Movie Review: A Christmas Tale (2008, Directed by Arnaud Desplechin)

I’m trying to see as many of the end-of-the-year Oscar contenders as I can before they leave the theatres. This is not an easy task since film distributors find it wise to pack all the interesting and halfway-intelligent films into the month of December. Each year, I find myself waiting impatiently for eleven months until we reach the month of indie dramas, character-driven stories, and, invariably, a Holocaust story or two (or three or four). Don’t get me wrong, many of the hyped-up films in December are just that, pieces of pretentious Oscar-bait that wear melodramatic emotions and human suffering on their sleeves. Sometimes, though, you see a film that actually lives up to its critical hype, or at least transcends the Oscar-centric structure of contemporary cinema in a meaningful way.

In the spirit of experiencing such films, I sauntered off to an arthouse cinema for a screening of A Christmas Tale, one of 2008’s critical darlings. Don’t let the movie’s title mislead you. This is not a charming story of the joys and perils of the holiday season à la A Christmas Story or National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Rather, it’s a French-language subtitled three-hour film about a dysfunctional family at Christmas time.

Don’t all rush to the theatre at once to see this film. I know it might not sound like your cup of tea. But, it’s actually pretty good. In fact, while the film is flawed in many ways, it has moments of absolute brilliance and clarity. I’m not going to talk much about the movie’s elaborate plot, because that’s not really the point of the work. I will say that the narrative focuses upon the family’s matriarch, who has a terminal disease, and her decision about how to deal with the sickness. In the process of watching her work through her own ethics and values, we meet the important people in her life, all fascinating characters themselves.

I don’t think A Christmas Tale is one of the greatest films of the year. It suffers a bit from a lack of narrative clarity at times and some melodramatic moments that feel out of place in the context of the work as a whole. Nevertheless, it offers a nice alternative to the mainstream (and predictable) Hollywood movies playing at a Cineplex near you. Like several other films of the year, we feel like we’ve really spent some time with these characters, as neurotic and messed up as they are. In the end, we feel the full force of the matriarch’s decision regarding her cancer. What better time than the holidays to meditate upon the nature of life and death and the role that one’s family plays in one’s existence?