Back when I was in college, one of my classes happened to be talking about Christmas movies. A classmate was railing against everyone else’s favorites, because, he said, on some level, they all rewarded materialism. It wasn’t even that he thought Christmas movies should be a religious thing, just that a real Christmas movie shouldn’t about giving or getting some thing. Our instructor asked him if he thought there was such a thing as a real Christmas movie, and without missing a beat, my classmate said, "The Ice Storm."
Now, I’m not going to go that far. While I admire Ang Lee’s portrait of a family leading lives of trapped desperation, and I very much admire my classmate’s complete lack of hesitation in suggesting the movie, The Ice Storm is kind of, ya know, bleak. So I’ll offer something I saw very recently that’s just a little more lighthearted and is very definitely an independent movie.
It’s called Happy Christmas, it came out this year and it stars Anna Kendrick. The movie was apparently made for just $70,000, and to be honest, it looks like it. It’s pretty rough around the edges, there’s almost no plot, and most of the dialogue was clearly improvised, as some of the characters aren’t really even very articulate.
Some people will be really turned off by all this, but for me, it sort of made everything feel more like real life. There’s unexpected humor, a very real sweetness, and while the characters have their share of problems, it’s refreshing that no one is mean and anyone who gets hurt is understanding and able to forgive. There aren’t any epiphanies or major revelations, but there is incremental progress in these people’s lives, and, for me, that was satisfying. And without a doubt, Happy Christmas has the most charming one-and-a-half-year-old child you’ve ever seen in a movie.
Happy Christmas won’t change your life. But it’s not about getting things. It’s about a family that generally gets along and can handle it when they don’t, and people who are decent to each other, even if they’re not perfect. And I think that’s worth celebrating.
