18: Christmas Movies
From the Soul Telegram: Movies & Meaning Archives…
Gareth Higgins on CHRISTMAS MOVIES
Toward the end of The Shop around the Corner (1942, above; caption credit to A Sharper Focus), Ernst Lubitsch’s almost overwhelmingly charming treatment of loss and love at Christmastime, two men have a brief conversation that I can’t stop thinking about, years after first seeing the movie. Mr. Matuschek, played by Frank Morgan - already perennially associated with Christmas for his role as the Wizard of Oz - discovers that new junior employee Rudy (Charles Smith) has nowhere to be on Christmas Eve except alone in his room. The evolving delight that strikes Mr. Matuschek as he realizes that he now has someone with whom to share a meal on this, as they say most holy night, is palpable. Not just for him. Over the past hour or so we’ve watched him introduced as a gregarious father figure to his staff, a put-upon husband, a mistaken judger of persons, and a survivor of a suicide attempt. It’s his first Christmas alone in who knows how many years, he’s just gotten out of hospital, and audience affection for Mr. Matuschek is so high that we may feel that we actually need him to succeed. Oh! Mr. Matuschek! Let’s have a win! He has worked his way around the employees he knows, each of whom has something else to do that night; so he stands outside the store, waiting for a cab to take him to a solitary dinner and later an empty apartment. Thank God for Rudy! Nowhere to go, and he likes roast goose too! It’s a perfect little miracle of a cinematic moment - and it isn’t the end yet!
The Shop Around the Corner is such an unusual film, not only because it’s a comedy that more than dips its toes in despair, but also that its moment of greatest emotional catharsis actually comes before the two leads finally kiss, and that cathartic moment doesn’t just ignore the protagonists, but features two characters one of whom we met only a minute or two earlier. Lubitsch’s framing of the inside of a small one-room department store also manages to make it look more complex and spacious - the film never feels stagey, but simply lived-in. It’s also, I daresay, the best Christmas film James Stewart ever made. I know, I know, I know. The other one is archetypally brilliant, and so under our skin from repeated viewing that it’s hard to criticize It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). But it’s not a criticism of the one to say that the other may be better; or at least richer and more complex.
Both It’s a Wonderful Life and The Shop Around the Corner take pain seriously, which is part of what makes them not just great Christmas movies, but great movies per se. They recognize that magic doesn’t feel as magical if it’s just the way things always are. That an ordeal is necessary for a deliverance to be felt. In this sense they mirror the essential meaning of Christmas - buried in the secular world by consumerism, and even in many Christian traditions by dogma about heaven-when-you-die conversionism or a sanitized story about a woman in a perfectly laundered light blue tunic having a baby painlessly on recently swept straw. Yet Jesus came into a world that didn’t want him; his parents suffered community humiliation, refugee exile and the threat of murder to keep him; he lived for love, and was persecuted and killed by people like us. Now, people like us also are capable of embodying his ideals, people like us are also invited to follow him, and the way to step into the tradition he initiated is the same as the way to step into any path of true wisdom: to devote yourself to Love, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
Joy to the world: we don’t have to live separated anymore; exiled neither from our fellow humans, nor the earth, nor God. An uncapturable essence of light. All suffering is gathered up in the scene marked by dirty straw and dependable tunic. Kings bow. The baby’s cry tears open the fabric of the universe and says This is how it will be. You will never be further from Love than you are from your own breath. Your experience of this Truth will depend on your remembering to live into it. Pain is inevitable. Annihilation is not.
So Mr. Matuschek, and George Bailey, and all the characters in every authentic Christmas movie who undergo an ordeal before claiming their gift actually do embody the true meaning of Christmas: pathos unto love.
What are Christmas movies for? They’re for magic, but best served after a struggle. They’re for believing things could be different, but best revealed after seeing the dead-ends that the old ways have led us to. They’re for connection with others, most warmly felt when it has been withheld for a time. They’re for reminding us of the possibility of innocence, not Nativity-naivety, but a second childhood, born again into a beginner’s mind.
And they’re about changing our ways - most literally in the form of A Christmas Carol, of course. There’s an argument, filmed as The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017), that we owe much of the US/Western cultural forms of the season to the Scrooge story. (And Santa looks a lot different today because of a 1931 Coca-Cola advertising campaign, but that’s another story.) At any rate, whether or not we owe more of our December traditions to the bleak streets of Victorian London than an ancient Palestinian stable and flight into Egypt, for me, the Scrooge tale beautifully illustrates the essence of Christmas, and I try to watch at least a couple of versions of the story every year. (They’ve been making cinematic adaptations of A Christmas Carol at least since 1901, so there are a lot to choose from…)
Among the best are the musical version with Albert Finney, Scrooge (1970), the delirious Bill Murray comedy, Scrooged (1988), the Jim Carrey-Robert Zemeckis animated version of A Christmas Carol (2009), Simon Callow’s one man tour-de-force from 2018, and the 2019 TV version with Guy Pearce, which goes further into Scrooge’s cruelty than any previous version. But gloriously ahead of them all is The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), a rare example of a production originally intended as a TV movie whose pedigree grew to the point where it was decided to make it for cinema instead. What works best about that version is that Michael Caine plays it entirely straight; the color and verve of the Muppets seems even more real in the face of a serious actor being seriously good. As with Albert Finney, Caine’s Scrooge is believably selfish, and twisted against the light; and these are the two versions of A Christmas Carol in which the protagonist’s repentance seems most credible.
I think we love A Christmas Carol partly because we see ourselves in Scrooge, or at least our most unredeemed parts; we feel pain for Tiny Tim’s powerlessness, to be sure, and solidarity with Bob Cratchit’s struggle against the system. But if we’re really honest, deep down we know we are a little more like Scrooge than we want to admit. I always feel inspired to be a better person when I see the story told once more. There was a time when I thought to advocate watching Christmas movies at other times of year, because the magic of transformation seems more possible when I’m watching a Christmas movie. Or at least the magic of emulating a jerk who decides not to be a jerk anymore. But I’ve changed my mind recently, because I think seasons matter - just as the winter gives way to spring, and some things are more available in the fall than the summer, we’d become inured to its meaning if Christmas happened every day. There is the yearning, and the hoping, and the conception and gestation, the pain of labor, the birthing and stumbling into the light. There is the nurturing and the growing and the becoming. There is the gratitude for life that is more truly possible in the light of knowing it is always changing, if not ending.
The Dalai Lama is said to have noted that one thing we could do to make the world a better place is to go to sleep when it’s dark, and to wake up when it’s light. I think this principle applies to seasons, to “treats”, to the rhythm of the day and the week and the month and the year and a whole life too. What are Christmas movies for? All that I’ve said above - the magic and the regret, the community and the gratitude, the repentance and redemption, but they're also there to remind us that we live in time, and that if we don’t pause to notice it, it will pass us by. So whatever you’re doing this week and next, if you need a bit of help to connect with the spirit of interruption and redemption, perhaps one from the list below will serve. We’d also love to hear from you about your favorite Christmas movies - let us know!
My Favorite Christmas Movies
10: Joyeux Noël
9: All is Bright
8: The Snowman
7: Scrooge
6: Scrooged
5: Fanny & Alexander
4: The Night of the Hunter
3: The Apartment
2: The Shop Around the Corner
1: The Muppet Christmas Carol
Kathleen Norris on LOVE ACTUALLY - OR NOT?
While some insist that the original Die Hard with Bruce Willis — but to my mind, starring Alan Rickman - is the best Christmas movie ever, I believe that it’s another film, one that happily also features Alan Rickman. Love Actually (2003, written and directed by Richard Curtis) may deserve the title because it so handily reflects our confused and contradictory feelings about Christmas.
Watching the film can feel like a holiday dinner with family, when you realize that while you love these people, there’s a good reason why you get together only once a year. A Christmastide viewing of Love Actually is unlikely to unearth one relative who detests the film from start to finish, and another who loves every part of it. The scenes in the film that you love others will find cringe-worthy, and vice versa. One odd thing about the movie is that my idea about what works beautifully and what doesn’t changes every time I see it.
I find two things consistently wonderful: Bill Nighy’s sly, over-the-top performance as a washed-up pop musician and former heroin addict, especially when he advises a young television audience not to buy drugs — just become a rock star and get them for free. On another plane altogether, Emma Thompson has a gripping scene as a devoted wife and mother who’s discovered that her husband has betrayed her. She doesn’t know if he’s having a full-blown affair, only that he’s purchased an expensive necklace for another woman. And she has to pretend that all is well, getting him and their children out the door for their school Christmas pageant. Thompson has commented in interviews that out of all her films this scene is the one strangers will tell her is something that moved them deeply, or resonated with their own experience of betrayal.
Love, Actually demonstrates how a director’s good intentions can work for both good and ill in the finished product. Richard Curtis was inspired by all the messages of love sent by desperate people during the 9/11 attacks in America. And to demonstrate that love does in fact surround us he shows people of all ages and races hugging each other in the arrivals section at Heathrow airport. But in working with such an overpowering emotion as love he must also show that it is messy and demanding. Parental love, sibling love, lust masquerading as love, the grieving love for a dead partner, unrequited love, all have their turns in his film. Some sections soar, and others fall flat.
I wonder if with such an uneven film as Love Actually the context in which you first view it matters a great deal. I first saw it when I could gladly allow my critical thinking to take a break. Having no idea that the film had a Christmas theme, I rented the DVD for a special Christmas Eve with my younger sister Rebecca. She then lived in a group home with several other women who like her, had mental and physical issues that made it impossible for them to live with their families or on their own. My family included Becky in all our holiday and birthday gatherings, and also regular excursions to cinemas, as Becky loved movies.
Over time, due to parents aging and family members moving away, we had fewer of those gatherings. While I knew the group home was the best place for my sister, I didn’t want her to spend Christmas Eve there. I made arrangements for her to come to my apartment in a HandiVan, so we could walk to a Christmas Eve service at my church and afterwards she would spend the night.
This meant making sure we had all her medications on hand, and a also a pad for the bed as all the excitement would be likely to make her incontinent. Becky was bi-polar, and my family had learned when she was a child that Christmas made her both weepy and hyper. Those extreme reactions did not diminish with age, but hoping for the best, I promised Becky pizza, popcorn and movies. We watched Love Actually and when it ended Becky seemed overwhelmed but happy. The film had given her everything she wanted: strong doses of humor, sadness, and above all, romance. She declared it the best movie she’d ever seen, and that’s good enough for me.
A more recent film on a Christmas theme is The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017, directed by Bharat Nalluri, written by Susan Coyne). It tells the story of how Charles Dickens (played zestfully by Dan Stevens) came to write his beloved Christmas story at a difficult time in his life, after three previous books had been commercial failures.
Dickens’ desperation is made palpable, as is the way he eats up all the odds and ends that fuel his inspiration and eventually coalesce — a name on a tombstone, the chains around a solicitor’s safe, a man muttering, “Humbug!”and a folk tale told by an Irish maid about the dead visiting the living on Christmas Eve. The film does justice to the story’s original title: A Christmas Carol. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, and we learn that some of the ghosts Dickens has to face are from his own past, when he was forced into grueling child labor by his father’s bankruptcy. Reconciliation and healing are part of any good Christmas story, and the Scrooge character, subtly rendered by Christopher Plummer, challenges Dickens to contend with his own hardness of heart towards his charming but feckless father, portrayed by the always brilliant Jonathan Pryce.
Any writer will laugh over the way Dickens suffers constant interruptions just as his work is flowing well. I particularly enjoyed the way his characters appear in his room to spar with him over their portrayal. In the short documentary accompanying the DVD the director asserts that A Christmas Carol forever changed the way people in the Western world celebrate Christmas, and I believe he’s right: not only was the book an immediate best-seller in 1853, its message of love and compassion hit home, and charitable donations in England that year soared to unforeseen levels.
Love Actually is available for rent on a variety of sites, including Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, and GooglePlay, and Netflix DVD. The Man Who Invented Christmas is available for rent on these sites. In addition it may be streamed on Hulu.