As seen at AFI Fest 2008:
Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale is a movie that
will have hardcore art-film enthusiasts raving and everybody
else snoozing. Yes, it's true that the movie is darn amazing on
a technical level: it tells the story of an extended-family of
15 gathering over Christmas and never loses sight of a single
character. Every persona is well-developed and the viewer feels
like they know each of them. Ice the cake with some lovely
cinematography courtesy of veteran Eric Gautier and you've got
yourself what would seem like a masterpiece on the surface.
And yet A Christmas Tale is no masterpiece. In fact,
it may not even be a good movie. The reason is simple: however
well-constructed its characters and situations are, they never
connect with the audience on an emotional level. Desplechin's
work is so technically competent that it practically begs to be
viewed as an exercise rather than the deeply poignant experience
it should be. There is a sense that the filmmaker loses touch
with his characters by overanalyzing them; they should be rough
around the edges but the film's execution doesn't allow for
this.
Desplechin's overzealousness in A Christmas Tale does
not just show in the fact that he spends a lot of time indulging
in each of his characters. It also rears its ugly head when he
structurally implies up-front that the experience will be a
greatly emotional one. Desplechin inserts all of the film's
conflicts and dramatic meat into the first act of the movie—we
learn right away that the family's matriarch, Junon (Catherine
Denuve), has been diagnosed with terminal leukemia; that she
lost a 7-year-old son decades ago, likely because she passed the
disease on; that her next-eldest son, Ivan (Melvil Poupard),
became her favorite child because he took the deceased's place;
and that her youngest, Henri (Mathieu Amalric), will soon be
giving her a bone-marrow transplant despite being banished from
the family in a legal-agreement by her depressed daughter,
Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) —to show that he's going to use the
rest of the movie to work on emotional-development. (If that
sentence seemed long and complicated, then the movie, which
plays like 25 of them strung together, isn't for you.) Oh, and
don't forget that A Christmas Tale is indeed about its
titular holiday, meaning its frontloaded structure suggests a
genre-defying movie in and of itself because, after all, when
was the last time you saw a Christmas movie about character
development?
The above represents precisely the irony of A Christmas
Tale: it focuses so much on developing its characters and
yet the characters never once move the audience. Part of this is
because they collectively represent a dysfunctional family and
dysfunctional families are rarely involving when their antics
aren’t in some way true to life or neurotically funny (forget
about touching). But a lot of it is because Desplechin just
wants the film to be perfect, which is the antithesis of what
his characters are. They should be a family of humans experiencing
authentic problems as they come together to celebrate a holiday;
instead, they're pawns in an artistically-drunken Christmas
carol that wants to make sure you know it's not like the rest of
its kind. The result is a work that will leave most viewers
yawning well before its cumbersome 152 minutes have passed.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 11.2.2008
Screened on: 10.28.2008 at the Lionsgate Screening Room
in Santa Monica, CA.