Christmas-themed comedies come in two basic flavors, the warm family plum pudding and the more recent development of the anti-Christmas raspberry, represented by the likes of Scrooged, The Ref, and the mighty Bad Santa. There are also mutants that fall between the two stools, such as Bob Clark's A Christmas Story, a nostalgic family comedy from the director of Porky's, in which gross-outs are part of the simpler times towards which the viewer is expected to look back on longingly. Both the reassuring family films and the movies in which a Bill Murray or a Denis Leary plays a rude, aggressive sort with no interest in good will to man are in denial over what Christmas means to so many of our fellow citizens: holiday depression. Luckily, a few brave filmmakers have chosen to seize that topic and run with it.
The Scottish film Comfort and Joy (1984), written and directed by Bill Forsyth, is the Bringing Up Baby of holiday depression comedies. It stars the resourceful and engaging Bill Paterson as Alan, a fortyish control freak who works as a radio D.J. The movie opens on Christmas Eve, with Alan and his beautiful girlfriend (Eleanor David) making love beside the decorated tree; when they're done, she announces that she's been meaning to tell him that it's all over and that the guys are on the their way to help her move out. The movie spans the week between Christmas and New Year's, a period during which Alan, in despair over the loss of his girl and convinced that his life is in a rut, seems in danger of melting and vanishing down a storm drain with the rest of the slush. The movie has a plot; Alan, flailing about for a way to make his life mean something, decides to become a serious radio news guy and, looking for a story to cover, gets mixed up in the tribal warfare between competing ice cream vendors. But the movie's special glory is in its graceful, poeticized comic atmosphere, which manages to make depressive stupor seem rather lyrical. The cinematography by Chris Menges is a major factor in this, as is Bill Paterson's performance and Eleanor David, too. When Alan dreams about her coming back to him, you can completely relate to his not wanting to ever wake up.
La Buche, a 1999 French film directed by Daniele Thompson from a script she wrote with her son Christopher, opens four days before Christmas and deals with the various messes that three sisters, played by Sabine Azema, Emmanuelle Beart, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, are trying to sort out while preparing for the inevitable family gathering. The tone is established in the opening scenes, when Thompson gradually cuts from images of nightmarishly crowded, noisy Paris streets crammed with holiday shoppers to a funeral, which seems like a comparatively restful scene until the deceased's cell phone goes off inside his coffin. La Buche isn't as soulful as Comfort and Joy, but it is pretty funny, and unlike the Forsythe movie, it's readily available on DVD. And besides, the season hasn't been made yet that couldn't be made a little more festive by the addition of Charlotte Gainsbourg.
No discussion of all that you dismay would be complete without a mention of the opening of Morvern Callar. Directed by Lynne Ramsay from an adaptation of Alan Warner's novel by the director and Liana Dognini, the movie opens with the title character (Samantha Morton) waking on Christmas morning to find her boyfriend's dead, bloody body beside the Christmas tree; he has committed suicide during the night, and left behind the manuscript of his completed novel for her to print out and solicit to a publisher. In shock, Morvern submits the novel under her own name, then takes off for a holiday in Spain with her best friend (Kathleen McDermott) in tow, equipped with her dead boyfriend's money and credit cards and a mix tape he made for her to act as soundtrack to her new adventure. Morvern Callar isn't a comedy (to put it mildly), and it leaves its connection to the holidays in the dust, along with the twinkling, lighted tree and the blood on the kitchen floor. But in its chilly, gripping way, it is the story of someone who leapt at the chance to light out and make a new life for herself, just like that whiny bastard George Bailey was always insisting, unconvincingly, that he wanted to do. Truly Santa works in mysterious ways.
