By Dan Jackson

“Ba-humbug!”-  Ebenezer Scrooge

I’m a bit of a Scrooge.

When I say this I don’t mean to imply that I am a decrepit old man who shudders at the very idea of the holidays. However, when faced with a world determined to systematically spread holiday cheer to everyone (whether they like it or not), I find it useful to keep a dose of Scrooge’s cynicism handy. With awful Christmas songs blaring from radios as early as November and garish lighting fixtures blinking incessantly through December, it is difficult to stay sane amidst the madness and actually remember what this holiday is actually about: Christmas movies. 

Not Santa and his elves. Not baby Jesus and his wise men. I am talking about the true spirit of Christmas embodied by those tireless cinematic heroes like George Bailey of It’s a Wonderful Life and Ralphie Parker of A Christmas Story. Despite my Scroogish tendencies, I will always have a soft spot in my cold black heart for Christmas movies. As a firm believer in the value and necessity of cultural canons, through the years I have established a Christmas Canon. I won’t list every film that I would consider worthy of the Christmas Canon, but I will provide a quick sampling of some of the major works: It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, Home Alone, and, yes, even Die Hard. The list goes on. 

Though the films in this canon waver in terms of actual merit (it’s impossible to mount a serious critical defense of Home Alone; I’ve tried), they all possess an ample amount of seasonal cheer coupled with a Scrooge-like darkness and dread about the holidays. In particular, It’s a Wonderful Life appears to be nothing more than a lightweight tearjerker, but the terror in James Stewart’s dark, ravaged face is as intense as his performance in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. A Christmas Story may be best remembered for its big comic vignettes (i.e. the pole-licking scene), but Darren McGavin’s performance as the father mixes fear and sadness into the film’s nostalgic sheen. Home Alone is considered a piece of childhood wish-fulfillment, which it is, but the movie also plays on many children’s fears of abandonment while offering a sly critique of upper-class yuppie parents who are so self-centered they don’t even notice they left one of their children behind while speeding off to Europe. The most troublesome for many is Die Hard, a film remembered more for its chaotic action set-pieces than for its Yuletide cheer. The film takes place on Christmas, which does not necessarily place a movie in the canon, but amidst all the explosions and glass-walking lies a movie about family, and isn’t that what this holiday is supposed to be about? Watching these images play out on the television screen, year after year, they begin to feel less like films, more like members of my family. 

While discussing Christmas films with an actual member of my family, my aunt told me that she saw A Christmas Story twice in one day, staying in the theater to experience it a second time. For a child of the 90’s (like myself) it seems odd and slightly disturbing to think that a movie like A Christmas Story was even released. I’d like to think that the movie wasn’t filmed but, instead, was somehow spontaneously birthed from a cultural womb of cable television and holiday cheer, filling a giant, leg-lamp shaped hole in our society. Much like imagining a world without the Internet or microwaves, I struggle to wrap my feeble brain around the idea of a world without A Christmas Story. 

However, this world did exist. In fact, there was a world without any Christmas films at one point.  This may be obvious for some, but because I saw all the canonical Christmas films on VHS or DVD, I struggle with the notion that a good holiday film can actually play in theaters. Up until last month I thought it was impossible. 

Then Arnaud Desplechin proved me wrong. 

Desplechin is a French filmmaker and in many respects he is the last filmmaker one would expect to receive a Christmas classic from. In fact, it is useless to classify his latest project as a mere Christmas film; it is much, much more. Desplechin’s film, titled simply A Christmas Tale, is a dizzying descent into the world of the Vuillard family Christmas, a charming clan consisting of some crazy brothers, a controlling sister, a distant mother, and a doting father. Desplechin uses every cinematic trick at his disposal - New Wave touches like irises and jump cuts, montages set to blaring hip-hop music, speeches spoken to the camera, puppets, a scholarly dose of outside literary references - but while these stylistic detours often feel overwhelming, they never threaten or distract from the film’s story. Instead, these slightly over-the-top elements are essential in showing the inner-workings of an over-the-top-family. 

Though some critics have complained that Desplechin covered much of the same material (with the same actors) in his 2004 film Kings and Queen, the difference here is that A Christmas Tale is more focused and less freewheeling, most likely because Desplechin is constantly counting down the days to Christmas, giving the film a manic urgency.  It’s rare that a film makes you want to simultaneously reach for your copy of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality and hug your dad, but this film does.  This bizarre combination of feelings is enough to put this film in the Christmas Canon; Desplechin’s deft mix of family cruelty, existential dread, and holiday merriment is the perfect combination for both my inner Scrooge and my inner George Bailey.  Ba-humbug, indeed. 

A Christmas Tale and It’s A Wonderful Life are both currently playing at the IFC Center in New York.