When you notice that a film is directed by David Gordon Green, you honestly don’t know what you’re going to get. The filmmaker started out as one of the great indie dramatists of his generation; then he turned to comedies (movies and series TV), with his friend Danny McBride often a part of the mix; then he moved into horror with a trio of Halloween movies and an Exorcist sequel, all of which were varying degrees of awful.
But while he was moving from genre to genre, rather than abandon the genre before, he always seems to keep them in his back pocket. With his latest work, the Christmas-themed Nutcrackers, you would think this marks his return to comedy if only reading the film synopsis. In fact, I’m not sure this one is meant to be entirely funny, especially since it deals with how a group of four young, male siblings—all played by real-life Janson brothers (Homer, Ulysses, Atlas, and Arlo Janson)—deal with the death of their parents in a car crash in a world where no one else really wants them.
Now, that plot synopsis might not sound that funny. But the central figure in Nutcrackers is actually Ben Stiller as the boys’ uncle Michael, a big-shot real estate guy from Chicago who drives his flashy yellow Porsche to their rundown farm in rural Ohio, thinking he’s only there for a couple days to sign off on handing the boys over to a foster family. But foster worker Gretchen (Linda Cardellini) informs Michael that the family in question didn’t pass the background check, so he’s responsible for the boys until a new family can be found. And since it’s the Christmas season, available families are scarce. Michael has a big deal back in Chicago that he’s supposed to be in charge of, and with no wifi signal on the farm, his deal is about to be taken away from him at a time in his life when he really could use a win.
Michael and the boys’ mother (his sister) had a falling out years earlier, so the boys don’t know him at all, and what they’ve heard about him isn’t particularly good (“You don’t know how to love,” says one of the kids, quoting their mother). It’s clear the kids are no angels either; they are destructive, uncommunicative, and generally used to doing whatever they want. And while the film starts out with us believing this is going to be a “Them vs. Him”-style of wacky comedy, Nutcrackers turns into something a little more substantial and unexpected.
Does that mean it’s good? Not exactly, but I’ll give it points for surprising me with how the film’s screenplay from Leland Douglas (drawing from true events, supposedly) allows Michael and his nephews to find a happy medium where they do get along most of the time, and we actually get to know the boys as individuals rather that a roving band of maniacs.
The great Toby Huss arrives later in the movie as town bigshot Aloysius Wilmington, who becomes a leading candidate to possibly foster the boys in his mansion, but a big mishap tanks that idea. Later, when Michael discovers that his oldest nephew was a prize student in his sister’s ballet studio, the family decides to put on an updated rendition of The Nutcracker as part fundraiser/part commercial for how civilized the boys actually are.
Michael doesn’t give up his heartless tendencies until much later in the film than you might imagine, and while the brothers have their hopes up that their uncle might stay around and raise them, we’re never quite sure if that’s ever going to be his intention. And that's fine because we’re never convinced he’ll be a good parent in the first place.
The overwhelming issue with Nutcrackers is that we’re never allowed to like any of these characters until far too deep into the movie, and by the time we get there, I simply couldn’t force myself to get invested in anyone’s outcome. It’s frustrating, because I think there’s a great, somewhat believable, version of this story to be told. But this isn’t it, despite decent performances from Stiller and the Jansons.
The film is now streaming exclusively on Hulu.
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