Despite its title, this French film isn’t really a Christmas movie. More specifically, it’s not a typical Christmas movie. You know the type: the ones with all the wacky, zany family members coming home for the holidays and hilarity inevitably ensues. However, “A Christmas Tale” has a lot in common with “A Christmas Story,” a movie that is unabashedly Christmasy, but has risen above the rest of the pack. “A Christmas Story” has become a modern classic and worthy of 24-hour marathons because of its refreshing lack of sentimentality and its ability to capture the embarrassment and weirdness of childhood. The ridiculously similarly titled “A Christmas Tale” succeeds pretty amazingly for the same reason, except that it captures those same problems in adulthood.
“A Christmas Tale” tells the story of marginally-to-extremely dysfunctional family, the Vuillards, and their attempt to bring everyone back to the family home in Roubaix for Christmas in the wake of the family matriarch Junon’s (Catherine Deneuve) diagnosis with myelodysplasia, a rare bone disease and precursor to leukemia that demands a bone marrow transplant. Driven by either guilt or a true desire to see everyone, the family members all roll back into Roubaix as they each await the results of bone marrow transplant compatibility tests. There’s Junon’s older and preternaturally wise husband Abel, the melancholic and grudging oldest sister Elizabeth, her depressed and potentially schizophrenic son Paul, the jittery family man youngest brother and erstwhile DJ Ivan, his beautiful wife Sylvia, their two young sons, the quietly desperate painter cousin Simon, and finally, the boozing, chain-smoking, rude and obnoxious middle child, Henri, and his girlfriend Faunia.
With such a crowded house, friction is guaranteed. Especially since Elizabeth banished Henri from the family five years prior, due to a financial disagreement and various other unnamed torments. Henri is allowed back for the holidays due to the special circumstances, and everyone seems to welcome him back, with the obvious exception of Elizabeth, who prefers to hold her grudge and only speak to him when absolutely necessary. The anarchic presence of Henri combined with the declining health of Junon sets off a holiday week filled with arguments, confessions, pleas and calculations ““ just like anyone’s Christmas.
The old trope of disastrous and overwhelming holidays is so cliche in film, how can this one possibly add anything to the heap? The reason that this film rises above the rest is that it gives the characters that inhabit it time to breathe, as well as time to fully express their problems and quirks and address why they have or suffer from them. This comes at the cost of a nearly glacial pace (the movie clocks in at 2 1/2 hours), but it’s definitely worth it in terms of the payoff reaped from the dynamic characters.
Whereas in other Christmas films of the “crazy uncle” variety, the characters are no more than people stereotyped by one attribute: the conservative uncle, the gay cousin, the sarcastic mother in law, etc. In “A Christmas Tale,” everyone is so much more than that, with strengths and weaknesses, quirks and idiosyncrasies, and most importantly, individual motivations.
The other reason this movie is set apart is, as mentioned before, the relative lack of sentimentality. There’s no big group hug at the end, no “true meaning of Christmas” spiel. What you have instead is some of the most biting dialogue in a holiday-themed movie that I’ve heard. (Henri tells Elizabeth’s husband that he “doesn’t count” so seriously and offhandedly that he ends up with a fist to his visage.) This comes with some loss of realism in parts, but it’s refreshing to see the lingua franca of the dysfunctional family drama collide with a holiday movie.
On top of that, the acting is fantastic. Mathieu Amalric, fresh off of his turn as surprisingly axe-handy (Seriously, what was with that last fight scene?) Bond villain Dominic Greene, is the driving force behind this cast as Henri. Henri in another actor’s hands could have been an unforgivable jerk, but here alternates between lovably honest, drunkenly funny and bitterly cold-hearted and mean. The way he plays to the audience’s sympathy is brilliant. The rest of the ensemble cast is wonderfully natural and well-drawn, although I felt that Consigny’s Elizabeth was somewhat akin to a 50-pound lead weight that cries, due to the fact that her character spends most of the movie holding a grudge and weeping.
Director Arnaud Desplechin has done a remarkable thing and revitalized the Christmas film by focusing on realistic characters and situations. If only American Christmas movies could take a cue and bring some of the honesty from this film to theirs, and we can have another American movie that runs 24 hours on Christmas day.