Christmas at Orchard House
I didn’t write a newsletter last week because, frankly, last week was the most exhausting I’d had all year. But now I am back!
It’s sort of a joke on Twitter this time of year (and most times of year) to declare one film or another to be a “Christmas movie.” The Green Knight is a Christmas movie. Spencer is a Christmas movie. Gremlins is a Christmas movie. (Well, it is.) The template for the joke is the declaration that “Diehard is a Christmas movie,” and if you Google that phrase you’ll discover a rich, years-long argument about it.
The joke, of course, is that none of these movies are the kind of heartfelt, candlelit, sugar-coated home-for-the-holidays movie you can catch on the Hallmark channel, or that I remember wallpapering movie theaters in my early 90s youth. But this week I tweeted about how both Little Women movies — the 1994 one and the 2019 one, equally good in my book but for different reasons — are Christmas movies, sort of as a joke. Many people reposted it with declarations of the “THIS!” variety; many people regard them to be Christmas movies.
They aren’t really, narratively, anyhow. A true Christmas movie ends with Christmas; these ones start with Christmas and then move on. Several big pivotal scenes in the early parts of Little Women happen at Christmas and Christmas parties. The one where the girls bring their breakfast to the Hummels; that ball that Meg and Jo go to, where they first really meet Laurie; the Christmas Beth receives the piano from Mr. Laurence and Mr. March returns home from the war. There’s this impression in the first half of Little Women, when they are still girls, that it’s always kind of Christmas at Orchard House. They may not have much in the way of material things; this is a story about a family with an absent father because he’s away being a chaplain in the War. But they do have each other, and friends, and a lot of generosity and love, and all the memories are rosy-hued.
By the second half of the story, they’re growing up and going away. Their rosy illusions are getting punctured, some more gently than others. Beth gets very ill. Meg settles into being a very poor man’s wife. Jo discovers that her aspirations may not be enough to guarantee her a beautiful future. Amy is less enthralled with her future than she expected. And Laurie … well, Laurie goes through it.
One reason I love Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of two years ago (here’s my review) is that she clearly recognizes what the novel is. It’s partly Louisa May Alcott (through her stand-in, Jo) working out her own feelings about growing into adulthood. And more broadly, it’s about how our memories of a happy childhood, or a happy former time, take on a golden cast in memory, and how adulthood can feel a bit cold and grey by contrast, when the realities of life and our own mortality catch up with us. Every life ends in death, after all.
Gerwig does this with the actual color grading in the film, which signals to us whether we’re in the past or the present. By contrast, Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version (that’s the one starring Winona Ryder and a very young Kirsten Dunst) is more straightforward and chronological, though, for my money, equally delightful. I will never forget what a perfect little imp Christian Bale is as Laurie.
The golden glow on both of them, I think, are what make them feel like Christmas movies, even if the second halves of them are profoundly un-Christmasy. But it’s also why I’ve always thought of the soundtrack to the 1994 one — possibly Thomas Newman’s best? — as Christmas music. All those bells and strings! The harps! The swells!
The score tells the story as well as the movie itself, and as I listened to it on the subway this week (coming home from a long day that ended with Company on Broadway) I heard the arc in it. It starts out brilliant and excited, like the girls when they’re still in their teens; there are romantic passages, then sad passages, then incredibly plaintive passages (there’s one track called “Valley of the Shadow”). When it ends, the old themes return, but deeper and richer now and, I think, maybe a little slower.
Which I think is a little bit the point of Christmas music. It’s a strange holiday to experience as an adult, especially if your childhood and youth was spent with a whirlwind of Christmas concerts and plays and gatherings and the excitement of maybe seeing snow and definitely seeing presents. Now the month is loaded with last-minute work, grading final exams, and trying to arrange travel plans and not forget any gifts. There is a lot of festive joy, too, but it’s quite different now. The season shifts from rose and gold glow to something a little more silvery blue.
So I think I will proclaim that the Little Women soundtrack, at least, is my kind of Christmas music, and be happy for the story it tells, which mirrors, so neatly, our own. To silvery Christmases.
Been writing
Two weeks’ worth!
A list of December movies. It is always a big movie month, but this year it’s a big movie month.
A review of Flee, one of the year’s best documentaries, and the year’s best animated movies, and the year’s best international movies, which means it’s just one of the year’s best movies, full stop.
In honor (?) of Paul Verhoeven’s nunsploitation movie Benedetta — and also Lauren Groff’s Matrix and the Rebel Hearts documentary from earlier this year — I wrote about the pop cultural fixation on nuns, and why.
Joined some colleagues to talk about Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s glorious new West Side Story, which is easily one of the best movies of the year. (I was worried! I was not disappointed. See it in a theater, it’s worth it.)
Much more on the way!
Been watching and reading
I am midway through Lauren Groff’s novel Fates and Furies, which I’d always meant to read, and man is it good. I mean I knew it was good, but I didn’t know!
Most notably, we watched all of the old Matrix movies — old in this case meaning “came out when we were in college” — because the new one is coming out soon. Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions are indeed not very good (or rather, they share all the flaws exhibited by your typical superhero movie these days) but I am here to tell you that the 1999 film is exceptional, made all the more so by the fact that like a full 30% of it is just people explaining stuff to Neo. Great Keanu too, but you knew that.
Odds and ends
All I want to say is that we saw Company, and boy did I love it. It has no business being as good as it is, and if you can get to New York to see it, do so.