Staff Inquiry: A Guide To Non-Christmas Christmas Cinema

Christmastime. Is Here. ‘Tis the season of light and gift-giving, but also of nostalgia and tired holiday classics (I imagine that this is the one time of year many of you find the need to break out the VCR). The Christmas canon is both firmly established yet endlessly fluid, with a new crop of films hoping to join its ranks at the end of every year.

This year, Film Inquiry put their collective egg noggins together to help you eschew that canon, and maybe start a new one altogether: the non-Christmas Christmas film. These films, though set during Christmastime, have little to do with Santa Claus or Charles Dickens. They use the holiday and its signifiers as a iconographic shorthand to either convey something of emotional substance to the viewer, or ironically, to comment upon the holiday itself.

So if you just cant stand another Christmas with Tim Allen, then please allow us to recommend some films that are both of quality and have only slightly been cut with holiday cheer.

Alex Lines – The Silent Partner (1978)

Dir. Daryl Duke

The Silent Partner is a really terrific underrated bank heist film, starring cult favourite Elliot Gould and eventual Oscar winner Christopher Plummer. Directed by Daryl Duke, a small-time Canadian director who didn’t direct many films outside of this, The Silent Partner is a tense, smart little bank heist film which has a great original premise. A lowly bank teller, Miles Cullen (the always interesting Elliot Gould) finds out that his bank is about to be robbed due to a discarded note, so he hatches a plan. He will take a bunch of money for himself, so when the robber comes and takes the remaining cash, Cullen will state that all the money was taken by the robber and he will get away scott-free. When the robbery goes down and the robber, Harry (a younger Christopher Plummer) realizes that Cullen has screwed him over cash-wise, he decides to stalk and track him down, whilst Cullen enjoys his newly-acquired wealth with his co-worker Julie (Susannah York).

As the film takes place around the holiday season, the initial robbery by Harry is performed with him in a Santa costume, where he rushes past a group of excited children to rob the bank. The image of a gun-wielding Santa demanding money at a bank is an arresting visual from the start, but Duke builds upon this, creating a tense robbery sequence where two robberies are going down at the same time – Cullen’s and Harry’s, with both parties playing with each other that will spark an on-going cat and mouse game, which will drive the rest of the narrative. The interesting juxtaposition of commercialized Christmas entertainment and gritty 1970s crime cinema makes for a great Christmas scene in a non-traditional Christmas-set film.

Jacqui Griffin – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Dir. Shane Black

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer and directed and written by Shane Black, is a Christmas adjacent neo-noir and a favourite among many of us here at Film Inquiry. It’s truly a great film, and an excellent example of modern noir. If you haven’t yet seen it, may I suggest sitting down for that this year instead of It’s A Wonderful Life yet again. However, despite the entire film taking place during the holiday season, only one scene directly ties into Christmas, and that scene is the LA party where Harry (RDJ) meets up with Harmony (Michelle Monaghan) to go over some particulars in the case they’re working.

The reasons I love this scene are twofold. First, RDJ plays his character wacked out on Demerol so perfectly, it’s almost like he has some experience in the matter… second, the party is WEIRD in a way that only Los Angeles can possibly be. These are the exact kinds of parties a struggling actress like Harmony would get hired to work and be ogled by bizarre Hollywood personalities nobody has ever heard of but who somehow know everyone. These are the parties I remember being at when I lived in Los Angeles. The girl dressed as a half human-half reindeer? I have seen that type of weird before. I have felt that strange mix of terror and intrigue when you pass through a dimly lit corridor into a large room full of partially dressed people doing whatever they can to “make it”.

And that’s what I love about Christmas in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. They “LA” Christmas to the extreme and hit every nail directly on the head. The movie is all about dealing with false identities and deception and the fakeness of Hollywood, so I think it’s great that they chose to showcase Christmas in the exact same way. Harry’s amusement mixed with confusion is the only response I think sane people have when confronted with these “art” parties. And until I throw my own weird art/therapy/terrorfest party (which could honestly be any day now), I reserve the right to judge.

Tyler George – Rob the Mob (2014)

Dir. Raymond De Felitta

Rob the Mob is a gangster flick that depicts the true story of a couple whose fate ended on Christmas Eve. In 1992, Thomas and Rosemary Uva (played by Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda), a hopelessly romantic couple with a criminal history, notoriously held-up the most dangerous crime families in New York. The couple adopted the moniker Bonnie and Clyde, and the movie makes a few labored efforts to parallel Arthur Penn’s 1967 masterpiece.

The performances of Michael Pitt and Andy Garcia are the movie’s strength, while Ray Romano seems out of place and adds to the tonal confusion of the movie. I interpret the mixed tones as an effort to achieve something like what Penn did; but without Gene Hackman or a consistent style, the movie oscillates wildly between a Food Network Italian cooking show and a gritty, street-level view of crime and poverty. Early in the film, Tommy and Rosie are crack smoking petty criminals, and Michael Pitt’s eyes somehow convince me that he is no stranger to the white pony.

While the movie is largely centered on the question of whether stealing from criminals is heroic, the Christmas theme appears late in the movie – a few lights on the streets let us know that the holiday is approaching. But the movie also takes advantage of New York City’s iconic relationship to the holiday. In a celebratory mood after their successful heists and the resulting media publicity, Tommy and Rosie go ice-skating at the famous Rockefeller Center ice rink. There really isn’t a city more Christmasy than NYC, where Santa conventions are real, 34th Street is not just a movie, and the imported, 75-foot tree is taller than any of the buildings where I live. So it makes some sense that a film that ends on Christmas Eve would further sentimentalize its already tragic story by incorporating these merry tropes.

In the movie’s final scene, the couple’s inevitable assassination by not-so-mysterious forces gets a slow-motion treatment that may vaguely remind viewers of Bonnie and Clyde’s famous death scene. Instead of blood, the treatment of the not-so-distant, real-life deaths of Tommy and Rosie is dramatized with an uninspired shower of glass caused by an assassin’s gunfire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omarau-p0Yo&feature=youtu.be&t=3m1s

Dave Fontana – In Bruges (2008)

Dir. Martin McDonagh

Directed by Martin McDonagh, In Bruges is a movie with many contradictory elements. The film is about two assassins named Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken Daley (Brendan Gleeson), who are sent to hide out in Bruges, Belgium after an assassination gone wrong. While there, the two engage in larceny, recreational drug use, and also get involved in a series of violent acts; all aspects that seem wildly out of place in a Christmas movie.

What makes In Bruges a Christmas film, then, initially just seems coincidental. Ray and Ken just so happen to get sent to Bruges around the same time as the Christmas season, so you are able to see the city dressed up in the usual holiday lights and cheer. But, as they are sent there for a very grave reason, which only worsens upon arrival, the city does not seem so bright after all. To Ray, it is the very definition of hell. So, the idea of being there during Christmas could also be nothing more than a further pandering of positivity in Ray’s otherwise desolate world. Such a contradictory theme is present in much of the film, which treats subjects as dark as suicide or murder with an almost surreal sense of humor.  

The film’s events also take place during Christmas to show that, no matter what is happening in your own life, the world still goes on normally without you. For that reason, despite how inconceivably awful things could get, maybe life is just worth living after all. To have such a strong message, and in a film so wonderfully entertaining as In Bruges, makes this an absolute must-see for the holidays. 

Arlin Golden – Beat Street (1984)

Dir. Stan Lathan

Growing up in a Jewish family, my relationship to Christmas is distant and latent; I only started celebrating in recent years as a result of living with my gentile significant other. Therefore, I don’t have a lot of established associations or nostalgia attached to its celebration, though I have become a sucker for the holiday. Consequently, the one piece of media I most associate with Christmas comes not from Rankin & Bass or Frank Capra, but people more in line with my tastes when I discovered the joys of the season, the Treacherous Three and original human beatbox Doug E. Fresh in the seminal early hip-hop film Beat Street.

As a film, Beat Street is pretty pedestrian, weaving nary a plot around set pieces meant to both demonstrate and capitalize upon budding hip-hop culture. But those set pieces alone make the film worth a watch, and the Santa rap stands out as the most engrossing of them all. Essentially a music video of their holiday hit (the original track is over 6 minutes, as was not uncommon in the early days of rap on record), the three MCs emerge from behind a black screen one at a time, at first revealing only their rapping heads. Its a simple but visually arresting stage trick, and I’m shocked that it has never been paid homage in a contemporary rap video (please prove me wrong, someone), though Paul Reubens took the concept to new heights for The Pee-Wee Herman Show on Broadway.

This shortened version does put added emphasis on an unfortunate line concerning the sexual orientation of Special K‘s G.I. Joe, a throwaway line in the album cut. The song’s strength, though, is its pointed yet jammin’ critique of holiday consumerism and the plight of the urban poor around Christmas time, particularly relevant subject matter for the Reagan era that unfortunately rings equally true today. The addition of Doug E. Fresh, pre-Slick Rick, is just icing on the cake that is clearly the best Christmas related number of cinema. But don’t just take it from me, see it for yourself!

Jay Ledbetter – Die Hard (1988)

Dir. John McTiernan

I wanted to write about something else. I really did. But at the end of the day, there is only one great non-Christmas Christmas movie, and it is Die Hard. Die Hard is the Citizen Kane of action films. It encapsulates a bygone era of action flicks that has been fossilized into the sediment of movie history. Bruce Willis’ John McClane (the character that Willis was born to play) is looking to reinsert himself into the lives of his estranged family, and isn’t family what the holidays are all about?  Much to his chagrin, there is a group of terrorists who have decided there is no night like Christmas Eve to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the beautiful Nokatomi Plaza. 

The man behind the heist is Hans Gruber (the character Alan Rickman was born to play—you’ll notice a pattern here), the Krampus to John McClane’s Santa Clause. Gruber succeeds where so many villains in these type of films fail, in that he is sinister, smart, intimidating, and actually capable of pulling this crazy plan off. Quick, off the top of your head name the villains of any Mission Impossible movie, any of the Fast and Furious> movies, or any Die Hard movie after Die Hard 2. If you could name one, great. You are in the large minority. There are innumerable quality action heroes, but the number of comparable villains is microscopic.

McClane is a one man wrecking crew, but he takes a beating along the way. And by takes a beating, I really mean gets his ass straight-up kicked. He gets kicked around, thrown into walls, takes a bullet, and is forced to walk on more broken glass than you would want your worst enemy to have to walk on. McClane’s victory is a Christmas miracle, but it isn’t wrapped up neatly in shiny wrapping paper with an adorable bow. Instead, he is left bloodied and bruised, but a hero nonetheless. It is a victory well-earned, and that deserves some affection from the woman you love, no matter how absent you may have been in the past. Hans Gruber is to John McClane what Clarence is to George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s just a shame that Hans didn’t earn his wings in the end. They probably would have come in handy.

Christmas is, if nothing else, what we make it and I hope this foray into Christmas-adjacent cinema can be a resource for you the next time your family reaches for The Miracle on 34th St. or Elf. From all of us here at Film Inquiry, happy holidays, merry Christmas and have a happy New Year, ho ho ho!

What non-Christmas films do you like to break out during the holiday season?

And with this final article, we’re off – the Film Inquiry HQ will be closed until after Christmas! We wish everyone a very happy jolly merry Christmas!