On Christmas Movies

There are only two Christmas movies I like.

Well, that's not exactly true. I like Elf and A Christmas Story, some of the Rankin/Bass stuff, etc. But I enjoy those movies the same way I enjoy other movies, regardless of holiday affiliation. What I mean is that there are only two movies I like because they are about Christmas. A lot of movies that brand themselves as "Christmas movies" do so by treating the Christmas holiday as some intangible abstraction that's an entity unto itself—for example, Santa Clause cancelling Christmas in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV movie or the way that "Christmas Spirit" saves the day in Elf. It's fine if people find joy in that, but I don't. When I grasp at it, it becomes a hollow and vague mythology I don't quite understand. People don't seem to like this about me, and I get it; it's no fun when someone's unenthusiastic about your traditions.

Still, the two I'm thinking of are the only ones I've found (with the possible exception of my recent realization that Catch Me If You Can is maybe a stealth Christmas movie) that render the experience I know as Christmas with any sort of fidelity, enough so that they move me to tears every single stupid year. I'm not going to be blowing anyone's mind here: those two movies are 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1946's It's a Wonderful Life.

In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey has dreams. He wants a big suitcase. He wants to see the world. Time after time, he's offered the opportunity to realize those dreams, and time and time again, he chooses to stay home. This comes to a head one Christmas Eve when George—thousands of dollars in debt, still trapped in his falling-to-pieces home in his same small town full of provincial people and dead-end careers—surveys his life in despair and decides to end it.

We of course know how this turns out. But I think it's worth lingering on that moment of despair, because the movie itself does. People remember the movie's uplifting ending, but we sometimes forget this for the first 3/4 of the film, this is the story of an individual's dreams being systematically crushed by his own allegiance to the people he knows. It's a feature-length inquiry into the cost of ambition, and that cost is the human relationships you have in the present; it's also a feature-length inquiry into what it means to decide that cost is too high.

A gentler variation of the same happens in A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which Charlie Brown spends most of the film's 25 minutes reconciling himself to the fact that celebrating Christmas the way others tell him to makes him miserable and the holiday meaningless. He invests in playing out the conventions of the holiday season—decorations and trees and pageants and presents—in much the same way that George Bailey walks through the beats of a small-town domestic life, and both end up finding this path crushingly unsatisfying. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, this is perhaps best exemplified when he takes that twig of a tree, determined to do right by it, only to find it wilted by the weight of the single ornament he hangs. "I've killed it," he cries, followed by the most anguished sigh children's animation has ever produced. "Everything I touch gets ruined." He defers to what people ask of him, and he's given back a cold, quiet despair. "I know I should be happy, but I'm not," Charlie Brown tells Lucy near the movie's beginning; he knows he should be happy because that's the expectation when you are surrounded by friends at a holiday.

But that is life with people: an existence at times overwhelmingly defined by alienation, frustration, and despair. I know this sounds like stylish broodiness, but I mean it in the most sincere way I can muster. There's a shot in It's a Wonderful Life several minutes before George decides to kill himself when, as Mary explains to her husband all the holiday festivities the family has lined up, George grabs his son and hugs him, staring over the boy's shoulder into empty space, and James Stewart's face as he begins to sob shatters me every time; the in-the-moment explanation for his distress is that his uncle and business partner has just lost $8,000, but it's clear that it's not just this financial woe that's passing in front of his eyes—he's thinking of the honeymoon money, college, New York City, and every other time he passed up on what one character calls "the chance of a lifetime," every choice that's brought him to this exact moment, and he's crippled by the thought that he's made a mistake. That the choices he made that brought him his friends and the loving family around him, engaging in fun, kitschy Christmas traditions, have rendered his life meaningless. Unless you've had one of these moments yourself, I don't know that it's possible to know just how real that look is that flashes across James Stewart's face.

Neither of these movies end here, obviously.

The most common interpretation I've heard of when the angel swoops in and shows George what his life would be like if he'd never been born is that it's a celebration of altruism—i.e. affirming that George Bailey has been a good person and that his life has meaning. And the text of the movie bears this out. George is a saint, and the positive effects of his having lived his life the way he did are gigantic. But I don't think it's George seeing the sudden worsening of the quality of life of his family and friends without him that makes George choose life. What truly strikes terror into George's heart in the Pottersville sequence is the fact that nobody knows who he is. His wife screams as he tries to embrace her; his mother sneers "George who?" when he arrives at her door; "This is George Bailey! Don't you know me?" he asks his former employer, Mr. Gower, to which the doddering man confusedly replies, "No." The horror of Pottersville isn't that Bedford Falls has suddenly gotten a bunch of nightclubs and cool movie theaters; it's that George is given a glimpse of what life would be like without any of the human contact that has kept him from realizing his ambitions—in other words, to be alone. And it's Hell.

Likewise, a lot of people latch onto Linus's sermonette detailing the Christmas story as told in the Gospel of Luke as the sort of culminating message of A Charlie Brown Christmas. And that's definitely part of it. The religious significance of the holiday in contrast to the commercial ends to which modern life has twisted it is clearly central to Charles Schulz's thesis on Christmas. But that's not where Charlie Brown's despair resolves. His moment of anguish with the tree, his "I killed it" moment, is after Linus reads the Bible. The movie's resolution comes, as in It's a Wonderful Life, with a supernatural event that leads to an embrace of the worth of being part of a community of people. Charlie Brown's friends encircle the collapsed tree and, after musing that "maybe it just needs a little love," they grab some lights and Linus's blanket and transform the twig into the small but unmistakable form of a lush evergreen fir. Charlie Brown returns, and seeing him, they wish him a Merry Christmas and all together sing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" as a timid smile spreads across Charlie Brown's face.

This is what dissolves Charlie Brown's despair: this group of people who, only moments before, made him so very unhappy. Put another way, to answer Charlie Brown's insistent question, this is what Christmas is all about: neither cultural traditions like trees nor religious ideas like the birth of Christ, at least not in isolation—it's these things linked with the idea of communing with other human beings.

This is what makes Christmas one of the most difficult holidays: it forces the confrontation of the tension between individual fulfillment and communal connection. You may be deeply miserable around people, but it is existentially terrifying to have no one. The only thing worse than being with people is being with nobody. It never feels this way in the moment. It is blessedly tempting to choose isolated independence and personal ambition over the conservative warmth of a community. I want to do what I want to do, and people get in the way of that. Both movies show why exactly this is so appealing: in Wonderful Life, we see the lack of autonomy and existential frustration inherent in human relationships; in Charlie Brown, we see the alienation that comes out of incompatible approaches to life goals. But what makes these movies so quintessentially Christmas is that they don't let their protagonists stay there. They bring George Bailey and Charlie Brown to the idea that even though human connection is alienating and frustrating and restrictive, it is the better way to live. "It is not good for man to be alone," to quote Genesis, and even if the act of not being alone isn't necessarily a path to happiness, it's a path to meaning.

"No man is a failure who has friends," says the angel's final note to George at the finale of It's a Wonderful Life. It's easy to sentimentalize this, but that statement is one of the most hard-won ideas in all of American cinema—the idea that the people you know and love are more important than your own individual ambitions. It's an idea that nearly drives George to suicide. It's an idea I find incredibly difficult to wrangle. People are irritating and taxing; they are weights who make independence difficult; they are mean, and I am mean to them. But they matter. And that's Christmas. Christmas is a rebuke of the individual in favor of the loving collective. I am terrible at acting out this idea, but that's what it is.

Now of course, even being presented with this choice between people and individuals is a privilege, and even among those who have that choice, there are legitimately abusive and harmful communities that individuals should be able to separate themselves from. Christmas is not about an obligation to all communities. And I know that this isn't what Christmas means to everyone else, and that's fine. What I'm describing here is intensely personal to me specifically, and I'm honestly not sure how many peers I have in these ideas. And maybe this post is corny and maudlin and melodramatic. Maybe. But even considering all that, every year, without fail, I end up tearing up at the end of It's a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Being brought face-to-face with the compelling necessity of human communities, despite my most lonesome urges—that's the holiday for me.

Until next time.

100 Years...100 Movies 46-48: It Happened One Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rear Window

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

I said last time that I had to wait for DVDs to trickle in, and trickled they have. Well, one has at least. Still waiting on more for next time, but hey, at least we've got A Streetcar Named Desire!

46. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra)
Now this is a fun one. Watching it today, there's nothing especially groundbreaking about it, and as far as I know, it wasn't all that groundbreaking back in 1934 either. In fact, It Happened One Night is downright conventional. It's plot—entitled lady runs away from her oppressive upper-class lifestyle, along the way meeting a dashing stranger with whom she bickers long enough to fall in love with—is one of the most dogeared sections in the romantic comedy playbook, and the rest of the production follows suit, remaining comfortable within the established rules of the filmmaking game. But innovation be darned! Over and over again, It Happened One Night proves that it doesn't matter how conventional or groundbreaking a movie is so long as it is executed well. The whole film is just such a pleasure to experience. The screenplay is fast and funny, the cinematography is playful, and Gable and Colbert have an infectiously delightful chemistry on screen. They both look like they're having the times of their lives. Also, the film is super sexual, which was a fun surprise for me when I first saw it. Like, sex is everywhere. Given that the film concerns several things that take place over several nights, I'm half convinced that the It in the title must refer to the you-know-what and that One Night is the wedding night at the end. That last shot (i.e. the curtain dropping) is one of the funniest, most sexually forthright (yet somehow understated) moments I've ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood movie from this era. The rest of the film flirts around innuendo admirably, but there's no beating around the bush (so to speak) in that last moment; that falling curtain is as cheekily unsubtle as a movie can get short of a flashing "gratuitous sex scene" marquee a la Wayne's World. Then again, maybe my surprise has more to do with my ignorance of cinematic history than anything. Wikipedia informs me that It Happened One Night was one of the last rom-coms produced in pre-Code Hollywood. So maybe some of you more film-literate readers can tell me if this film is an anomaly or not.

47. *A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, Elia Kazan)
Blanche DuBois is an impressive feat of a character. On the one hand, she's a nearly intolerable tangle of contradictions, someone who's so caught up with appearances and her elitist ideas of what makes human beings worth her attention that it's often a relief when she exits a scene. The fact that she spends at least half the plot lying through her teeth and being just generally phony makes her presence all the more unbearable. There are several characters vying for contempt in A Streetcar Named Desire, but, for all of Stanley's frightening violence, Blanche is by far the most grating. This is true in both the play and movie adaptation (which is impressively faithful to the play while somehow also avoiding feeling like a play itself—lookin' at you, The Philadelphia Story). And yet, on the other hand, the movie somehow avoids viewing Blanche with contempt. Instead, the film (and, by extension, we as an audience) feels compassion for the poor woman. There's no schmaltzy heart-tugging or anything, but just the right amount of humanity in the depiction of her broken neuroses. If I had to pinpoint the source of this humanity, I'd have to split the credit three ways among Tennessee Williams's script, Vivian Leigh's performance, and the cinematography. Lines like "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers" land like bombs, and Leigh's acting is tinged with just enough desperateness to color Blanche with this compellingly primal fear of disappearing into the shadows of society. And speaking of shadows, the cinematography is particularly lush in its representation of Blanche, always cross-cutting her figure with both blinding light and lush darkness, and I'll be darned if you can film someone with such sensitivity without giving rise to at least a little feeling for the person. I've spent this whole post talking about Blanche, which is unfortunate, given the excellence of the rest of the movie, too. I'll close by posing this mostly irrelevant question: do I detect shades of Marlon Brando's Stanley fifty years later in James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano? You Sopranos fans out there let me know!

48. Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
One of the great things about Rear Window (and there are a lot of them) is that it takes a high-concept premise and turns it into something that feels a lot bigger than that premise would seem to allow, something of intellectual and even philosophical depth. This is a particular strength of Alfred Hitchcock, and he does it time and time again, perhaps to the most acclaim in Vertigo but also to lesser degrees in Psycho, Suspicion, Rebecca, and any number of his other films. With Rear Window, we have the mostly pulpy premise of a man who is confined to his room by an injury witnesses his neighbor commit what looks like murder. It's a fun narrative hook, and the plot plays out pretty much in the same fun, pulpy vein. There are great visceral thrills to be had in Rear Window, and if thrilling were all that the film was up to, it would be a resounding success. But, as is the case with Psycho, Vertigo, et al., these thrills are delivered through Hitchcock's direction, and what direction it is! Without Hitchcock, it's a fun movie. With Hitchcock, it's a movie about existentialism, about psychosexual tension and voyeurism, about the unreliability of perspective, about the mysterious ways in which the world develops in leaps and bounds when we aren't there to see it. A lot of those things are hinted at in the screenplay, but it's the direction that really brings the themes to full bloom. I'd also like to note that while Rear Window is definitely about ideas, it never ceases to be great entertainment, either. If you don't care about the ideas, that's totally fine; there's plenty else to enjoy. Hitchcock was a master of this type of two-track cinema, where the film is both accessible and intellectual while being neither dumb nor esoteric (or esoterically dumb, for that matter). The only contemporary director I can think of who consistently manages this balance even close to as well as Hitchcock did is Christopher Nolan, and, c'mon, even he can't hold a candle to ol' Alfred.

As always, it's great to hear what y'all think about the stuff I ramble about here. Until next time!

If you feel so inclined, you can read the previous post in the series, #s 43-45, here.
Update: The next post, #s 49-51, is up right here.

100 Years...100 Movies 25-27: To Kill a Mockingbird, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, High Noon

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

More movies. Y'all know the drill.

25. *To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Robert Mulligan)
I watched To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time just a few days before deciding to embark on this blog series, so what the heck, I'll give it the ol' first-time asterisk. And you know, I pretty much loved it. The story of To Kill a Mockingbird (both here and in the original Harper Lee novel) is simple enough that it should be easy to out-think. I've seen some critics try: the plot is naive, the morals are too neat, the racism is too clean, the black characters are thinly drawn despite being key in one of the focal threads, that mockingbird metaphor is, well, that mockingbird metaphor, and if we're talking about the movie specifically, the direction is kind of flat and unremarkable. So on and so on. I understand what they're saying, but try as I might, the sheer magnitude of the work's humanity just bowls over any reservations. There's an uncondescending sincerity about To Kill a Mockingbird that makes the film feel tender and real in a way that is super rare in movies. Plus, I think those criticisms are overlooking how the story is couched entirely in the perspective of an elementary-school-aged child. Our glimpses of the courtroom come from an eight-ish-year-old girl peering in through the door window and over the balcony-seat railings. Scout is a girl who, even at the film's end, is still in the process of coming of age, so the bits of the adult world that trickle down into her realm of understanding are of course a little simple. That the directing is so indistinct (the critics are right about that—Mulligan could sure learn some lessons from E.T. on how to shoot a child's POV) does kind of obscure this perspective, but it's a perspective nonetheless. I've been weirdly backhanded in my compliments in this response, so let me end on a note of strong positivity: this movie is beautiful, not in a flashy way but in an unpretentious way that makes the outgrowth of tragedy from both human depravity and decency in the film's final act all the more profound. High praise from this reviewer.

26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939, Frank Capra)
This is one of those movies that it's been a long time since I've seen. Like, a really long time; think family movie night ten-to-fifteen years ago. And yet, for all that distance between me now and my viewing of this movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington remains vivid in my memory, with little of the afterimage or detail distortion that sometimes plagues my movie watching even now. Some of that memorial vividness probably has to do with the fact that I watched way fewer movies back when I was in middle school than I do now, thus making my head less crowded with movies to blur together. But I'd guess the main reason it's stuck with me is the sheer winsomeness of the picture combined with the heft of its subject matter. Jimmy Stewart is charming as ever, but all that charm might come off as kind of smarmy on the movie's part if his performance weren't paired with such a bleak picture of our nation's politics. Not that it's a bleak movie; we're dealing with Frank Capra here. But it's a movie that is uncommonly successful at mixing optimism for the promise of our political system with cynicism at the reality of how things play out. I think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is plenty aware of the fairy-tale-esque "man against the odds" plot that takes the titular Mr. Smith from small-town bumpkin to political white knight—those scenes with Mr. Smith first laying eyes on the dazzling monuments in Washington, D.C., are just a tad too rose-colored (especially when compared to the actual corruption in the movie's D.C.) to be read as completely sincere. Yet the film also seems to be saying that in some iteration of our government's reality, this plot could happen, if we all somehow did the right thing. It's a tricky line to walk, to be both cynical and optimistic, but Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is proof that when pulled off, it's a powerful combination.

27. High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)
Can one lousy song ruin an entire movie? Well, not really. I mean, I still like High Noon and everything. But "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'" sure does try its darnedest to spoil the whole thing. I mean, for crying out loud, what is the deal with "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'"?? First of all, it's dull as already-dried paint. I like old country music, but "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'" apparently found the exception to that rule. Second of all, the lyrics are just so heavy-handed. Do we really need a song that not only explicitly states the major and minor themes of the film but also recounts specific incidents from the film as evidence? I don't think so. Imagine if Spider-Man 2 (we're talking the Sam Raimi one, because they didn't make any more Spidey movies after that one, right?) had integrated the cartoon theme song into the most dramatic sections of its score instead of just making it a one-off joke in middle. That would be awful and cheesy and undercut a lot of the tension, right? High Noon, ladies and gentlemen. Listen, I get it that the technicalities of "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'" are pretty cool; the movie's score was pretty innovative in its seamless use of both mood music and a pop song. And look, High Noon is a great movie otherwise, a deceptively simple one-act drama with layers and layers of metaphorical meaning. But that song, y'all.

It's weird, but the hardest part of this series has turned out to be writing these stupid introductions/conclusions to bookend my responses to the movies. So, I'm sorry if the housekeeping perfunctoriness of these bits is getting lame. Really, though, I'm running out of ways to say "Here are three movies and my thoughts on them. See ya!" So, well... yeah. Let me know what you think about these movies. Until next time!

If you fancy a look back, you can read the previous post in the series, #s 22-24, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next post, #s 28-30, here.

100 Years...100 Movies 19-21: On the Waterfront, It's a Wonderful Life, Chinatown

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

As promised last time, this post is full of movies I've already seen: one that I'm intimately familiar with and two others that I know a little less thoroughly. It'll be obvious in the write-ups which is which. And now here we go—hold on to your butts.

19. On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan)
First of all, how cool is that poster? There are plenty of sweet movie posters out there, but this one really takes the cake, especially when compared to the usually pretty but less dynamic posters from other movies of the era. Another thing about that poster: doesn't it kind of look like a propaganda piece? The evil unions are here to crush the American Individual with a red fist of Communism! Thankfully, the movie isn't like that at all, although it's notable for being one of the few politically conservative "message" movies that I think is legitimately great. A question that plagues me at least monthly: why are there so few talented artists who are politically conservative? Setting aside demographic quandaries for now, though, this movie is a triumph of moral storytelling, and a rousing thriller/character piece as well. Regardless of how you swing politically, this movie has a way of winning you over with its likable characters, who have a real Springsteen-esque desperation to them. Oh yeah, and I've read that Marlon Brando basically re-wrote the acting book with his method performance in this movie. I don't know enough about acting to confirm or deny, but dang, he sure is riveting here.

20. It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
I have seen this movie so many freaking times. Like, at least once a year since I was around five, and during several of those years, the number of viewings far surpassed just once. And unlike Star Wars or Toy Story (the two distant runners up for most-seen film on this list), most of those viewings were forced upon me by my parents, who decided to make a tradition of rounding up the family every Christmas to watch a movie about a man whose life is so calculatedly against him that he considers committing suicide even though he's married to Donna Reed. So, needless to say, my relationship with this movie has been quite the tumultuous one. As of right now, though, I've pretty much come full-circle on my feelings regarding the films, from my adoration of it as a youngster, to my jaded, smarter-than-thou teenaged years of hating it (the money I would pay to go back in time and punch the past me in the face), to now, my early twenties, when I realize that hey, it's a pretty great movie after all. A lot of ink has been spilled analyzing the many, many strengths of It's a Wonderful Life, so rather than being comprehensive, I'm going to wax specific in what's left of this response. One strength I noticed for the first time in my most recent viewing of the film is just how natural and loose everything feels. Not really the story so much (I mean, we're dealing with talking galaxy angels here), but the acting and structure of the individual scenes feel so alive and uncalculated, in a way that seems so lively when compared to the relative staginess of most films of the era. Just look at any of the several scenes that takes place in a crowded environment: characters meander drunkenly in and out of the shot, actors have to yell at one another to be heard over the ambient noise, snippets of dialogue come from every which direction, overlap, not one of them aimed at the microphone. Capra allows the chaos of human interaction to slip into these scenes, and it's marvelous. The same goes for the acting, especially of Jimmy Stewart, who makes his role feel so lived-in by inhabiting perfectly the natural choreography of someone's interactions with people he knows very well. The most convincing argument for this life being wonderful comes not from the magical fable at the film's end but rather in the film's depiction of the beautiful, uncontrollable vibrancy of everyday human existence. It's sentiment done exactly right.

21. Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
I've only seen Chinatown once, and I'm not sure that I got it. Like, don't get me wrong, I see exactly what everyone is talking about when they praise its screenplay and especially the acting and all that. Jack Nicholson has never been better, and the only other role I can think of in which Faye Dunaway's topped hers here is her Oscar-winning television mogul part in Network. The cinematography and direction are uniformly excellent, too, though I do prefer Polanski's tense, showier stuff like Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby. Nevertheless, it's a fantastically put-together movie, and I'm not here to contest that. When I say I didn't "get" Chinatown, I mean that I had a hard time following the plot, which is not only multi-layered but also understated. And there you have one of my most embarrassing characteristics as a movie-watcher (or book-reader or television-viewer): I'm often terrible at keeping up with plotting. I love a good story, but if there's not a certain amount of hand-holding, exposition, and/or a clear emotional through-line, you've lost me. Consequently, film noir and its modern offspring (which includes Chinatown) are often challenging viewing experiences for me. Given enough time and re-watches, I can usually sort everything out, but that's not a courtesy I've allowed Chinatown. So I'm left admiring the film a good deal without really connecting with or even understanding it. I'm ashamed.

Now I'm more than one fifth of the way through the list! Woot woot! Slightly less iconic films to come, though nothing too shocking. Feel free to let me know whatever thoughts you guys have so far. It's always great to hear from the readership. Until next time!

You can read the previous post in the series, #s 16-18, here.
Update: Read on to the next post, 22-24, here.