with a winsome yearning to belong.

The family itself centers on the three women’s parents, played by Maureen O’Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan as an aging show business couple who have spent decades in loving warfare over his cheating and her drinking and their mutual career decisions.

If Mickey is the character played by Woody Allen in the movie, Allen also provides another, second character in a more subtle way. The entire movie is told through his eyes and his sensibility; not Mickey’s, but Allen’s. From his earlier movies, especially Annie Hall and Manhattan, we have learned to recognize the tone of voice, the style of approach.

Allen approaches his material as a very bright, ironic, fussy, fearful outsider; his constant complaint is that it’s all very well for these people to engage in their lives and plans and adulteries because they do not share his problem, which is that he sees through everything, and what he sees on the other side of everything is certain death and disappointment.

Allen’s writing and directing style is so strong and assured in this film that the actual filmmaking itself becomes a narrative voice, just as we sense Henry James behind all of his novels, or William Faulkner and Iris Murdoch behind theirs.

The movie is not a comedy, but it contains big laughs, and it is not a tragedy, although it could be if we thought about it long enough. It suggests that modern big-city lives are so busy, so distracted, so filled with ambition and complication that there isn’t time to stop and absorb the meaning of things. Neither tragedy nor comedy can find a place to stand; there are too many other guests at the party.

And yet, on reflection, there is a tragedy buried in Hannah and Her Sisters, and that is the fact of Mickey’s status as the perennial outsider. The others get on with their lives, but Mickey is stuck with his complaints. Not only is he certain there is no afterlife, he is very afraid that this life might also be a sham. How he ever married Hannah in the first place is a mystery; it must have been an intermediate step on his journey to his true role in life, as the ex-husband and hanger-on.

There is a scene in the movie where Michael Caine confronts Barbara Hershey and tells her that he loves her. She is stunned, does not know what to say, but does not categorically deny that she has feelings for him. After she leaves him, he stands alone on the street, ecstatic, his face glowing, saying “I’ve got my answer! I’ve got my answer!”

Underlying all of Hannah and Her Sisters is the envy of Mickey (and Woody) that anyone could actually be happy enough and lucky enough to make such a statement. And yet, by the end of the movie, in his own way, Mickey has his answer, too.

Home for the Holidays ½

PG-13, 104 m., 1995

Holly Hunter (Claudia Larson), Robert Downey Jr. (Tommy Larson), Anne Bancroft (Adele Larson), Dylan McDermott (Leo Fish), Charles Durning (Henry Larson), Geraldine Chaplin (Aunt Glady). Directed By Jodie Foster. Written By W. D. Richter. Based on a short story by Chris Randant.

There is a point in Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays when a brother and his brother-in-law are fighting on the front lawn while the father tries to break it up by wetting them down with a garden hose. Looking across the street at the neighbors gawking, the father snarls, “Go back to your own goddamn holidays!”

The movie, which is about the Thanksgiving family reunion from hell, is not exactly a comedy and yet not a drama, either. Like many family reunions, it has a little of both elements, and the strong sense that madness is being held just out of sight. Have we not all, on our ways to family gatherings, parked the car a block away, taken several deep breaths, rubbed our eyes and massaged our temples, and driven on, gritting our teeth? That is not because we do not love our families, but because we know them so very, very well.

We get that sense in the opening scenes of Home for the Holidays, as Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) discovers she has been fired from her job at a Chicago art museum, and responds by kissing her boss; she’s already building up holiday hysteria. Claudia is driven to the airport by her teenage daughter Kitt (Claire Danes), who confides she will “probably” experience sex for the first time over the weekend. At the other end, she’s greeted by her parents, Adele and Henry (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning). Henry’s taking a home video. Adele has brought along an extra parka in case Claudia has lost hers (she has).

The Larson family home is a triumph of art direction. It has been furnished with dozens if not thousands of the sorts of objects found in mail-order gift catalogs. Not expensive catalogs, but the kinds of catalogs with sixteen gifts on each page, each one a “miniature” of something you would not possibly want the full-size version of, such as a reindeer or a barbershop quartet.

Henry is a retired airport maintenance man. Adele chain-smokes all the time and can read her daughter-s mind. (“Mom, I’m thinking of a change . . . I may not be at the museum all that much longer.” “They fired you!”) Soon Claudia’s gay brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.) turns up with a new friend named Leo Fish (Dylan McDermott). The parents seem to accept their son’s homosexuality without acknowledging it, which is an accurate note for many families. Claudia is disturbed by the absence of Tommy’s former boyfriend, who was popular with the entire family.

Then Claudia’s sister Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson) and brother—in—law Walter (Steve Guttenberg) turn up. Walter cannot stand Tommy. Tommy cannot stand Walter or Joanne, and finds a way to deposit a turkey in her lap without quite seeming as if he meant to.

These are all routine family problems compared with the arrival of Aunt Glady (Geraldine Chaplin), who is quite mad in her own style of passionate intensity, and has had a crush on Henry since she first laid eyes on him (he looked, she recalls, like a horse in a uniform).

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.

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).

Eduardo runs the family grocery store or bodega, an anchor of the neighborhood. He has long dreamed of a son taking it over, but this does not seem to be. Anna has long yearned for a grandchild, and regards Sarah as if hinting that a joyous announcement only would be polite. Anna and Eduardo are undergoing great unhappiness in their marriage; it’s always a danger signal when someone leaves the room to take a cell call. But find out about that for yourself. The big issue that Eduardo and Anna share publicly is her desire to get rid of the sick old tree in the middle of the lawn, and his reluctance to commence this family duty, or much of any other, on Christmas Eve.

The performers breathe real life into the characters, starting with Elizabeth Pena and Alfred Molina. Leguizamo is more pensive than we’re used to. The actors are good at something that seems almost impossible, all talking at high energy and interrupting one another, as if they really have known one another very well for a long time. This cannot come easily and may take more of a knack than heavy drama.

The story unspools, the threads sometimes tangling, as many a family reunion movie has before this one. “A Puerto Rican family,” writes one of the fanboys on IMDb. “Dear God, I hate those movies.” He is open-minded: “All these movies with ethnic families (Italians, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, etc. etc.), they all suck.” Do you have the feeling he’s living in the wrong country? Another deep thinker on the same board writes, “Debra Messing = Puerto Rican??” No, but then she doesn’t play one. For that matter, several members of the cast are not of Puerto Rican descent, but you know what? They’re actors. And the story is familiar to their experience not because they’re mostly Latino but because they’re human and have families.

That’s the point of this movie. If you could be the invisible Ghost of Christmas Present in the Rodriguez house, what would you see? If you’ve been lucky, you’d see memories of your own family holidays. There’s nothing magic about being Puerto Rican. I could not only identify with but recognize every experience this family has. To a necessary degree the screenplay by Alison Swan and Rick Najera follows familiar formulas. But then the dialogue, the specifics, and especially the acting take charge, and the movie becomes funny, sad, corny, romantic, heartfelt, all when it needs to be.

One of the most touching moments occurs between Anna and Sarah, who had not expected to get along very well this holiday. Sarah plays a Jewish woman who doesn’t know from this Puerto Rican Christmas. She doesn’t want to look like a snob, but she’s from a different background, and that’s also how Anna sees her. But what with one thing and another, Sarah starts to love the family, and Anna starts to love her. You know, Anna informs her quietly, there are some very fine Jewish Puerto Ricans.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

R, 93 m., 1987

Steve Martin (Neal Page), John Candy (Del Griffith). Directed, produced, and written by John Hughes.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles is founded on the essential natures of its actors. It is perfectly cast and soundly constructed, and all else flows naturally. Steve Martin and John Candy don’t play characters; they embody themselves. That’s why the comedy, which begins securely planted in the twin genres of the road movie and the buddy picture, is able to reveal so much heart and truth.

Some movies are obviously great. Others gradually thrust their greatness upon us. When Planes, Trains and Automobiles was released in 1987, I enjoyed it immensely, gave it a favorable review and moved on. But the movie continued to live in my memory. Like certain other popular entertainments (It’s a Wonderful Life, E.T., Casablanca) it not only contained a universal theme, but also matched it with the right actors and story, so that it shrugged off the other movies of its kind and stood above them in a kind of perfection. This is the only movie our family watches as a custom, most every Thanksgiving.

The story is familiar. Steve Martin plays Neal, a Chicago advertising man, sleek in impeccable blues and grays, smooth-shaven, recently barbered, reeking of self-confidence, prosperity, and anal-retentiveness. John Candy plays Del, a traveling salesman from Chicago who sells shower curtain rings (“the best in the world”). He is very tall, very large, and covered in layers of mismatched shirts, sweaters, vests, sport coats, and parkas. His bristly little mustache looks like it was stuck on crooked just before his entrance; his bow tie is also askew.

Both of these men are in Manhattan two days before Thanksgiving, and both want to get home for the holidays. Fate joins their destinies. Together they will endure every indignity that modern travel can inflict on its victims. What will torture them even more is being trapped in each other’s company. Del wants only to please. Neal wants only to be left alone.

John Hughes, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, is one of the most prolific filmmakers of the last twenty-five years. He is not often cited for greatness, although some of his titles, like The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone, have fervent admirers. What can be said for him is that he usually produces a real story about people he has clear ideas about; his many teenage comedies, for example, are miles more inventive than the recent sex-and-prom sagas. The buried story engine of Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not slowly growing friendship or odd-couple hostility (devices a lesser film might have employed), but empathy. It is about understanding how the other guy feels.

Del, we feel, was born with empathy. He instinctively identifies with Neal’s problems. He is genuinely sorry to learn he stole his cab. He is quick to offer help when their flight is diverted to Wichita, Kansas, and there are no hotel rooms available. Neal, on the other hand, depends on his credit cards and self-reliance. He wants to make his own plans, book his own room, rent his own car. He spends the movie trying to peel off from Del, and failing; Del spends the movie having his feelings hurt and then coming through for Neal anyway.

The movie could have been a shouting match like the unfortunate Odd Couple 2 (1998). Hughes is more subtle. The key early scene takes place in the Wichita motel room they have to share, when Neal explodes, telling Del his jokes stink, his stories are not interesting, and he would rather sit through an insurance seminar than listen to any more of the fat man’s pointless anecdotes. Look at Candy’s face fall. He shows Del as a man hurt and saddened—and not for the first time. Later he remembers how the most important person in his life once told him he was too eager to please, and shouldn’t always try so hard.

At this point, Del wins our hearts, and the movie is set up as more than a comedy. But a comedy it is. Not one movie a year contributes a catchphrase to the language. We remember Jack Nicholson ordering the toast. “If you build it, they will come.” “E.T., phone home.” “I’m walkin’ here!” “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” “Are you talking to me?”

And we remember the scene where Del and Neal wake up cuddled together in the cramped motel bed, and Neal asks Del where his hand is, and Del said it’s between some pillows, and Neal says, “Those aren’t pillows,” and the two men bolt out of bed in terror, and Neal shouts, “You see that Bears game last week?” and Del cries, “What a game! What a game! Bears gonna go all the way!” This is not homophobia but the natural reaction of two men raised to be shy and distant around other men—to fear misunderstood intimacy.

The other great comic set piece in the movie is responsible for its R rating; nothing else in the movie would qualify for other than PG-13. This is Neal’s verbal symphony for the f-word, performed by the desperate man after a rental-car bus strands him three miles from the terminal without a car. He has to walk back through the snow and mud, crossing runways, falling down embankments, until he finally faces a chirpy rental agent (Edie McClurg) who is chatting on the phone about the need for tiny marshmallows in the ambrosia. When she sweetly asks Neal if he is disturbed, he unleashes a speech in which the adjectival form of the f-word supplies the prelude to every noun, including itself, and is additionally used as punctuation. When he finishes, the clerk has a two-word answer that supplies one of the great moments in movie dialogue.

Neal is uneasy around ordinary people and in unstructured situations. His mind is organized like a Day-Timer. He’s lived in a cocoon of affluence and lacks a common touch. Consider the scene on the bus where Del suggests a sing-along, and Neal, awkwardly trying to be a good sport, begins “Three Coins in a Fountain” (and doesn’t know the words). His fellow passengers look at him like he’s crazy. Del saves the moment with a boisterous rendition of a song everybody except Neal knows: “Meet the Flintstones!”

The last scenes of the movie carry the emotional payoff we have been half-awaiting all along. For Neal, they reflect a kind of moral rebirth such as Scrooge experiences in another great holiday tale: He has learned his lesson, and will no longer judge people by their appearances, or by his own selfish standards. There is true poignancy in the scene where Neal finds Del waiting alone on the L platform.

One night a few years after Planes, Trains and Automobiles was released, I came upon John Candy (1950–1994) sitting all by himself in a hotel bar in New York, smoking and drinking, and we talked for a while. We were going to be on the same TV show the next day. He was depressed. People loved him, but he didn’t seem to know that, or it wasn’t enough. He was a sweet guy and nobody had a word to say against him, but he was down on himself. All he wanted to do was make people laugh, but sometimes he tried too hard, and he hated himself for doing that in some of his movies. I thought of Del. There is so much truth in the role that it transforms the whole movie. Hughes knew it, and captured it again in Only the Lonely (1991). And Steve Martin knew it, and played straight to it.

The movies that last, the ones we return to, don’t always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart. When Neal unleashes that tirade in the motel room and Del’s face saddens, he says, “Oh. I see.” It is a moment that not only defines Del’s life, but is a turning point in Neal’s, because he also is a lonely soul, and too well organized to know it. Strange, how much poignancy creeps into this comedy, and only becomes stronger while we’re laughing.

The Polar Express

G, 100 m., 2004

Body movement performers: Tom Hanks (Hero Boy / Father / Conductor / Hobo / Scrooge/Santa), Michael Jeter (Smokey / Steamer), Nona Gaye (Hero Girl), Peter Scolari (Lonely Boy), Eddie Deezen (Know-It-All), Charles Fleischer (Elf General), Steven Tyler (Elf Lieutenant / Elf Singer), Leslie Zemeckis (Sister Sarah / Mother). Voice performers if different than above: Daryl Sabara (Hero Boy), Andre Sogliuzzo (Smokey / Steamer), Jimmy Bennett (Lonely Boy), Isabella Peregrina (Sister Sarah). Directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Zemeckis, Gary Goetzman, Steve Starkey, and William Teitler. Screenplay by Zemeckis and William Broyles, Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg.

The Polar Express has the quality of a lot of lasting children’s entertainment: It’s a little creepy. Not creepy in an unpleasant way, but in that sneaky, teasing way that lets you know eerie things could happen. There’s a deeper, shivery tone, instead of the mindless jolliness of the usual Christmas movie. This one creates a world of its own, like The Wizard of Oz or Willy Wonka, in which the wise child does not feel too complacent.

Those who know the Chris Van Allsburg book will feel right at home from the opening moments, which quote from the story: On Christmas Eve, many years ago, I lay quietly in my bed. . . . The young hero, who is never given a name, is listening for the sound of sleigh bells ringing. He is at just the age when the existence of Santa Claus is up for discussion.

The look of the film is extraordinary, a cross between live action and Van Allsburg’s artwork. Robert Zemeckis, the same director whose Who Framed Roger Rabbit juxtaposed live action with animation, this time merges them, using a process called “performance capture,” in which human actors perform the movements that are translated into lifelike animation. The characters in The Polar Express don’t look real, but they don’t look unreal, either; they have a kind of simplified and underlined reality that makes them visually magnetic. Many of the body and voice performances are by Tom Hanks, who is the executive producer and worked with Zemeckis on Forrest Gump (1994) —another film that combined levels of reality and special effects.

The story: As Hero Boy lies awake in bed, there is a rumble in the street and a passenger train lumbers into view. The boy runs outside in his bathrobe and slippers, and the conductor advises him to get onboard. Having refused to visit a department store Santa, having let his little sister put out Santa’s milk and cookies, Hero Boy is growing alarmingly agnostic on the Santa question, and The Polar Express apparently shuttles such kids to the North Pole, where seeing is believing.

Already on board is Hero Girl, a solemn and gentle African-American, who becomes the boy’s friend, and also befriends Lonely Boy, who lives on the wrong side of the tracks and always seems sad. Another character, Know-It-All, is one of those kids who can’t supply an answer without sounding obnoxious about it. These four are the main characters, in addition to the conductor, a hobo who lives on top of the train, Santa, and countless elves.

There’s an interesting disconnect between the movie’s action and its story. The action is typical thrill-ride stuff, with The Polar Express careening down a “179-degree grade” and racing through tunnels with a half-inch of clearance, while Hero Boy and the hobo ski the top of the train to find safety before the tunnel. At the North Pole, there’s another dizzying ride when the kids spin down a corkscrewing toy chute.

Those scenes are skillful, but expected. Not expected is a dazzling level of creativity in certain other scenes. Hero Girl’s lost ticket, for example, flutters through the air with as much freedom as the famous floating feather at the start of Forrest Gump. When hot chocolate is served on the train, dancing waiters materialize with an acrobatic song and dance. And the North Pole looks like a turn-of-the-century German factory town, filled with elves who not only look mass-produced but may have been, since they mostly have exactly the same features (this is not a cost-cutting device, but an artistic decision).

Santa, in this version, is a good and decent man, matter-of-fact and serious: a professional man, doing his job. The elves are like the crowd at a political rally. A sequence involving a bag full of toys is seen from a high angle that dramatizes Santa’s operation but doesn’t romanticize it; this is not Jolly St. Nick, but Claus, Inc. There is indeed something a little scary about all those elves with their intense, angular faces and their mob mentality.

That’s the magic of The Polar Express: It doesn’t let us off the hook with the usual reassuring Santa and Christmas clichés. When a helicopter lifts the bag of toys over the town square, of course it knocks a star off the top of the Christmas tree, and of course an elf is almost skewered far below. When Santa’s helpers hitch up the reindeer, they look not like tame cartoon characters, but like skittish purebreds. And as for Lonely Boy, although he does make the trip and get his present, and is fiercely protective of it, at the end of the movie we suspect his troubles are not over, and that loneliness may be his condition.

There are so many jobs and so many credits on this movie that I don’t know who to praise, but there are sequences here that are really very special. Some are quiet little moments, like a reflection in a hubcap. Some are visual masterstrokes, like a point of view that looks straight up through a printed page, with the letters floating between us and the reader. Some are story concepts, like the train car filled with old and dead toys being taken back to the Pole for recycling. Some are elements of mystery, like the character of the hobo, who is helpful and even saves Hero Boy’s life but is in a world of his own up there on top of the train and doesn’t become anybody’s buddy (when he disappears, his hand always lingers a little longer than his body).

The Polar Express is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas clichés that children have inflicted on them this time of year. The conductor tells Hero Boy he thinks he really should get on the train, and I have the same advice for you.

Prancer

G, 102 m., 1989

Sam Elliott (John Riggs), Rebecca Harrell (Jessica Riggs), Cloris Leachman (Mrs. McFarland), Rutanya Alda (Aunt Sarah), John Joseph Duda (Steve Riggs), Abe Vigoda (Orel Benton), Boo (Prancer). Directed By John Hancock. Produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis. Screenplay by Greg Taylor.

Every once in a while you meet a kid like Jessica, who is tough and resilient and yet hangs onto her dreams.

She’s a nine-year-old who still believes in Santa Claus, and uses logic to defend her position: If there isn’t a Santa, then maybe there isn’t a God, and if there isn’t a God, then there isn’t a heaven, and, in that case, where did Jessica’s mother go when she died? Jessica lives with her dad and brother on a small farm outside Three Oaks, Michigan. Her dad grows apples and is struggling to make ends meet. He may have to sell the tractor. “Will we have enough to eat?” she asks him. “Sure,” he says. “We’ll have apple sauce, apple juice, stewed apples, apple pie, baked apples. . . .“ One day while she’s walking down the main street on her way home from school, Jessica witnesses a disturbing accident: One of Santa’s reindeers falls down from a holiday decoration strung up across the street. It’s Prancer, the third in line.

Nobody seems to care much about the injured decoration, which is cleared from the road. But not long after, walking home alone through the frosty woods on a cold night, Jessica comes across a reindeer with an injured leg. It stands unafraid in a moonlit clearing and seems to be asking for help. Not long after, her dad comes along in his pickup, and then they both see the deer in the road. Her dad sees that it has a bad leg and wants to shoot it, but then the reindeer disappears. And when it turns up again in the barn, Jessica hides it in an out-building and brings it Christmas cookies to eat. She wants to nurse Prancer back to health and return him to Santa.

OK, I know, this sounds like a cloying fantasy designed to paralyze anyone over the age of nine, but not the way it’s told by director John Hancock and writer Greg Taylor. They give the film an unsentimental, almost realistic edge by making the father (Sam Elliott) into a tough, no-nonsense farmer who’s having trouble raising his kids alone, and keeps laying down the law. And what really redeems the movie, taking it out of the category of kiddie picture and giving it a heart and gumption, is the performance by a young actress named Rebecca Harrell, as Jessica.

She’s something. She has a troublemaker’s look in her eye, and a round, pixie face that’s filled with mischief. And she’s smart—a plucky schemer who figures out things for herself and isn’t afraid to act on her convictions.

Her dialogue in the movie is fun to listen to, because she talks like she thinks, and she’s always working an angle. She believes ferociously that her reindeer is, indeed, Prancer, and to buy it a bag of oats she does housecleaning for the eccentric old lady (Cloris Leachman) who lives in the house on the hill.

Prancer is not filled with a lot of action. Only ordinary things happen, as when the local newspaper prints a letter that Jessica wrote to Santa, assuring him that Prancer would be back in good shape for Christmas duty. (The headline, inevitably, is “Yes, Santa, there is a Virginia.”) The reindeer finally is discovered, and Jessica’s dad sells it to Mr. Drier, the local butcher. Of course, Jessica is sure Prancer will end up as sausage meat but, no, all Drier wants to do is exhibit the animal as a Christmas attraction.

The best thing about Prancer is that it doesn’t insult anyone’s intelligence. Smaller kids will identify with Jessica’s fierce resolve to get Prancer back into action, and older viewers will appreciate the fact that the movie takes place in an approximation of the real world.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale ½

R, 84 m., 2010

Onni Tommila (Pietari), Per Christian Ellefsen (Riley), Peeter Jakobi (Santa). Directed and written by Jalmari Helander. Produced by Petri Jokiranta. In Finnish and English, with English subtitles.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is a rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking hung by the fireside with care. How else to explain an R-rated Santa Claus origin story crossed with The Thing? Apart from the inescapable that the movie has Santa and reindeer in it, this is a superior horror film, a spot-on parody of movies about dead beings brought back to life. Oh, and all the reindeer are dead.

I need to help you picture this. It is the day before Christmas in the far Arctic north. Young Pietari lives on a reindeer ranch with his dad and other men who would feel right at home shooting reindeer from a helicopter. Yes, they are hunting food. The Scandinavians eat reindeer. God knows they do. Years ago, I once visited Finland, Norway, and Sweden on a tour for the Scandinavian Film Institute, and at every single meal, some sort of reindeer appetizer was served as a “delightful surprise.” Between meals or when lost in the snow, they gnaw on reindeer jerky.

I stray. Nearby, there is a huge mound that looks vaguely sinister. The Americans have been blasting away up there with dynamite. Very sinister. Pietari (Onni Tommila) and his friend Juuso have been sneaking through the fence to spy on the Yanks. Pietari is a dead ringer in every way for Ralphie in A Christmas Story.

There is a legend that centuries ago the citizens were threatened by fearsome monsters. They were able to trick them onto the lake, where they froze. One of them was cut out inside a giant block of ice and buried deep beneath the mound. And now . . .

It’s an idea from The Thing, where an alien was found in Antarctica and brought frozen into a hut, where drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . it began to thaw. We approach this possibility on the Night Before Christmas. Pietari’s mother is dead (lots of lumps of coal in this stocking), and his dad, Rauno (Jorma Tommila), keeps telling him to stay in the house, and Pietari, an earnest, stubborn Ralphie type, keeps sneaking out. He’s the only one who figures out what’s happening: Inside the mound, inside the ice, is Santa Claus.

Well, not Santa precisely. A savage, scrawny beast of a man with a beard, who eventually does admittedly end up wearing a Santa suit, but strictly for warmth. This creature is however arguably of the species Santus Clausium. The director of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, the Finnish Jalmari Helander, has made two Rare Export short subjects about the capture and taming of wild Santas, who are then supplied to the worldwide market for Santas. Those Finns, what cut-ups.

Don’t let it get lost in the confusion that this is a fine film. An original, daring, carefully crafted film, that never for one instant winks at us that it’s a parody. In its tone, acting, location work, music, and inexorably mounting suspense, this is an exemplary horror film, apart from the detail that they'’re not usually subtitled A Christmas Tale and tell about terrifying wild Santas.

The R rating was earned by the F-word and a nekkid Santa. Did I mention the reindeer slaughter?

The Ref

R, 97 m., 1994

Dennis Leary (Gus), Judy Davis (Caroline), Kevin Spacey (Lloyd). Directed By Ted Demme. Produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Screenplay by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss.

The Ref is a flip-flopped, updated version of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in which a kidnapper naps more than he was counting on. The movie stars sometime standup comic Dennis Leary as Gus, a would-be jewel thief who sets off an alarm in a private house in an affluent Connecticut hamlet, and in desperation kidnaps a married couple on Christmas Eve and orders them to drive to their home.

Once there, he assumes, he will have time to plot his next move. But he doesn’t get a moment’s peace, because the couple he has kidnapped, Caroline and Lloyd, have been fighting for years, are constantly at each other’s throats, and are both completely incapable of surrendering in an argument.

The couple, played by Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey, are smart, bitter, and articulate—and boy, can they fight. Gus is almost forgotten at times; he has a gun, but he can’t get the floor. He tries to explain: “People with guns can do whatever they want. Married people without guns—for instance, you—do not get to yell! Why? No guns! No guns, no yelling! See? Simple little quiz!”

That doesn’t stop them for a second. After the kidnapper demands rope to tie them up, for example, Lloyd says they don’t have any, but Caroline helpfully remembers some bungee cord in the kitchen, and that sets off Lloyd, who thinks his wife is being cooperative because she’s attracted to the criminal. Caroline explains that she was frightened: “Humans get frightened because they have feelings. Didn’t your alien leaders teach you that before they sent you here?"

The situation at the house grows even more desperate after the couple’s young son arrives home from military school. The kid is a conniver who has made piles of money by blackmailing a teacher (named Siskel) at his military academy, and now he’s impressed by Gus and basically welcomes new excitement in his life. And all of Lloyd’s hated relatives are scheduled to arrive shortly for a holiday supper.

At some point during this process, the relationship between Gus and his victims subtly shifts; he becomes not so much the kidnapper as the peacemaker. He tries to enforce silence, truces, agreements. The couple begins to cooperate with him, maybe because they’re afraid of his gun, but more likely because the situation takes on a logic of its own. (It’s pretty clear Gus isn’t going to shoot them.) Lloyd’s relatives know the couple has been seeing a marriage counselor, and so it’s agreed that Gus will pretend to be the marriage counselor so that the kidnapper can continue right through the Christmas Eve gathering.

Material like this is only as good as the acting and writing. The Ref is skillful in both areas. Dennis Leary, who has a tendency, like many standup comics, to start shouting and try to make points with overkill, here creates an entertaining character. And Davis and Spacey, both naturally verbal, develop a manic counterpoint in their arguments that elevates them to a sort of art form.

There are a lot of supporting characters in the story: The relatives, each with their own problem; the local police chief; Gus’s rummy-dummy partner; the drunken neighbor dressed as Santa Claus; and of course Siskel, the teacher from the military school, whom the kid is blackmailing because he photographed him consorting with topless dancers. The director, Ted Demme, juggles all these people skillfully. Even though we know where the movie is going (the Ref isn’t really such a bad guy after all), it’s fun to get there.

Scrooge

G, 113 m., 1970

Albert Finney (Ebenezer Scrooge), Laurence Naismith (Mr. Fezziwig), Alec Guinness (Jacob Marley’s Ghost), Edith Evans (Ghost of Christmas Past), Kenneth More (Ghost of Christmas Present), Paddy Stone (Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come), David Collings (Bob Cratchit), Richard Beaumont (Tiny Tim). Directed by Ronald Neame. Produced by Robert Solo. Screenplay by Leslie Bricusse. Based on the novel A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

The notion of Albert Finney playing Ebenezer Scrooge is admittedly mind-boggling, and so is the idea of A Christmas Carol being turned into a musical. But Scrooge works very nicely on its intended level and the kids sitting near me seemed to be having a good time.

Still, I’m not sure the movie should have been in color (Scrooge having, of course, the definitive black-and-white personality). And I’m not convinced it should have been a musical. With so few musicals being made today, it’s our loss that so many of them are written by Leslie Bricusse. Here he is, after Doctor Dolittle, back again with still more forgettable tunes and inane lyrics with titles like “I Like Life” and “Thank You Very Much.”

Bricusse’s songs fall so far below the level of good musical comedy that you wish Albert Finney would stop singing them, until you realize he isn’t really singing. He’s just noodling along, helped by lush orchestration. To get the lead in a big-studio musical during the long dying days of the genre, you apparently had to be unable to sing or dance. How else to account for Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon? Or Finney in this one? Finney adopts Marvin’s singing style, which is a sort of low-register growl. Meanwhile, countless dancers and a children’s choir keep up the pretense that music is happening.

So if all of these things are wrong, why does Scrooge work? Because it’s a universal story, I guess, and we like to see it told again. Ronald Neame’s direction tells it well this time, and the film has lots of special effects that were lacking in the 1935 and 1951 versions. I was less than convinced by Scrooge’s visit to a papier-mâché hell, but the appearance of Christmas Present (Kenneth More) surmounting a mountain of cakes and candies was appropriately marvelous.

The whole problem of the Ghosts of Christmas have been handled well, in fact. Reviewing the 1951 British version of A Christmas Carol for the Chicago Sun-Times, Eleanor Keen noted appropriately that the three ghosts are “a trio that resembles fugitives from an eighth-grade play in costumes whipped up by loving hands at home.” My memory of that version is that she was right and the ghosts looked ridiculous.

In this version, the ghosts are handled more believably (if that’s possible). The Ghost of Christmas Past is a particularly good inspiration: They’ve made the role female and given it to Dame Edith Evans. She plays it regally and sympathetically by turns, and seems genuinely sorry that Scrooge’s childhood was so unhappy. Christmas Present, played by More, is a Falstaffian sort of guy with a big belly and a hearty laugh, who doesn’t look like a ghost at all. And Christmas Future is simply a dark, faceless shroud, not unlike Lorado Taft’s figure of Time in his Fountain of Life sculpture on the Midway at the University of Chicago. All three figures are miles better than conventional eighth-grade ghosts.

Alec Guinness contributes a Marley wrapped in chains; the Christmas turkey weighs at least forty pounds; Tiny Tim is appropriately tiny, and Scrooge reforms himself with style. What more could you want? No songs, I’d say.

The Thin Man

NO MPAA RATING, 93 m., 1934

William Powell (Nick Charles), Myrna Loy (Nora Charles), Maureen O’Sullivan (Dorothy Wynant), Cesar Romero (Chris Jorgenson). Directed by W. S. Van Dyke. Produced by Hunt Stromberg. Screenplay by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett.

William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance. His delivery is so droll and insinuating, so knowing and innocent at the same time, that it hardly matters what he’s saying. That’s certainly the case in The Thin Man, a murder mystery in which the murder and the mystery are insignificant compared to the personal styles of the actors. Powell and Myrna Loy co-star as Nick and Nora Charles, a retired detective and his rich wife, playfully in love and both always a little drunk.

Nick Charles drinks steadily throughout the movie, with the kind of capacity and wit that real drunks fondly hope to master. When we first see him, he’s teaching a bartender how to mix drinks (“Have rhythm in your shaking . . . a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time”). Nora enters and he hands her a drink. She asks how much he’s had. “This will make six martinis,” he says. She orders five more, to keep up.

Powell plays the character with a lyrical alcoholic slur that waxes and wanes but never topples either way into inebriation or sobriety. The drinks are the lubricant for dialogue of elegant wit and wicked timing, used by a character who is decadent on the surface but fundamentally brave and brilliant. After Nick and Nora face down an armed intruder in their apartment one night, they read about it in the morning papers. “I was shot twice in the Tribune,” Nick observes. “I read you were shot five times in the tabloids,” says Nora. “It’s not true,” says Nick. “He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”

After a prologue set three months earlier, most of the movie takes place over the holiday season, including cocktail parties on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and the exposure of the killer at a dinner party sometime around New Years’ Eve. The movie is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, one of the fathers of noir, and it does technically provide clues, suspects, and a solution to a series of murders, but in tone and intent it’s more like an all-dialogue version of an Astaire and Rogers musical, with elegant people in luxury hotel penthouses and no hint of the Depression anywhere in sight.

The Thin Man was one of the most popular films of 1934, inspired five sequels, and was nominated for four Oscars (best picture, actor, direction, and screenplay). Yet it was made as an inexpensive B-picture. Powell and Loy had been successful together earlier the same year in Manhattan Melodrama (the last film John Dillinger ever saw), and were quickly cast by MGM in this crime comedy that was filmed, incredibly, in only two weeks. The quick shooting schedule was possible because there are very few sets and negligible exteriors, because there is much dialogue and little action, and because the director, W. S. Van Dyke, was known for sticking to a schedule. That The Thin Man cost so little and looks so good is possibly because the interiors are simple and elegant, and the black-and-white photography flatters the loungewear and formalwear worn by a great-looking cast (which in addition to Powell and Loy, included Maureen O’Sullivan and a young Cesar Romero). And there is a kind of grace in the way the six-foot Powell hovers protectively over the fix-foot-six Loy (or sometimes simply leans as if blown in her direction).

Although Dashiell Hammett was known for hard-boiled fiction, and John Huston’s 1941 film of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was one of the first examples of film noir, The Thin Man is essentially a drawing-room comedy with dead bodies. The plot is so preposterous that no reasonable viewer can follow it, and the movie makes little effort to require that it be followed. Nick Charles typically stands in the midst of inexplicable events with a drink in his hand, nodding wisely as if he understands everything and is not about to share. When a reporter asks him, “Can’t you tell us anything about the case?” Nick replies: “Yes. It’s putting me way behind in my drinking.”

Briefly, the film involves the mysterious disappearance of an inventor (Edward Ellis); the concern of his daughter (O’Sullivan), who is an old friend of Nick and Nora; the greed of the inventor’s ex-wife (Minna Goimbell); the even greater greed of her gold-digging husband (Romero); the suspicious motives of the inventor’s mistress (Natalie Moorhead), and various other thugs, gunsels, cops, reporters, and the untiring cast of partygoers who turn up nightly at the Charles’ suite for free drinks.

One of the movie’s charms is the playfulness with which Nick and Nora treat each other, and life. During one ostensibly serious scene, Nick pretends to find a piece of lint on her blouse, and then flicks her on the nose when she looks down; she jabs him in the side; he pretends to be about to sock her, and then they both try to put on serious faces. On Christmas morning, Nick tests the new air-rifle he got as a present by firing at the balloons on their Christmas tree. Nick throws a dinner party for all of the suspects, with plainclothes cops as waiters, and Nora tells one of them: “Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts?”

The movie’s only real skullduggery comes when Nick goes on a midnight prowl through the inventor’s laboratory, and even then the real sleuthing is done by Asta (Skippy), the couple’s high-spirited terrier. Nick and Nora included him in all of their activities, and Asta became one of the most famous movie dogs of his time, in part through his ability to shield his eyes with his paws when life grew too disturbing to contemplate.

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.