CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS
US, 2004, 99 minutes, Colour.
Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, M. Emmett Walsh, Elizabeth Franz, Cheech Marin, Jake Busey, Austin Pendleton, Felicity Huffman.
Directed by Joe Roth.
The first surprise was that this film is based on a John Grisham story, Skipping Christmas.
The second surprise is the films itself. I badly misread the cues in the screenplay in the first part of the film. When the Kranks see off their daughter to Peru to work for the Peace Corps and decide that they will go on a cruise at Christmas by themselves and save money by not having Christmas parties or gifts or house decorations, it seemed to me a very good idea. It was a blow against the commercialisation of Christmas. It was a protest against gaudy festoons and the clichés of ‘the festive season’. How wrong could I be? Totally.
Tim Allen (looking severe for most of the film until a final private generous gesture to an elderly couple across the street) that gave some decency to the story) and Jamie Lee Curtis (looking flustered, pratfalling and trying to cope with her daughter’s first Christmas away from home) are the Kranks. They immediately get the cold shoulder treatment at work and in the street. Apparently, with their decision to forego this kind of Christmas, they are the most self-centred, self-absorbed, un-community-minded, most derelict of civic sense, insidious destroyers of the American way of life. In fact, the Yuletide gruppenfuehrer of their street (Dan Aykroyd) leads the denunciations with a self-satisfied, eyebrow-raised expression of disbelief at this blatant expression of suburban treason. His stormtroopers begin to harass the Kranks. They are sorely tried but stick to their decision. No decorations, no Frosty the 7-foot Snowman on their roof, no lights.
Suddenly, their daughter announces she is coming home for Christmas and you have the fastest re-wind of attitudes in cinema history. They buy desperately, they borrow decorations and a Christmas tree from neighbours (their previous refusal to buy their usual tree is greeted with as much shock as if they had publicly announced they did not believein God or the Stars and Stripes), Frosty comes out of the cellar – and everybody (who had until five seconds earlier were loathing the Kranks) pitches in to help out. Even Santa turns up to celebrate.
In thirty years time, cinema historians could be examining the sub-text of Christmas with the Kranks, seeing it as an allegory of G. W. Bush’s America. Family values are supreme, enterprise is to be rewarded, all decent people appreciate Christmas - even though, with the separation of Church and State, there is absolutely no reference at all to Jesus or the Nativity (except a fleeting joke reference to the Magi), it is a completely secular Christmas of good cheer.
A lament about a vacuous screen image of the priest. It occurs in the very American imagining and celebration of Christmas, Christmas with the Kranks (2004, director Joe Roth), completely secular, Santa Claus, Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman, competitive street decorations, neighbour peer pressures to conform to this commercialised secular, non-Christian, party-going and gifts celebration of Christmas. There is a religious reference insofar as, when the Kranks, Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis, are caught in a mall, tanning in bikinis for a Caribbean trip, their priest, Father Zabriskie (Tom Poston) is passing by and gapes in disapproving disbelief – priest as censorious prude. However, he does turn up on Christmas Eve to the Kranks’ party, part of the life of the party, joining the band and singers, all in clerical collar. Without being too censorious, one might wonder why he bothers to come to the Kranks’ party for so long when, on Christmas Eve, he could be involved in visiting other families or more pastoral activity, especially if his church was to celebrate Midnight Mass!
The screenplay was written by Chris Columbus who, amongst other films, directed the first two Harry Potter films. The production notes tell us that director Joe Roth wanted to explore the ‘mythology of Christmas’ – but this is all he could come up with. It is Christmas without Christ. And if you don’t follow what the all-American majority demand, you are pariahs. The review in London’s Metro newspaper ended smartly, “Conform, all ye faithful”.
