Christmas Movies
Christmas was Friday but this newsletter comes out on Mondays so what can you do
Watching
Happiest Season (2020)
I am no expert in the art of the modern holiday romcom, but passing familiarity with the genre leads me to theorize that high jinks are its most basic building block. “My girlfriend’s niece and nephew hid an expensive necklace in my tote while we were window shopping at a jewelry store and now the mall police are investigating me for shoplifting ”: classic high jinks. “My girlfriend decided to tell me halfway into the car ride to her parents’ house where we’ll be spending a week for Christmas that she never actually came out to her family so now she wants me to pretend to be her orphan roommate and while we’re at it maybe don’t even act gay either”: that’s a stretch.
Many have diagnosed Harper (Mackenzie Davis) the toxic girlfriend as the problem with Happiest Season, but that’s not necessarily true. Not being out to your family does put you in tight spot; she easily could (and should) have told Abby (Kristen Stewart) before they got in the car what was about to go down, but just as lesbian representation serves its purpose so too does people-who-make-poor-decisions-under-pressure representation. So Harper’s a bad girlfriend, as are many. The real issue is that the movie forces a reconciliation (with Dan Levy acting as mediator) without first making Harper understand just how much she’s hurt the person she loves the most.
A vocal contingent of viewers on my Twitter feed wanted Abby to ditch Harper for ~old flame~ Riley (Aubrey Plaza)—the movie does toy with the idea, and yes, let’s immediately put K-Stew and Plaza in a (better) movie together—but the final scene Riley has with Harper feels like the appropriate arc for her character. Riley has had time to learn how to protect herself against Harper, so when Harper is finally, cruelly outed to her family, Riley maturely offers a handshake and condolences and gentle encouragement to not give up on Abby if that’s what she really wants. Maybe it’s unkind of her to throw Abby under the bus like that, but then again I guess it’s Riley’s prerogative to dispose of her like that after Abby drags her out for drinks and a drag show only to not leave Harper for her.
Speaking of which—until that scene at the bar, I had another theory brewing, about how somewhere in this movie there is an interesting concept about what happens when the adult children of boomers come home to the towns that raised them. Ultimately I don’t think there’s enough there for that take, but I remain puzzled by where the homophobia (real or feared) in Harper’s house is coming from. Harper’s insecurity about coming out to her family is rooted in her parents’ political aspirations, not any stated religious opposition. Capitalism loves [to sell things to] the gays, so that can’t be the culprit. What the hell must these people think of Pete Buttigieg or Andrew Sullivan?
Carol (2015)
When Carol premiered at Cannes 5 years ago it would unknowingly herald the passage of marriage equality that was to come in the U.S. a month later. Film critic David Ehrlich, whom I was still following closely at the time, became the movie’s noisiest and most viral standard-bearer until its eventual theatrical release at the very end of 2015. So impatient was I to see this movie that had been as hyped up within art film circles as The Force Awakens was being hyped up in Star Wars circles that I planned my Christmas vacation to include a stopover in New York, where I could catch a show at the Angelika (Carol would not open in D.C. until after Christmas).
At the time Carol was shouldering a burden the subsequent years have relieved it from, that of being the Gay Movie of the Moment. Now we’ve had Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (and…Happiest Season…well, we had a good run), but there had always been movies before it (including Blue Is the Warmest Color just two years prior, but that’s a whole different story). This one was merely the first that I could enjoy as such; revisiting Carol now without expectation, I find myself better appreciating its peculiarities.
That Carol is a gorgeous movie is self-evident almost to its detriment. It isn’t just that it’s so well-shot that makes a movie any good. If anything Carol can be a much more visually ugly movie than people tend to acknowledge. So much of it is so green, and not the verdant green of fresh pine branches (though there’s that, too) but rather a nauseous green that nobody actually turns when they have too many servings of eggnog, even though it feels like maybe they should. The textures of 16mm film are expressive but not in and of themselves beautiful; Todd Haynes and DP Edward Lachman have to make it beautiful, which they do, by using color and distance and composition to contrast the dueling subjectivities of Carol and Therese.
Since I haven’t read the Price of Salt, the Patricia Highsmith novel on which Carol is based, I can only assess the movie on what screenwriter Phyllis Nagy gave Haynes to work with, and then what he did with it. I recall negative reviews criticizing the movie for asking us to see Carol & Therese’s relationship as moral because it is lesbian (and especially in contrast to all of the horrid heterosexual alternatives). I’m unsure on rewatch if that’s really what the movie is saying, or if that was just what the atmosphere around its release led a lot of people to read into it. I think the movie is aware of—and not necessarily condoning of—the unequal dynamics at play between Carol (older, scheming, but lovelorn) and Therese (younger, romantic, but guarded) and it tells that story aesthetically as much as it does verbally. All that visual and aural flair isn’t a distraction: it’s the point.
Christmas, Again (2014)
Noel (Kentucker Audley) comes down to Brooklyn from upstate every December to sell Christmas trees. Whether he’s taciturn because of or without correlation to his recent breakup with the girlfriend who used to join him is an open question. Over the course of a month, Noel undertakes his very own crèche-sized labors of Hercules, with customers (real locals, I assume) in the place of Stymphalian birds and other such monstrous creatures of ancient imagination. These monsters are almost as terrifying. There’s the guy who comes by asking if they sell the tree the Obamas got, the lady who wants to know if she can get a wreath without all the, you know, decorations, the lady who wants to know if she can get a wreath with, you know, some decorations, the boss who drives by every couple of days to monitor the progress of sales and glare at him from behind two pairs of glasses, the married couple who calls for delivery and brings Noel to tears when he shows up and sees that they’re expecting.
There’s also a woman Noel finds unconscious on a park bench with gum in her hair and a guy digging through her wallet. He brings her back to his camper for the night and she skedaddles the next morning with nary a thank you. He’s nonplussed, she guiltily brings him a pumpkin pie (with blackberry garnish) a few days later. He’s happy to oblige the expiatory offering, but he’s just here to sell Christmas trees, not to get involved in the affairs of city people—and certainly not to follow through on any yuletide meet-cutes. Before the last of the trees have been sold and the camper hits the road again, Noel will spend one more night with her making amends. More importantly, he’ll find purpose and strength from many of the other people he helps along the way.
Unlike so many contemporary New York indie movies you’ve come to associate with the gritty, colorful look and feel of this one (whose cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, also did those ones), Christmas, Again has a purity of heart and kindness of spirit that’s only possible because it was imagined from within. Writer/director Charles Poekel ran his own Christmas tree stand in New York for three years and used the profits, in combination with some kickstarter funds, to finance this movie, which is largely based on his experiences. Presumably the love story was a dramatic addition, but who am I to say! In Brooklyn anything is possible.
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Long hours are to be expected when you work at a gift shop right around Christmas, but it’s remarkable nonetheless that we get little sense of Alfred (James Stewart)’s home life in this Lubitsch classic. Perhaps he should have bargained for a better work-life balance for the new year, or perhaps we are meant to assume that a strapping bachelor such as himself spends all his idle hours nervously pacing the streets of Budapest, dining on vittles from food carts, and only returning home when his shoes have worn out and he can fall promptly asleep.
Clearly we must rescue this man from such a sorry fate, and someone, fortunately, has cooked up a pen pal plot. No I don’t exactly know how this works: he’s started anonymously exchanging letters with an eligible bachelorette, who of course turns out to be Klara (Margaret Sullavan), the bright new coworker who makes the grandest of entrances: solving the storekeeper’s problem of how to pawn off novelty items on an unsuspecting public that doesn’t need them. Surely I missed the beat that explained how the correspondence began. Was there a classified in the paper they both responded to? Who’s the matchmaker setting people up all over Budapest and how many success stories do they have to their name? You could spin a whole cinematic universe out of the concept.
This movie reminds me anew why it’s called the Lubitsch touch and not the Lubitsch chokehold. The long gag in the first scene has an even longer payoff and the script is peppered with witticisms, but this is still a story set during the darkest and coldest month of the year. Someone tries to shoot themselves, Klara’s out here reading Anna Karenina, Alfred gets laid off, and neither Klara nor Alfred have a body to spend the holiday with. Even after Alfred learns that Klara’s his mysterious epistolary inamorata, drama obliges us to wait until the film’s very last scene to see if she’ll still be interested in him once the mask comes off (so to speak).
Christmas Eve comes and goes with sales as good as ever. The night is full of good cheer but as dark as the shop once everyone else has gone on their way. Klara still has hope that her pen pal will turn out to be the man of her dreams; Alfred is quaking in his boots hoping the same. Lubitsch prolongs the arrival of the moment of truth as far as we can bear it. We believe we know how this will end, of course, but in that unlit showroom for those last minutes the tragic alternative is still in play. Maybe their hearts will break tonight; maybe there won’t be anywhere to rest our heads. But then—
Next month marks Movie Enthusiast’s 5th anniversary! I can’t believe that I used to send this twice a month. While I’m pretty satisfied with how this newsletter is structured now, this is as good a time as any for feedback. Is there anything you want me to cover more of or less of in 2021? Send me your thoughts! Since I’m publishing on Substack now, we can also try opening up the comments on these posts for public discussions now and then.
Next week I’ll be back with my favorite movies of 2020 and other 2020 bests-of. Start taking bets in the comments! (Don’t do that. Or I mean, do if you want to, I don’t care, it’s your life!)