A Christmas Story 1983

[3.0/10] Maybe you have to have grown up in the 1940s. Maybe you have to be nostalgic for a time that we barely have any point of reference for in 2019. Maybe you have to have watched this movie on TBS’s constant loop to where it became part of the cinematic wallpaper of your yuletide celebration.

Whatever it is, you need a certain something to be able to appreciate A Christmas Story, and I just don’t have it. I don’t get this movie, and worse yet, I do not understand how anyone above the age of eight could like it. It is broad, hacky, annoying, and toothless, with scant few moments of cleverness or warmth to make it anything more than festive nails on a chalkboard for ninety minutes.

The film tells the story of Ralphie, a young boy in 1940s Indiana who wants a B.B. gun for Xmas. Based on Jean Shepherd’s fictionalized recollections of childhood, director Bob Clark depicts Ralphie’s trials and tribulations as he tried to ensure he receives his desired holiday gift and otherwise navigates the peaks and valleys of childhood. Those misadventures largely encompass the cornball dysfunction of his family: a know-nothing patriarch, a caring traditional mom, and an inert little brother who’s mostly a prop.

Shepherd’s provides voiceover narration for these vignettes, representing an adult Ralphie looking back on this time, and it’s hardly a feature. While I’m sure there’s a touch of sardonic wit that’s lost in translation, the prose is clunky when vocalized. There’s an overwritten quality to it that occasionally draws a touch of humor from using grandiose terms for the mundane bumps and bruises of childhood, but mostly it comes off like Shepherd and Clark gilding the lily.

It’s a larger problem with the film as a whole. There’s a disconnect to a film steeped in nostalgia for a time decades before most modern viewers were born, but to the extent there’s anything universally relatable about the film, it’s the way little things like what present you’re going to receive on the big day, or how you might do on the big assignment, feel like world-shattering events in a child’s mind. But A Christmas Story plays these events to the cheap seats, between its cartoony central characters and goofy tone, that it drains almost any human connection from the film.

It’s also just damn annoying to sit through for an hour and a half. There is an awful lot of screaming and screeching in this movie, often for no particular reason. Every character besides the mom is at least kind of an asshole. And the observational humor is so tame, so utterly, stultifyingly bland, that you can’t help but wonder if the next gag will be some cutting dig against substandard shoe polish.

It doesn't help that, as inevitably befalls most movies made nearly forty years ago, there’s some uncomfortable bits of culturally insensitive comedy that take you out of the film. Ralphie comparing his dad to an “Arab trader” in voiceover almost made me choke on my drink. And the fact that the closing bit of humor centers on Chinese food waiters being unable to pronounce “R” sounds when trying to sing Xmas carols is utterly cringe-worthy. As always, some allowances have to be made for art from a different time, but bits like these make it hard for the film’s already placid, bad sitcom-level comedy to land.

About the only thing that works in the film are its visuals. Make no mistake, Bob Clark and cinematographer Reginald H. Morris can’t match Chris Colombus and Julio Macat of Home Alone in terms of finding striking images and dynamic shots within a mostly low-stakes domestic story. But few scenes in the film convey the funhouse mirror scariness of life as a kid than when Morris goes with a point-of-view shot for Ralphie’s interaction with a gruff mall Santa and his grumpy elves, earning a boot in the face for his troubles.

In fact, the only warmth in the film comes in its visual moments on Xmas morning. The tactile close-ups of everyone’s hands, busy at work unwrapping presents, or the slow pan across a lawn covered in icicle-dressed trees, or Ralphie’s parents gazing out at the evening snowfall while their tree provides a light in the dark creates a mood of joy and cheer that the rest of the film’s nonsense doesn't even graze.

A Christmas Story’s imagine spots are shockingly lacking in imagination. I don’t know what this film’s budget was, but it’s basically an excuse to throw people in some cheap Halloween costumes and speed up the playback scenes. What should be the most fun sequences in the movie are lifeless, laughless diversions with nothing to show for them.

The same goes for the family’s interactions. There’s a generic sitcom dynamic at play here, with what feels like a weird cross between a 1940s setting and a 1980s sensibility. Nearly all of the characters are such over the top archetypes that nothing they do is real enough to be funny or funny enough to be real. Only the mom has any true admirable qualities, and the quotidian disputes over now-iconic leg lamps and bunny suits lack any sign or insights.

Taken most charitably, A Christmas Story can be commended for telling the story of a lower-middle class family, one that doesn't really fit the mold of the Cleavers. It’s a creditable feature that the kids in the film are not innocent angels but jerky and human and even weird at times.

But Clark and Shepherd can’t turn those admirable aims into a film actually worth watching. The comedy on display is suitable for kids Ralphie’s age, and embarrassingly bad for anybody older. There’s no real story or plot to speak of beyond Ralphie’s quest for a B.B. gun, and each of the vignettes that simply roll into one another has little too offer beyond a tepid take on domestic life. If this is what passed for wry insight or venerable laughs in 1983, then count me as glad that whatever sensibility is needed to appreciate this pile of snowflaked crud is thankfully in short supply so many holiday seasons later.

I didn’t grow up in the 1940s. Obviously, my kids didn’t either. Hell, my parents weren’t even born until the middle of the following decade. So why does this overly sentimental dash of era-specific holiday cheer hold such a special place in my heart? Why do I still cackle like a fool when I can recite all the punchlines? Why can I relate so easily to its themes and characters? I don’t rightly know, but it’s all true.

As a kid, my sister and I would religiously throw our new pairs of dress socks over one shoulder, aping Ralphie and his brother. I knew the unique endorphin rush of planting myself in front of a favorite evening program; the raw fear of standing up to a bully that had me out-muscled and deeply intimidated; the untamed lawlessness of the playground. As I’ve grown into middle age, I haven’t lost touch with the realities behind those well-loved signature scenes. Instead, I’ve developed an equally powerful admiration for the adult perspective. Now I appreciate the exhaustive desperation of dinner with a picky eater. The rising urge to spout “do as I say, not as I do” without the slightest hint of irony. The amplified magic of giving the best gift of the season and watching stars twinkle in the eyes of its recipient. It delivers all this amid a ninety-minute string of huge laughs, expertly teased and foreshadowed and paid off. There’s a lot of meat on this bone, but by the time the on-screen holiday has come and gone, we have nothing left to pick.

It’s a holiday classic for good reason. Our societal scenery may have changed a little, but the messages and feelings and distinct personalities have basically remained the same. Any other movie, I’d get tired of watching on an annual basis. This one hits my belly like a splash of whisky, all warm and spicy and good. This one feels like home.