The following excerpt is taken from The Christmas Virtues, a collection of essays by your favorite conservative writers (and Sonny Bunch) about Christmas. It is the epic conclusion to Jonathan V. Last's "Virtues Trilogy."
What’s the greatest Christmas movie of all time? Well, before we tackle that question, we have to take a step back and ask what makes a movie a "Christmas movie" in the first place. It’s a trickier problem than you think. Being set during the Christmas season is a necessary, but not sufficient, factor. If all you needed were jingle bells in the background, then Shane Black—the brains behind Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Iron Man 3, all of which take place around Christmastime—would be the undisputed champ of Christmas cinema, the auteur of Noel. But none of those movies are really Christmas movies. So he’s not.
What about Die Hard, the 1988 Bruce Willis action classic? It was released during summer blockbuster season, but it’s about terrorists who take over an office building during a Christmas party. So many film-school hipsters have declared it a Christmas movie that BuzzFeed—BuzzFeed!—felt the need to publish a piece declaring that the take was no longer hot. But Die Hard is clearly not a Christmas movie, because Christmas isn’t intrinsic to the plot. The story could have just as easily taken place during, say, the Fourth of July. All that matters to the mechanics of Die Hard is that people gather at Nakatomi Plaza so Alan Rickman can become an international star by lecturing his hostages on the finer points of bespoke menswear.
In order to make the cut as a Christmas movie, the holiday has to be integral to a film’s actions and inform its themes. Take Home Alone, Chris Columbus’ 1990 film about a kid named Kevin whose family goes on vacation without him. The plot involves a pair of criminals robbing homes that are (a) filled with new loot, in the form of Christmas presents, and (b) empty of people, who are traveling for the holidays. Throw in the fact that the movie’s key themes are family togetherness and forgiveness, and the taxonomy is settled: Home Alone is definitely a Christmas movie.
Is it a great Christmas movie, though? Probably not: As Barack Obama said of Hillary Clinton, it’s likable enough. Screenwriter John Hughes deftly mixed sentimentality and comedy, popping a heartwarming conclusion on top of what is basically just a bawdy amalgamation of body humor and annoying kid stuff. Home Alone isn’t as funny as the funniest Christmas movies, and yet its sentimentality is more cloying than even the schmaltziest ones.
But at least we’re getting somewhere now. As with Home Alone, the great Christmas movies tend to meld sentimentality with humor. Yet we generally classify them under one phylum or the other. And when it comes to the sentimental species—the ones that make you well up, even though you know everything works out in the end and even though you’ve seen the movie a hundred times—there are only a couple of legitimate choices for GOAT (that’s greatest of all time, for you n00bs).
The grandfather of the genre is Miracle on 34th Street. The 1947 classic from George Seaton is about proving that Santa Claus, the Christmassiest figure of them all in our increasingly secular society, is real. The story of a doubtful little girl whose harridan of a working mother has driven all faith from her, Miracle on 34th Street is about reclaiming wonder from cynicism and the importance of opening yourself up to love. It also might be the greatest endorsement of the U.S. Postal Service ever, with the film’s climactic scene revolving around giant bags of mail being delivered to the courtroom. (It’s amusing that in a seventy-year-old movie, the biggest anachronism is an ironclad belief in the competence of the Post Office.)
But the king of this category is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 monument to Americana. Capra embraces a sort of communal individualism that has long been the bedrock of American society: Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey is a hero who saves his brother and the town pharmacist and the family bank through a combination of blind bravery and devoted selflessness.
Mind you, when you look at it in a certain light, this neighborliness can edge a bit close to socialism. And truth be told, Potterville gets kind of a bad rap. Oh, sure, it’s filled with gambling parlors and cheap floozies. But on the other hand, think of all the gambling parlors and cheap floozies! Isn’t that what makes America great?
Still, show me a man who doesn’t get choked up when we flash back to Bedford Falls where George and his family are surrounded by the singing townsfolk who’ve just bailed him out, and I’ll show you a callous monster unfit for human society. It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas classic in spite of—or, heaven help us, maybe even because of—its commie sympathies.
You would think that A Christmas Carol should fall into this category of greats, too, but the problem with Dickens’ classic is that there are so many competing movie versions to choose from. The best-loved straight-up adaptation is probably 1951’s Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim as the titular miser. Then again, some people prefer the classic 1938 version starring Reginald Owen. And who can forget the 1970 musical adaptation starring Albert Finney? Or the 1984 version starring George C. Scott? Or the 1999 TV movie starring Jean-Luc Picard? Or the 2009 motion-capture version directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jim Carrey as not only Scrooge but also the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, too? (Actually, you can forget about that one. Not only is it distressingly terrible as a dramatic execution, but the motion-capture animation used by Zemeckis sits in the same Uncanny Valley in which his previous Christmas film, The Polar Express, was trapped. Instead of feeling sympathy for Tiny Tim, you get a subconscious feeling of revulsion. Because he looks like a cartoon replicant.)
In truth, I’m not terribly fond of any of them. Yet Dickens’ book is usefully Shakespearean in that its bones and its structure and its very language have been used for all sorts of adaptations. Many, perhaps most, of these are dreadful (An American Carol, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past), but every once in a while you get a classic. My personal favorite is Bill Murray’s Scrooged, which doubles as a fantastic Christmas movie and the best commentary on the soullessness of the television industry and the craven executives who have run it since Network.
Scrooged manages to rejigger A Christmas Carol in ways that are, at times, heartwarming. The adventure of Frank (Murray) with the Ghost of Christmas Past can get the waterworks going: When we see how he lost Karen Black and how much his mother loves him, it is, as the Ghost says, "Niagara Falls, Frankie Angel." The tears, they burn! Fortunately for people who are emotionally dead inside (like me) there aren’t too many of these moments, and Scrooged is deeply, darkly hilarious. The reimagining of Jacob Marley as a golfing, worm-ridden Lee Iacocca type is sublime, while Bobcat Goldthwait’s laid-off, warbling, shotgun-wielding, drink-sodden cubicle monkey adds the perfect dash of realistic absurdity. In one of those strange tricks of literally alchemy. Scrooged takes sentimental source material and turns it into a movie that’s not just a comedy, but a great one.
Many of the Christmas comedies since the early 1980s have lived in a dark place. Before Scrooged came Gremlins, a comedy/ thriller about a group of tiny monsters that takes over a small town after a young man fails to follow the rules of caring for them. You might not think of Gremlins as a Christmas movie, but remember: Not only does it take place during Christmas, but a key portion of the film involves the protagonist’s girlfriend coming to grips with the death of her father years before. While he was dressed as Santa. And trying to climb down a chimney.
Dark in a different way is Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas, the only movie that works for both Christmas and Halloween. It features great set design and a fascinating premise paired with catchy tunes. Stop-motion animation has nothing on the more traditional variety, however, and there’s a reason Boris Karloff’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! has been in constant rotation for the last five decades.
But The Grinch gets downgraded in my book for inspiring what has to be the single worst Christmas movie in history: Jim Carrey’s live-action adaptation of the same name. It’s pretty remarkable that Carrey has managed to star in not one, but two, of the most unnecessary adaptations of beloved Christmas movies. If you want someone to crap all over a Christmas classic, Carrey’s your guy. And you might want to look out: Given that his Grinch came out in 2000 and his Scrooge dropped in 2009, we’re just about due for Another Garbage Jim Carrey Christmas Movie.
As far as the animated division goes in our little field taxonomy, for my money it’s topped by A Charlie Brown Christmas. Who can forget the dinky little Christmas tree bowed over at the top? The 1965 classic also does something very few Christmas movies then, or now, would dare to: It features a recitation from the Bible and a reminder of what the day is really all about.
Given that December 25 now rivals the Fourth of July weekend as a marquee release date, I guess it’s not surprising that so few Christmas movies are religious in nature. If you’re trying to cram people into 3D IMAX cathedrals with laser-aligned sound and convince them that popcorn and Diet Coke are worthy substitutes for the body and blood of Christ, you probably don’t want to remind them of the fact that they’re ducking out on paying respects to the guy who died for their sins. The only Christmas movie I can think of in recent years with an explicitly churchy message is 2006’s The Nativity Story. It also happens to be the only film to have debuted at the Vatican rather than Mann’s Chinese.
All of which is to say that Santa has more or less replaced Jesus as the cinematic face of the season. So you would think he’d be treated with a little more respect. The aforementioned Miracle on 34th Street notwithstanding, Santa is more frequently blasphemed against than venerated these days. Do you have any idea how many cheap, terrible, horror Christmas movies there are? Among (many) others, there’s Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Santa’s Slay (2005), and Santa Claws (1996). If I’m forced to pick a "favorite," I guess I go with Santa’s Slay; not only is the pun to die for (get it?), it also stars former professional wrestler Bill Goldberg as a demon Mr. Claus.
It’s one thing to portray Ol’ Saint Nick as a demonic murderer; that’s all in good fun. But none of those movies is as blasphemous as 2003’s Bad Santa. Billy Bob Thornton stars as a safe-cracking drunk whose holiday routine is to take a job as a department store Santa in order to infiltrate high-end shopping malls and make off with a sack full of goodies on Christmas Eve. Yet even a movie like this—which delights in shocking audiences with Thornton’s crook dressed up as Santa and performing all manner of mayhem—winds up being transformed by the idea of Christmas. In time, Thornton’s lecherous, conniving character learns to care for others and himself.
It’s deeply funny and, in its own perverse way, deeply sweet. Even though it’s played for shock value, the truth is the movie wouldn’t work without Christmas in it. Improbably, it’s become a cable Christmas classic. But it’s not the cable Christmas classic.
In 1997, TNT began running one movie, over and over, for twenty-four consecutive hours spanning Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This movie has earned a place in our culture, in our hearts, and in our homes as a mainstay of the Christmas season. I speak, of course, of A Christmas Story.
The 1983 film did solid, if unremarkable, business in its initial theatrical run. But the quest of a towheaded scamp named Ralphie to get a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas resonated with people over the long haul. In part, this is because Ralphie manages to navigate the everyday childhood indignities most of us remember with, if not fondness, then some sentimentality: the taste of soap after ill-advised wise-acreage; the ever-looming threat of bullies on the prowl; the overwhelming, soulful desire to own a piece of exquisite, manly hardware frustrated—over and over.
The movie’s enduring popularity speaks to memoirist and screenwriter Jean Shepherd’s ability to capture a sort of idealized American Christmas, putting a humorous gloss on all the secular accouterments of the season. Who doesn’t remember taking a trip to some shady lot filled with hucksters looking to pawn off thinned-out, half-brown pine trees? Or counting down the days until the home-cooked Christmas goose (or ham or roast) is ready to eat? Or putting on a ridiculous piece of clothing sent by a loved one, snapping a photo of yourself in the getup, and then burying it in a closet, never to be seen again? And lurking beneath it all is the ever-looming specter of consumer excess and silliness, represented by the spent pile of paper and trimmings under the tree that Ralphie’s little brother dozes off into, new toy clutched to his side.
In a way, the entire conceit of TNT’s "24 Hours of A Christmas Story" is just another manifestation of that crass commercialism. But it’s one that’s wholly welcome, as far as I’m concerned. Because this annual tradition has created a family ritual and touchstone that now spans generations. What makes A Christ- mas Story the quintessential Christmas movie isn’t just the movie itself. It’s the way the movie has been force-fed to us—which has turned it into a tradition.
It doesn’t matter if you’re watching It’s a Wonderful Life or Scrooged or A Christmas Story. What matters is that you’re watching it with your family, year after year. As you grow up together. As you grow old together.
So don’t worry about which Christmas movie is the "best." Just pick one—there’s no shortage to choose from—and start a tradition. And the best one will be the one that’s yours.