It’s not the easiest thing in the world to make a really good Christmas movie these days, one that you’re pretty sure you’ll revisit in the years to come just because of the way it makes you feel. It’s hard to avoid rehashing something that’s already been done, or to balance tones just right so that you bring warmth, but avoid being maudlin. The best seem to acknowledge the melancholy that’s inherent in the season while also layering that with humor, recognizing that people, and especially people around the holidays, are complicated and full of feelings, with all the joy and difficulty that entails.
It's not impossible, of course—The Holdovers and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point are two highlights of recent years, and both acknowledge the strong pull of nostalgia around Christmastime, but don’t dwell on it. And here, now, is The Baltimorons, which walks its own fine lines and comes out at the end with that lovely, achy combination of a little bit of sadness, a lot of playfulness, and a recognition and affirmation of our humanity that marks the best of these Christmas films.
The movie starts with what can accurately be described as a shambolic suicide attempt by Cliff, a sorta dumpy bearded guy who’s probably somewhere in his 30s. Cut to some amount of time later, and we see he’s six months sober and headed to Christmas dinner with his girlfriend and her family, which doesn’t happen because he knocks his own tooth out before he even gets in the door and has to find a dentist on Christmas Eve. That dentist is Didi, who has her own reasons for answering a call like this on a day like this, and after she fixes Cliff up and a few unlikely situations arise, we find the two of them walking and talking for most of the rest of the movie. Cliff was once a promising improv comic, and so he's undeniably funny, but also, on paper at least, undeniably irritating, and somehow he’s able to steer that latter quality into a disarming charm, both for the audience and for Didi. Why we don’t want to throw this guy out the window every time he opens his mouth is kind of a mystery. Or maybe we do, but he keeps talking us out of it. Didi is a fair bit older than Cliff is, but it’s clear they’re both searching for something, and that seems to be what keeps them together on this day when they should probably both be somewhere else.
The movie has a light, breezy feel as director Jay Duplass periodically drops in shots of cars driving around Baltimore over a jazzy score that’s an overt homage to Vince Guaraldi and his famous Charlie Brown Christmas music, enough so that I simply thought it was Guaraldi until I learned otherwise. And this is part of what ties us into that nostalgia without shoving it down our throats—we instantly feel comfortable with this kind of Christmas, even while we know these feelings aren’t terrifically smooth. And while it may be true that if we take a step back we’d see that what happens isn’t too likely in the real world, that’s no way to go through life, nor is it a way treat Christmas—The Baltimorons is sweet, sad, funny, and something I’ll be thinking of this year when the snow starts to fall.
The Baltimorons is in theaters.
