Nutcrackers: A Surprisingly Conventional Christmas Comedy, Given Who Made It
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
Nutcrackers, which has its debut on the Disney+ this week, is a nostalgia-soaked Christmas family adoption comedy, notable for its star, Ben Stiller, in his first lead role in a half-dozen years, and for its director, David Gordon Green.
Surprising only in its conventionality, Nutcrackers - which was a head-scratching pick to open this year’s Toronto International Film Festival - might best be described as mush with a light sprinkling of quirk. It is as if the director and star are engaged in what the TV series 30 Rock called “normaling,” or fetishizing the conventional.
Bachelor Ben Stiller has his hands full with a brand new family.
Stiller stars as Michael Maxwell, a stereotypically career-obsessed real estate agent from Chicago with an empathy deficit. When his estranged older sister and her husband are killed in a car accident, Michael finds himself the owner of a farm, and guardian of four rambunctious boys in rural Ohio. Four long-haired real-life siblings play the boys, using their first names: 12-year-old Homer, 10-year-old Ulysses and six-year-old twins, Atlas and Arlo Janson. The kids are the children of one of Green’s film school friends and their casually familiar interactions are the freshest thing about the film.
An art house darling in his lyrical early films (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Snow Angel), Green then moved to studio comedies (Pineapple Express). He is most recently known for his horror film reboots and sequels (three Halloweens and an Exorcist). During this same period, he has collaborated with his film-school friend, Danny McBride for the rudely funny comedy series, Eastbound and Down and The Righteous Gemstones.
With the one-off low-budget Nutcrackers, Green says he wants to pay tribute to the rough-edged adult-child comedies of his youth, films like The Bad News Bears and Uncle Buck. The result is a film that often feels, beat by beat, like you’ve seen it somewhere before. From the moment Mike rolls up to the ramshackle farmhouse in his lemon-yellow Porsche, it’s one madcap prank and wacky event after another: Pigs and chickens in the kitchen, a snake in the toilet, farts at the table, and soon the boys are doing donuts in the barnyard with Michael’s precious car.
Leland Douglas’s jaunty script doesn’t waste time fussing about the traumatic grief suffered by four orphaned rascals. Instead, the story focuses on the evolution of the fastidious and neurotic Michael, as he struggles to feed, homeschool and entertain the semi-feral brood while juggling phone calls to his employers in Chicago.
As Michael tries to place the kids with foster parents, he grows attached to them and even opens up to his own regrets about his estranged sister. Sweetening the possibility of his staying in the backwater Ohio town, there’s the presence of the comely and resourceful family services agent, Gretchen (Linda Cardellini).
Though allergic to subtlety, Nutcrackers lightly mocks red state small-town American conservatism and hypocrisy, the target of series like The Righteous Gemstones. You can get that in the title’s play on the word “crackers,” or the scene where a golf cart crashes into an ostentatious Nativity display. The androgynous-looking kids, regarded as local weirdos, were home-schooled without religious instruction, but they learned to dance in the ballet studio run by their late mother.
As Michael grows to care for the children, he encourages the boys to mount their own radical version of The Nutcracker ballet, entitled The Nutcracker’s Moustache, as a Christmas pageant. In a generous Christmas spirit, one can construe Nutcrackers as a fable about how creative expression is the antidote to grief. Or, at least, an alternative to the glut of even more saccharine seasonal romance movies available through your TV provider.
Nutcrackers. Directed by David Gordon Green. Written by Leland Douglas. Starring: Ben Stiller, Linda Cardellini with Homer, Ulysses and Arlo Janson. Nutcrackers debuts on Disney+ on Nov. 29.