I saw mommy dissing Santa Claus
Ticket Stubs #6: A dialectical analysis of ‘Christmas with the Kranks’, just to get you in the festive mood.
Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #6.
Christmas with the Kranks
Joe Roth, 2004
The 1960s French Marxist film theorists Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni — how many tautologies can you cram into an opening sentence? — are best known as editors of the definitive cinephile magazine Cahiers du Cinema and for an editorial they authored in October 1969 entitled ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’.
Cahiers was going through its ‘scientific criticism’ phase and Comolli and Narboni volunteered a schema through which to understand the operation of the dominant ideology (i.e. capitalism) in movies. By far the most consequential part of their schema was Category E, which describes ‘films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner’. This tension creates ‘a noticeable gap, a dislocation, between the starting point and the finished product’. For Comolli and Narboni, this indicates that ‘[a]n internal criticism is taking place which cracks the film apart at the seams’. Directors they cite as Category E filmmakers include John Ford, Carl Th. Dreyer and Roberto Rossellini.
This brings us, as discussions of Marxist film theory invariably do, to Christmas with the Kranks, a 2004 comedy about a couple, Nora Krank (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her husband Luther (Tim Allen), who decide to forgo the festive season one year in favour of a romantic cruise. This provokes their neighbours into a psychotic campaign of stalking, intimidation and coercion until the Kranks break down and agree to celebrate the holidays. And this isn’t a black comedy about how suburban conformism crushes individuality. Oh no, we’re supposed to be on the side of the neighbourhood.
The lesson of the movie is that declining to celebrate Christmas is selfish and that if next door want you to buy a tree, erect a huge Frosty the Snowman decoration on your roof, and throw a Christmas Eve soiree, it is your neighbourly duty to fall in line and start passing ‘round the eggnog. Joe Roth thinks he’s remaking A Christmas Carol with a couple standing in for Ebenezer Scrooge when he’s actually remaking The Stepford Wives with the Men’s Association as the good guys.
This is what makes Christmas with the Kranks a bizarrely watchable movie. Hollywood, a reliably liberal town, somehow managed to produce what is essentially propaganda against individuality and in favour of the imposition of community standards and traditions. It is a Category E movie from the other end of the political spectrum, its liberal facade cracking under the pressure of a conservative plot logic.
Joe Roth thinks he’s remaking A Christmas Carol with a couple standing in for Ebenezer Scrooge when he’s actually remaking The Stepford Wives with the Men’s Association as the good guys.
Nora and Luther are contrite by the movie’s end and thankful for the mob whose tactics include haranguing them in restaurants, denouncing them in the local newspaper, and surrounding their home at night with aggressive carollers who pop up at one window after another screeching an accelerando ‘Jingle Bells’. If you’re thinking, why don’t they just call the cops, wait for it: the cops are in on it, too. And all because the Kranks declined to buy a Christmas charity calendar of beefcakes in law enforcement. If this town was a Middle Eastern nation, we’d have invaded it by now.
Christmas with the Kranks is not a good movie. It’s not terribly original; the humour is flat and pat; neither lead is especially likeable; the plot is flaccid; and it’s all just a bit meh. It was released almost twenty years ago but I saw it for the first time maybe five or six Christmases ago, and I thought it was terrible. Then, the following Christmas, I watched it again, and the year after, and the year after that. And the damned thing has grown on me to the extent that watching it is now a holiday tradition, alongside It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and The Bishop’s Wife.
I can’t fully account for why. The supporting cast is way better than the movie deserves: Dan Aykroyd as head of the mob, M. Emmet Walsh as the grouchy geezer across the street, and Felicity Huffman as one of Nora’s girlfriends. Austin Pendleton has a small role as an umbrella salesman who has a cute if totally left-field pay-off at the end. Jamie Lee Curtis gets to do some physical comedy — Nora’s quest for an oversized can of hickory honey ham is a lark — while Tim Allen drops the odd one-liner (upon learning his daughter’s boyfriend is Peruvian: ‘Great, a communist’).
It’s not even a so-bad-it’s-good affair. It’s just so wildly counter to the boomer Hollywood ideology of be-yourself liberalism that you can’t look away, and the near-certainty that this subtext is entirely unintended only makes it more compulsive. This movie lives rent-free in the back of my mind and I’m going to need you to watch it and tell me I’m not crazy.
Oh, and I’ve buried the lead. The screenplay, an adaptation of a John Grisham book, was written by Chris Columbus. Yes, that Chris Columbus. Home Alone and Home Alone 2 Chris Columbus. Mrs Doubtfire Chris Columbus. The first two Harry Potter movies Chris Columbus. Producing a dud screenplay comes easy to a hack but Columbus had to overcome considerable talent to turn in a script like this. It may not be the sort of film Comolli and Narboni had in mind whey they sketched out their classification system half a century ago but Christmas with the Kranks belongs in Category E. If there’s any movie that’s cracked, it’s this one.
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.