What makes a film a holiday classic? I had plenty of time to contemplate this while snoozing my way through the current, disposable Christmas with the Kranks.
My favourites, I realized, are a standard bunch: It's a Wonderful Life, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, The Ref, A Christmas Carol (Alastair Sim version), A Charlie Brown Christmas. But they have one thing in common that I think is important: doubt. Each of them lives for a time in the shadows, unlit by all that holiday twinkling.
Their characters endure long stretches of genuine discomfort -- i.e., they're alive. The inescapable truth of Wonderful Life is that people's realities are usually smaller and duller than their dreams. In The Grinch, it's that some folks just don't like to see other folks be happy. In The Ref, it's that marriages can turn mean; in A Christmas Carol, that children get sick and die; and in Charlie Brown, that people are often lonely and unpopular for no apparent reason. That's pretty bracing stuff.
And though the Christmas spirit touches each character, a big part of what makes the improvements meaningful is that they're temporary, and will vanish like snowflakes. Jimmy Stewart will get frustrated again; Tiny Tim will die sooner than he should, even with an extra helping of goose. These films teach us that happiness comes not in long stretches, but in small moments, and is truly meaningful precisely because it's fleeting.
Ironically, somewhere deep within Kranks is a movie that could have been on that list. The plot as it stands: When their saintly daughter joins the Peace Corps, Mr. and Mrs. Well-Off Midwestern (Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen) decide to skip Christmas -- no decorating, partying, shopping, or gift-giving -- and take a Caribbean cruise instead, incurring the wrath of their hopped-up-on-the-holidays neighbours. But lo, when their daughter pops home to surprise them, everyone forgets their enmity and pulls together to do all the decorating, et al. in a single, madcap day, thus giving the economy -- er, the Christmas spirit -- its due. Big hugs and teary smiles all around.
The plot as I'd like to see it would be considerably darker. I wish the Kranks would decide not to celebrate Christmas simply because they can't stand how hideously overhyped and dictated it has become. I wish they had said, "Let's stop participating in a socio-economic junta in which Christmas decorations appear in supermarkets the day after Halloween, radio stations begin playing wall-to-wall holiday music in mid-November, chain stores try to turn outdoor lights into fashions that must be updated every season, professional tree trimmers in Manhattan (according to last Sunday's New York Times) charge $3,500 (U.S.) to decorate a single spruce, and schools make a show of accepting every religion but refuse to tolerate those who have none."
Then there could have been excellent black comedy in how the Kranks' fascistic neighbours, led by Dan Aykroyd, physically force them to wear appliquéd sweaters, put a snowman on their roof and coat every horizontal and vertical surface in garish sparkle. Then the stacks of plastic storage containers full of balls and stars that crowd the Kranks' living room could be played not for laughs, but for horror-movie chills -- forced Christmas overdecoration as metaphor for an America in which certain well-organized loudmouths have begun dealing with life's uncertainties by dictating how everyone should behave and talk and even think, resulting in not only a surfeit of holiday treacle, but in a world power too immature about sex to educate teenagers about it, too afraid of boycotts to show Saving Private Ryan on television, and so narrow-minded that it turns France into the enemy, makes "intellectual" a dirty word, and believes happiness is a right that can be bought at Wal-Mart on sale.
A few popular films have evoked Christmas for its darkness: Tim Burton set Batman Returns in a Gotham City made garish by too much holiday décor; it could have been subtitled, The Nightmare of Christmas. It's no accident that Alan Rickman's band of sneering Europeans in Die Hard attacks during an office Christmas party. And in Blackadder's Christmas Carol, a most un-treacly 1988 British telefilm starring Rowan Atkinson and written by Richard Curtis ( Love Actually), Ebenezer Blackadder starts out pleasant and turns cruel only after seeing visions of his ancestors and descendants.
One film this season, however, captures what I consider the true spirit of Christmas without ever mentioning the word, and sums up everything I'm trying to say about what makes holiday fare meaningful and memorable. In a beautifully heartbreaking scene near the end of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaire orphans return to the charred ruins of their former mansion, and for just a moment, see it whole again -- see home.
Though the vision evaporates as quickly as it appeared, the feeling we are left with is hope.
"The Baudelaire children knew there was always something," goes the voice-over, "something to invent, to read, or to bite, something to do to make a sanctuary, no matter how small." The Kranks, buried beneath all their tinsel, should be so blessed.
Johanna Schneller