CHRISTMAS MOVIES: Witnessing the Miracle in Action
Still from the film Remember the Night, 1946 / imdb.com
Awaiting the Christmas miracle that silently comes to set everything right, cinema offers the chance to witness this miracle in action — to see it and live through it. However, cinema didn’t immediately become part of the Christmas ritual alongside the tree, garlands, festive table, and gifts. While we owe the Christmas tree to the German Martin Luther, the tradition of Christmas movie screenings traces back to the English writer Charles Dickens.
It was his A Christmas Carol — the tale of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who, on Christmas Eve, is visited by three spirits of Christmas, as foretold by the ghost of his late business partner, Marley — that served as the literary foundation for the very first Christmas film in history. The five-minute Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), captivated audiences across Europe, including England’s monarch, King Edward VII.
Since then, no Christmas has been complete without cinema. It is a film that has articulated the strangeness of this holiday — its profound and mystical meaning, both majestic and eerie.
What is Christmas, after all? It is «zero hour», a moment where the past, present, and future meet and, consequently, dissolve. This is precisely the premise of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has captivated filmmakers for over a century with its stunning cinematic potential. This brief yet inherently cinematic text evokes a magical sensation of time disappearing.
Perhaps this quality has made A Christmas Carol not only Dickens’ most frequently adapted work but also one of the most filmed stories in world literature. To date, there are over eighty versions, including television adaptations. Dickens’ novella has taken on forms as varied as Westerns and romantic comedies — not to mention countless parodies where ghostbusters enthusiastically hunt down Christmas spirits.
The most recent version, arguably the most dazzling, was directed by American filmmaker Robert Zemeckis. His semi-animated A Christmas Carol (2009), created using motion capture technology and featuring the legendary Jim Carrey in the lead role, explores the cinematic potential of Dickens’ text more fully than any other adaptation.
The most successful loose adaptation, however, is the romantic dramedy The Family Man (2000). In this film, a Black Santa dressed like a streetwise hustler transports an egocentric broker (played by Nicolas Cage) into an alternate life — modest but peaceful and happy. Years earlier, Cage’s character abandoned the woman he loved, and now, much like Dickens’ Scrooge, he makes his employees work on Christmas Eve.
Director Brett Ratner tells a story of thirty-something angst, the nagging sense of another life lurking behind an existing one — comfortable, affluent, but hollow. Shamelessly, he explores the ultimate joy: returning to a place you left behind in your immaturity, a place only reachable at Christmastime.
CHRISTMAS: A HOLIDAY FOR MEN AND WOMEN
If Dickens is the quintessential Christmas writer, then Frank Capra is undoubtedly the quintessential Christmas filmmaker. Not only did he create the most iconic Christmas movie of all time, It’s a Wonderful Life, but he also defined the primary Christmas genre. Capra rightly believed that Christmas films are not comedies, fantasies, or fairy tales but, above all, melodramas. After all, Christmas is a holiday meant for pragmatic adult men and women who have lost their childlike innocence.
These adults, much like children, often crave the same cherished melodramatic story, wrapped in the essential trappings of the holiday season. Since 1946, the Western world has been captivated by Capra’s moral tale about a small-town philanthropist teetering on the edge of despair on Christmas Eve. Saved by his guardian angel, he’s shown all the good he’s brought into the world and how bleak life would be without him.
The shadow of this legendary film looms over the sharp Christmas comedy The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) by the Coen Brothers. In their story, a young inventor of the hula hoop contemplates ending his life on Christmas Eve, driven to despair by corporate scheming. However, unlike Capra’s protagonist, who considers jumping from a bridge, the Coens character eyes the rooftop of a towering corporate skyscraper.
French filmmaker Claude Lelouch also made his mark in the Christmas melodrama genre with Happy New Year! (La Bonne Année, 1973). In this film, hardened thief Simon is released from prison just in time for New Year’s Eve. Unbeknownst to him, the police plan to use his freedom to track down his accomplice, who has stashed the stolen jewels. Simon suspects the setup, but his real fear isn’t the police tailing him — it’s returning home.
Has Françoise — the independent, intellectual antique shop owner Simon fell for like a schoolboy and who visited him in prison for five years — waited for him? Pre-New Year, Paris is frozen in anticipation of magic. Mireille Mathieu, at the height of her fame, performs her iconic La Bonne Année to the applause of a colorful crowd filling the legendary Casino de Paris. Simon, a pragmatist with the grace of a magician and the melancholy of an angel, learns to believe in miracles that night.
For more than the fear of a lifetime in prison, Simon dreads finding Françoise no longer alone. Lelouch fills his New Year’s fairy tale with his signature sentimentality, cleverly plays with black-and-white and color visuals, teases intellectuals, and amuses the audience with a humorous prologue in which prisoners in a Paris jail watch his earlier film, A Man and a Woman (1966), on New Year’s Eve.
Meanwhile, on Christmas Eve, two charming yet hapless women in their thirties — an American (Cameron Diaz) and a Brit (Kate Winslet) — desperately flee troubled relationships in search of something new and unknown. In The Holiday (2006), they swap homes, embarking on journeys of transformation and self-discovery.
In Christmas, Again (2014), a doe-eyed young man named Noel with a mustache drowns his sorrow in work. Selling Christmas trees on the streets of New York, he battles insomnia, freezes to the point of exhaustion in his makeshift cardboard trailer, and oscillates between trying to forget his lost love and desperately clinging to memories of her.
This understated, sometimes gritty, story — resembling a handmade Christmas ornament — is about the human need for love in the cold of winter, where love, in the end, serves as the ultimate warmth against freezing Christmas temperatures.
Director Charles Poekel draws from his own experience, having once been a struggling tree vendor before making it to Sundance and Locarno. Capturing his lingering emotions on 16mm film, Poekel infuses the screen with the very spirit of Christmas — a holiday of hope and melancholy.
Miracles also grace the protagonists of Falling in Love (1984), where, amid Manhattan’s Christmas bustle, a married engineer played by Robert De Niro accidentally collides with Meryl Streep’s character, a married woman, and unwittingly walks off with her gift for her husband while leaving behind his own.
This is yet another «Christmas fairy tale» for adults, showing how one absurd encounter can lead to profound love. The suburban train becomes the vehicle of fate, carrying the characters as they, slowly and unsuspectingly, fall for each other.
In the classic The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Christmas brings together two bickering shop employees who are unknowingly enamored with each other through their anonymous pen-pal correspondence — a medium in which their delicate and lonely souls can truly be revealed.
This romantic comedy, where the happy ending seems preordained, still manages to create palpable tension: will the two recognize each other on their first date? He arrives with a flower, and she with a copy of Anna Karenina.
In 1998, The Shop Around the Corner gained renewed relevance when director Nora Ephron reimagined it as You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
Across the Atlantic, Britain, where everyone — from the Prime Minister to secretaries — is hopelessly in love yet unable to confess, takes center stage in the romantic Christmas comedy Love Actually (2003). This film vividly captures the magical essence of the season, almost making you feel it in your skin.
Meanwhile, the Soviet classic The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (1975) by Eldar Ryazanov is no less significant as a melodramatic Christmas fairy tale for adults. Although not embedded in the global cinematic context, it fiercely encapsulates the hero of the unheroic Soviet era. If you look closely, you might detect in its protagonist echoes of Andersen’s The Little Match Girl. Like her, the hapless Zhenya Lukashin avoids returning home, not out of fear of a cruel father but of relationships with women, from which he habitually flees.
Amid his midlife crisis and despair, Zhenya dreams of finding the perfect woman. In his sleep, she appears — symbolizing the miracle at work during this magical time.
Beyond the overtly Christmas-themed films filled with Santa Clauses and fantastical wonders, there are subtly Christmas-infused movies. In these, Christmas is not the central focus but remains an essential backdrop. These films feature an array of scoundrels, con artists, clumsy cops, gangsters, and soldiers, all of whom Christmas touches in unexpected ways, offering them a second chance.
In Remember the Night (1940), a young prosecutor falls for a woman who, in a moment of desperation, steals a bracelet from a jewelry store window. On Christmas, he bails her out, and she gives him a magical weekend in return.
Christmas also serves as the backdrop for pivotal moments in other iconic films. In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Don Corleone survives a near-fatal assassination attempt despite sustaining life-threatening injuries. Similarly, the holiday season frames the attempted revenge on wayward gangsters in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008).
In The French Connection (1971), William Friedkin’s Oscar-winning masterpiece and one of the greatest police thrillers ever made, two undercover cops dressed as Santa Claus tail a cash-flashing Italian drug courier through Christmas-time New York.
Gore Verbinski’s Mousehunt (1997) sees two hapless brothers hit rock bottom on Christmas Eve. In a single night, one loses his trendy restaurant, while the other is ousted from his home by his wife after losing their late father’s string factory.
Meanwhile, in Abel Ferrara’s ‘R Xmas (2001), a New York heroin kingpin tenderly watches his young daughter perform in a bunny costume at her Christmas recital. By day, he takes her on a heartwarming carriage ride, but by night, after she falls asleep, he heads to Harlem to work — packaging heroin.
CHRISTMAS AT WAR
Can war fit into the quintessential Christmas setting?
It can. For instance, in I’ll Be Seeing You (1944), director William Dieterle effortlessly tells a love-at-first-sight story between a soldier on leave from the hospital before returning to the front and a woman temporarily released from prison.
In Christmas in Connecticut (1945) by Peter Godfrey, sailors miraculously rescued from a sunken ship dream of a Christmas dinner while adrift in the vast ocean.
In Nagisa Oshima’s masterpiece Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), a Japanese sergeant with the face of Takeshi Kitano wishes an English officer a heartfelt Merry Christmas in broken English, bridging their once-bitter enmity.
Similarly, soldiers from opposing armies cease being enemies on Christmas Eve in the luminous French melodrama Joyeux Noel (2005). In this true story, Christmas transcends war and death as soldiers negotiate an informal truce above the heads of their commanding officers.
In this remarkable tale, a German tenor sings an aria over the trenches, which Scottish infantrymen join, French soldiers uncork champagne, and a British regimental chaplain delivers a touching Christmas prayer to his worn-out, lice-ridden congregation.
The pinnacle of this humanistic take on war comes with a football match played on neutral ground. Though military tribunals will soon deal with the participants, the game epitomizes the spirit of Christmas — a celebration infused with hope and sorrow.
At Christmas, anything is possible, even the impossible. It is a time when everyone can hope for a miracle, and by extension, happiness. Cinema captures this sentiment to its fullest extent.
