Old Acquaintance

I watch three Christmas classics and an old television special. I cast aside a bad novel and look to a new year.

In the spirit of the season I’ve been rewatching well-loved classic Christmas movies that I haven’t seen in a long time. I don’t celebrate Christmas myself, so I’m coming at these more as a lifelong movie nerd than as someone for whom these pictures have any particular flavor of tinsel-bedecked nostalgia.

The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick, is something the gothic stylist director/producer Tim Burton came up with (often branded as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas) and handed off to collaborators to bring to life as a film in 1993. It’s a dark fantasy kids’ movie that smartly operates as a joint Halloween/Christmas picture set in an imaginary universe where major American holidays are spiritually embodied in villages, basically taking the concept of “Santa’s Christmas village” or whatever it’s called and extrapolating a commensurate Halloween-themed community. Santa’s equivalent in “Halloween Town” is a “Pumpkin King” named Jack Skellington, voiced in speech by Chris Sarandon (whom I associate almost entirely with his excellent performance in Dog Day Afternoon, one of my absolute favorite movies ever) and in song by Danny Elfman, who wrote the songs for this movie. (This picture is both a musical and is rendered entirely in stop-motion animation, the latter being a great choice that really distinguishes it from other mainstream fare of its era.) Trouble ensues when Jack Skellington decides to usurp Santa Claus’s position and makes a mess of Christmas, tangling up the respective Halloween and Christmas aesthetics and ethea (fear versus joy, tricking versus giving, ghosts versus elves and so on — it’s in the title).

With respect for Elfman’s infamous theme song for my beloved The Simpsons, I think the serviceable but unmemorable songs are the weakest component of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which isn’t an especially strong criticism since so much greatness is on display here. My only other quibble is that I could have stood for a bit more development of Sally, a character who serves as a love interest and conscience for Jack and is voiced by the incomparable comic actor Catherine O’Hara. This is a great movie with a novel premise, fun and concise structure and an astonishingly cool and genuinely grotesque and unsettling design sensibility that feels as fresh and alive today as when I saw it at the theater as a kid.

Next I gave a look to another holiday classic that I last watched in its entirety as a child at the movie theater and which also has O’Hara in it. My mother took me to see Home Alone one day in 1990 and I went into it without any knowledge or expectations, making my first viewing the funnest-possible way for a child to experience a generational landmark and seismic accomplishment in the genre of kids’ movies.

I was hoping to report that Home Alone holds up great, imagining from my present-day vantage that it might be one of those perfectly-constructed textbook Hollywood showcases where nothing is wasted and everything works. For about the first third of the picture I would say that it is — the legendary filmmaker John Hughes gets his many characters, establishing circumstances and moral stakes across efficiently and escorts us plausibly and convincingly into the second act, when Macauley Culkin’s signature character the eight-year-old suburban iconoclast and family misfit Kevin is alternately relieved, fearful, ecstatic and dejected to find himself with a lavish house all to himself over Christmas. (I know how he feels.)

I don’t have to explain the consciousness-shifting cultural detonation this film was for my generation, or how it became a perennial Christmastime classic and has spawned a still-unfolding franchise that is putting out new product even now, or that Nineties-era Catherine O’Hara is the most beautiful, elegant, charming, coolest human being who has ever lived. These are well-established facts and we needn’t belabor them here.

But I will say that this film, written by Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus, is overall pretty good but is really meant more for the little kid of just below Kevin’s age that I was when I first saw it than for the home and alone adult I am today. It’s an alright movie but it wasn’t much fun to watch this time, not even for nostalgic purposes. The middle section drags as the filmmakers cast about for gags for the immensely talented young Culkin to realize and variously establish the Chekhov’s BB gun and Chekhov’s tarantula that will become important in the cartoonish third act when Kevin squares off against inept cat burglars played well by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern.

A lot of this belabored second act involves moving narrative chess pieces like Pesci and Stern’s characters around the board to gear up for that breathless climax, and most of the material with these villain characters compromises all of the praiseworthy believability from the first act that convinced me that the film’s initial premise is plausible. The choices that Pesci and Stern’s “Wet Bandits” make to spend days on end hanging around a rich neighborhood committing daytime burglaries and refusing to decline an attempt on a house they have been given ample reason to suspect is still inhabited over the holiday is far less believable than the means by which Hughes contrives to get Kevin left home alone in that house while his family accidentally flies to France without him. But the villains’ indefatigability is necessary for the picture to descend into the famous stunt-gag confrontation between Kevin and the burglars, a sequence that blew my mind in 1990 because I had never seen or conceived of anything like it in my several years of life. This time around I found it tiresome compared with the engaging, character-driven and O’Hara-heavy first act. (She plays Kevin’s mom and is one of the best things about Home Alone, which of course could be said of everything she’s ever been in.) I realize I’m kind of shitting on the main point and stakes of the movie, so for better or worse this critique might say more about me than about how well Home Alone holds up three decades after its release.

I’m also noticing that all of the classic Christmas films on this list are shot through with a genuine frisson of menace, grotesquerie and/or morbidity; maybe this is an essential element of the genre that is needed to contrast the morals of holiday cheer, togetherness and good will and cast them into shinier relief. It’s certainly true of what is widely considered the greatest-ever Christmas movie, the 1946 picture It’s a Wonderful Life, directed and co-written by Frank Capra and featuring indelible and influential performances by James Stewart and Donna Reed, which I watched this week for the first time in over twenty years.

The darkness in this one is thoroughly instantiated in the climactic sequence in which the goodhearted, charitable, honest and community-minded protagonist played by Stewart finds himself at the end of his rope and contemplates suicide, only to have a literal angel visit him from actual Heaven and magically show him how much worse his hometown and the people in it would be if he’d never been born. The movie up until that point comprises the story of how he always put his own impulses towards leaving his hometown and pursuing adventure and individuality beneath his responsibilities to take over his father’s business, provide for the community and stand up on behalf of his family and friends to the cruel-spirited businessman who wants to take advantage of everyone during the Depression and dominate the town.

On reflection these tastefully-introduced supernatural and spiritual/religious components aren’t especially strange for a Christmas movie, but it still strikes me as odd that something with such a magical premise was and is so easy to accept as serious, high-class commercial film production and genuinely affecting drama. Nevertheless one finds one’s self unquestioningly accepting the outlandishness of the concept and experiencing firsthand the truth that It’s a Wonderful Life does indeed work spectacularly well. It looks good in a quiet way, every performance leaps off the screen with vitality and the story progresses just long enough to give each character and scene due consideration without a moment’s tedium.

Above all else, the film is noteworthy for being one of the clearest expressions of the American social mores and preoccupying considerations of its time. (While its high quality and watchability explain its enduring appeal, the timeliness of its release surely had much to do with its initial success.) It was released in 1946 to an American public still reeling and recovering from the Depression and the War years, when literally everyone in the country had been touched by privation and/or lost family or friends to the War effort. The film presents a vision of small-town life and American values in which a sense of compromise, sacrifice and a “we’re-all-in-this-together” attitude are the highest virtues. As mentioned above, Stewart’s character George has an adventuresome and individualistic streak, inherently American traits that would robustly reassert themselves a generation later but that in the vision of It’s a Wonderful Life simply must be sacrificed for the sake of community cohesion and mutual survival.

Towards the end of this postwar victory lap of a film when George has a dystopian vision of his hometown as it would be without him, things that we today take for granted as being requisite for making a community a vibrant and interesting place to live, such as raucous live music, packed drinking establishments and the bright lights of a thriving downtown, are portrayed as unacceptable indulgences and threatening liabilities for communities that were only too glad to have survived at all, let alone have a stable vision for the future. Changes radical enough to make this film feel quaint have come and gone in both American society and in individual consciousnesses in the seventy-five years since the film’s release, but given the frightening degree to which our sense of national cohesion is currently fraying and even igniting this bleak Christmas season, the datedness of some of the film’s precepts and methods have only served to make It’s a Wonderful Life more enjoyable. In its enthusiasm for values that are due for a refurbishing like responsibility, straightforward honesty and humble service, it actually feels less dated and more meaningful than, for example, the cartoon Nineties zaniness of Home Alone. And the lovely ending of It’s a Wonderful Life retains its power to send a few tears rolling down a few cheeks. This author’s cheeks, anyway.

My mother gave me a copy of Mark Harris’s excellent book Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War for a gift in 2017 and I was fascinated by Harris’s extended analysis contrasting the differing visions for postwar life that the legendary Hollywood directors Capra and William Wyler offered in their respective 1946 films It’s a Wonderful Life and The Best Years of Our Lives. I’ve seen both and can attest to their being as good as they are different from one another. Harris’s analysis is outstandingly well-written and informative but is quite in-depth and I don’t remember every detail; it’s possible some of what I’ve written above was suggested by his writing or that he did a better job of making similar comments. In any case I strongly recommend Five Came Back, for this and other reasons.

Should it stay or should it go? I’ve made it about three fifths of the way through the Lionel Shriver novel I found in a Little Free Library and I’ve come to a difficult determination to exercise a license I hardly ever take with books or movies. I’m giving up on Should We Stay or Should We Go.

I’ve never read Shriver’s work before but if this novel is a fair indication, she simply isn’t a very good novelist, at least for one as relatively successful as herself. She has a lousy ear for dialogue, a clinical and self-satisfied style and, fatally for a fiction writer, a stubborn determination to be more polemical than interesting. All of this has left me simply not caring what happens at the end, or even what happens next. (Annoyingly for an expatriate American writer, she also peppered this particular text quite heavily with colloquial Britishisms, which ends up accomplishing the opposite of what I imagine her goal to have been in doing so.) The book’s interesting premise and structure are what led to me wanting to read it at all and ultimately bring me to the supposition that Shriver might be more of a high-level concept-developer than a writer who can execute in detail. I’ll find a cozy Little Free Library and release this one back into the wild where hopefully someone can get something meaningful out of it. With the coming onset of the new year and having received in the mail the copy of Anna Karenina for which I was waiting, I’ll clear the lane and refocus on Tolstoy for a while.

I like Auld Lang Syne, both the melody of the song and the sentiment of the lyrics, and while the outlook for the new year may not be as rosy as we’d prefer, this newsletter has gone a small way towards helping me stay connected to friends and colleagues during a lonely and bewildering time. In this spirit I watched a Scottish television special from 1986 called Robert Burns: Love and Liberty, which from start to finish comprises his poetry being recited and sung as it would have been during Burns’s time. Interesting if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am. It closes out with a sweet duet rendition of Auld Lang Syne, the prettiest and most heartfelt expression I know of the simple truth that we should remember good times and do our best to keep in touch and be there for one another.

Thanks sincerely for coming along with me on the first year of this experiment in using this project to keep my head during the pandemic and make myself practice writing and editing for the simple enjoyment of trying to get less bad at them. Whether you think my views are spot-on or full of shit, I’m always up for testing and trading opinions about cinema and literature. I hope you see some interesting movies and read some thought-provoking books in the coming year and that we won’t let old acquaintance be forgot.