One Magic Christmas (1985)

What's the edgiest Christmas movie of all time? A lot of people will scream "Die Hard!" and think they're being subversive. You dorks! Most people say Die Hard; it's now officially the conventional answer. Some people will say "It's A Wonderful Life" and also think they're being subversive. And yeah, in their case there is a valid argument to be made. It's A Wonderful Life is primarily remembered for its joyous, life-affirming conclusion, but it does force its hero (and by extension, the audience) to crawl through five football fields of shit-stinking foulness before we get to that point. The film earns its happy ending, but it's a grim and heavy-going experience for the most part (there's that joke in an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa gets hold of an alternate ending of the film that bears the label "Killing Spree Ending", which actually isn't too left of field the way George's story was going). If, on the other hand, your idea of an edgy Christmas movie is One Magic Christmas, a 1985 Disney film directed by Phillip Boros and starring the late Harry Dean Stanton, then you would become a much more intriguing person in my eyes and I'd probably make a point of talking to you more at our next dinner party. I loved this movie as a kid, though with hindsight I'm amazed that I could stomach its jaw-dropping moroseness. I had my heart ripped out by Benji The Hunted and I couldn't watch A Christmas Story because it spooked the living bejeezus out of me, but I was apparently fine with this. It's a film about a family who have some of the most horrible things imaginable happen to them around Christmastime, the kind of terrible tragedies that make George Bailey's plight seem relatively genteel, although you would never have guessed it from the entirely innocuous-sounding title.

In a more perfect timeline, I'd be bringing you this review from my parents' old tape recording of the film from (I think) 1989, which would have been stuffed with an array of contemporary adverts and idents. Unfortunately, while my parents were avid archivists of absolutely everything that flashed across their screen in the late 1980s (back when the VHS recorder was still their shiny new plaything) they knew next to nothing about VHS care and a sizeable portion of their recordings were wiped out in the mold epidemic of 2005. So many great and unique moments from UK broadcasting history lost to time because nobody told my parents that storing your VHS tapes against an outside-facing wall was a bad idea. But before you get too weepy-eyed you should also know that they insisted on recording everything in Extended Play. Meaning that it would have looked like crap anyway.

One Magic Christmas stars the late Harry Dean Stanton as Gideon, a strange and solitary figure who spends much of his time lurking in tree branches and playing the harmonica. He could be mistaken for the neighbourhood vagrant, but he actually has a far more improbable agenda up his sleeve. Gideon was once an ordinary mortal, but gave his life to save a boy from drowning (as per Gideon's account, I'm actually not clear on how he managed to save the boy at all, since he apparently couldn't swim) and by his virtue was reincarnated as a "Christmas angel", a being employed (by Santa, it seems) to rekindle the seasonal cheer of those whose spirits are particularly low around December 25th. This year his assignment is Ginny Grainger (Mary Steenburgen) a thirtysomething mother who hardened her heart to the holiday long ago; we're informed that she's a particularly sorry case because she can't even summon the will to say, "Merry Christmas". As it turns out, there's little in Ginny's life to be merry about. Her family have fallen on hard times ever since her husband Jack (Gary Basaraba) was made redundant, which has ultimately led to them facing eviction from their company-owned home (we learn all this from a particularly exposition-heavy conversation the family have early on while visiting a shopping mall). Ginny is managing to keep them a whisker above the poverty line by working as a cashier at a supermarket, where her bullying boss Herbie (Timothy Webber) does little to boost her morale. Meanwhile, the youngest of the family, six-year-old Abbie (Elisabeth Harnois), is beginning to question the existence of Santa, having been troubled by comments that he might pass over the poorer families in her neighbourhood this year, and by her mother's own dour outlook on the season. And it only gets more and more harrowing from there on in. Here's what our friends at Halliwell's Film Guide have to say:

"Decidedly downbeat Christmas fantasy: daddy gets drowned, mother is a nut, and the angel looks like a tramp. Santa Claus puts in an appearance for a happy finale, but It's A Wonderful Life should sue for plagiarism." 

Actually, Halliwell's is wrong about at least one of those details. Jack doesn't get drowned; rather, he gets gunned down whilst attempting to intervene in an armed robbery. A character does get drowned, but it's someone else's daddy, who also happens to be the person who pulls the trigger on Jack. Halliwell's were absolutely right about this being downbeat.

As for that "plagiarism" jibe...I can see where Halliwell's is coming from, although I'm sure that One Magic Christmas would prefer to view itself more as taking inspiration from Capra's film in crafting a modern fable about a family in crisis at Christmas. There a number of plot elements in One Magic Christmas that were visibly lifted from It's A Wonderful Life, and I don't think the film really makes any bones about that - the Graingers live in a town called Medford, which is obviously intended to call to mind Bedford Falls. At the same time, Ginny's embittered aversion to all things yuletide has obvious shades of that other classic and much-recycled Xmas staple, A Christmas Carol. Ginny is basically George Bailey and Ebenezer Scrooge combined into a single character, possessing both the former's rotten luck and the latter's misanthropy. A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life already have a few story beats in common, in that they both involve characters who, through a brush with the supernatural, learn what a tremendous impact their personal actions have had on the world around them and the difference that a single person can make; One Magic Christmas was presumably an attempt to transplant that same basic premise into a 1980s setting, with a protagonist whose seasonal cynicism springs from an entirely relatable place. For Ginny, the bugbear of the holiday season lies in its crass commercialism and its celebration of materialism that is well beyond her means; a stressful hassle that makes her current financial hardship seem all the more salient.

Ostensibly, the film does pivot on the somewhat condescending viewpoint that if you dislike Christmas then there's something inherently wrong with you; the very existence of these Christmas angels pretty much hinges on that (unless there are also Easter and Labor Day angels this film doesn't tell us about, I assume a person in this world is free to grumble about either of those without having a peculiar-looking stranger interfere with their lives). What makes Ginny's cynicism obviously problematic is the way it's inadvertently threatening to swallow up Abbie's innocence prematurely. Ginny is a sympathetic character, although she's perhaps not well-attuned to the impact her negativity is having on her daughter, who is struggling to consolidate the harsh reality of what's around her with the idealistic image of Christmas she sees in greeting cards and department store displays. To Ginny, this is a childish fantasy that Abbie must inevitably grow out of, but to Abbie this kind of whimsical escapism is a necessary part of reassuring herself that there are good forces at work in a world that seems increasingly cold and uncaring to her. To an extent, Abbie is having to learn to accommodate the purity of fantasy with the messiness of life (Abbie asks her mother at one point if she believes that, if Mrs Claus had children, she would ever be crabby with them), but she's troubled by how little space is being made for her own wide-eyed flights of fancy. Abbie is concerned that, with the all stresses the family have had to endure, her letter to Santa has been overlooked, and it's Abbie's burning desire to get a letter posted out before Christmas that drives a good chunk of the drama in the film. Abbie's interests aren't in acquiring more presents; we never actually learn what she asks for in her letter. Rather, she's motivated by a need to connect with that magic, to not be cut off from the joy and wonder that make Christmas so appealing to her. The discrepancy between mother and daughter is at the heart of the film, and it's genuinely heart-tugging. It would have been all-too easy to make a character like Abbie cloying, but I think you do feel for her as this vulnerable child who's getting dangerously close to getting her spirits dashed yet somehow always manages to cling on to some tiny shred of hope.

Meanwhile, Jack represents the alternative to Ginny's hardened cynicism, in that he's a dreamer who hasn't fully lost touch with his inner child. He's obviously too big to plausibly believe in Santa in the way that Abbie does, but he advocates the grown-up equivalent, in suggesting that maybe Santa is representative of "the nice spirit that's around at Christmastime". Personally, I grew up to be more like Ginny than Jack, so I find his miniature lectures on the matter a bit yawn-inducing. Finally, the older Grainger child, Cal (Robbie Magwood), has blatantly lost his fervor for Santa, but has a sensitivity toward Abbie's need to keep the faith. Note that Cal is by far the most expendable character in this film. He's there, more-or-less, so that Abbie can have someone closer to her own age to voice her concerns to, but the story could easily have been rewritten not to include him at all. His most notable contribution to the film is to throw in a random Honeymooners reference that confused the snot out of me as a kid and which I only got later on because Fry from Futurama obligingly explained it. ("He's just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife!")

(At first I was pondering if Abbie's crisis of faith about the existence of Santa is somewhat undermined, from a dramatic standpoint, by the fact that the viewer gets reassurance straight off the bat that, yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus in this world, for we hear him giving Gideon his assignment in the opening scene. Then again, he identifies simply as "Nicholas", so perhaps we're not meant to piece it together that they are one and the same.)

Out of a job, Jack spends his days repairing bicycles for the neighbourhood kids and is nursing ambitions of starting his own bicycle repair shop, but Ginny won't give the idea her blessing, arguing that they can't afford to be gambling their savings at a time like this. Ginny is also dead set against Jack's suggestion that they use a portion of their savings to buy expensive presents for the children; to her, toys are little more than junk from Taiwan that will be broken in a couple of days anyway. This is again intended to reflect Ginny's narrow-minded cynicism towards holiday custom (she sees only the materialism in gift-giving, not the joy and excitement that it can bring, particularly for small children), but she does have a point when she argues that they need to keep their savings set aside in case of a dire emergency (the example she gives is in case one of them gets ill, which given their luck so far doesn't seem like such a far-fetched prospect). Ginny is often played up as being a real stick-in-the-mud, but for much of the time she's merely tasked with the burden of having to be the sensible one in her family. It's also not as if the children will be waking up to empty stockings on Christmas day; Ginny went shopping earlier and clearly did her best to pick out fun and meaningful presents on a shoestring budget. It's evident that Ginny cares deeply for her family, and that her greatest priority is never anything less than to get them through this rough patch.

Unbeknownst to both parents, Abbie has forged a friendship with Gideon, thanks to her tendency to wander around the neighbourhood unattended after dark. The scenes with Abbie and Gideon are probably the film's most ill-judged, tonally speaking - we know that Gideon's intentions are all good and innocent within the context of the story, but there is something inherently sinister about anything involving a shadowy stranger approaching a small child when her parents aren't around and ensuring her complete confidence, particularly at the film's climax when he invites her to come away with him to the North Pole. If you think this is a case of me willfully subverting family entertainment with my own unholy thoughts, it's really not - I defy anybody over the age of sixteen to watch these scenes and not get a slight chill down their spine. I get that Gideon is supposed to look scruffy and unconventional for an angel, to illustrate that kindness and virtue come in all guises, but the fact that he acts like a villain from a PSA on the importance of stranger awareness is a tiny bit offsetting given that he's supposed to be the voice of reassurance in this film. Gideon explains to Abbie who he is and that he's come to help her mother regain her lost Christmas spirit (he demonstrates his angelic prowess by repairing a snowglobe gifted to her by her great-grandfather); he tells her that this can be achieved if she can be persuaded to post Abbie's letter to Santa herself. Unfortunately, that's no easy task, for Ginny interprets her daughter's pleas over the letter as further whining for material goods that the family can ill-afford. On the night before Christmas Eve, Ginny and Jack have another disagreement about the feasibility of Jack's bicycle shop idea, following which Jack disappears down the street and Ginny fails to console him by singing the title song from Lost In The Stars. Ginny takes the opportunity to deposit some letters off at the mailbox but passes over Abbie's letter to Santa. She gets confronted by Gideon, who chews her out for her lack of Christmas spirit and then royally freaks her out by revealing that he inexplicably knows her name. At this point, all of the Christmas lights in the neighbourhood ominously short-circuit. As it turns out, our waltz through the darkness is just getting started.

The full horrors really kick into gear the following day, when Ginny has to work long hours and Jack attempts to circumvent her stance on splashy Christmas gifts by withdrawing the money from the bank in her absence. Ginny gets wise to what he's doing and ditches work to try and stop him, pressing one of Herbie's buttons too many and getting herself fired in the process. Meanwhile, there's another character, Harry (Wayne Robson) who up until now has been lurking around the sidelines of the story; he appeared earlier on as a disgruntled customer at the supermarket and only that morning Ginny saw him unsuccessfully attempting to flog his possessions at a gas station as she was filling up before work. Harry is another family man who's fallen on desperate times, and to emphasise the tragedy he always has his silently disappointed-looking son in tow. Harry's desperation is such that he's prepared to go a step further than the Graingers; when he tells his son to "go and wait at the bus station for a couple of hours, there's something I've gotta do", we know that that's not good. Harry walks into the bank with a gun at the same time that Jack's in there and causes a hold-up, during which he takes a young woman hostage and threatens to shoot her if anyone blocks his escape. Jack politely implores that he let the woman go, so Harry shoots him (with little provocation, I might add). Harry then flees the scene and makes his getaway in the Grainger's car, which was parked right outside, and where Cal and Abbie just so happened to be waiting in the backseat. Oh bugger, is there a way this scenario could possibly get any worse? You betcha. Harry assures the two children that he won't hurt them, insisting that he's never hurt anybody in his life. Um, excuse me, Harry, you just shot and killed a man (the children's father, no less, although you probably don't know that) with minimal provocation, so perhaps you shouldn't be attempting to pass yourself off as a good guy who got caught up in a bad situation? The police attempt to enforce a roadblock as the vehicle goes over a bridge, which causes Harry to panic and lose control of the car, sending himself and the children hurtling off into the icy river below. Well, that escalated quickly.

There's a heart-breaking scene where Ginny is sitting alone crying in her bathroom when she gets the message that Cal and Abbie have been found alive and well - everyone assumes that they were released by Harry prior to the crash, but in actuality they were saved by Gideon. You might be questioning why Gideon didn't also intervene to save Jack and Harry, if he had the power - the answer is that this is all part of Gideon's grand plan. See, Gideon actually appeared before Abbie the night before and warned her that some bad shit might go down the next day and that she should not feel afraid (presumably, this is the film's way of attempting to reassure the viewer that, no matter how ugly the story is about to get, they should stick with it as it's ultimately going to end well). He also told Abbie that she would need to seek him out later on and where to find him. So yes, he knew what he was doing. I'm not 100% clear if Gideon actually engineered this entire tragedy or if he somehow knew in advance that this would happen, but either way, if the whole objective is to give Ginny a punitive crash course in what's important in life, then the film suddenly takes on a disturbingly mean-spirited vibe, as this is definitely a very extreme way of illustrating that point. For one thing, I don't think it's fair to suggest that Ginny is somehow "responsible" for what's happened simply because she didn't exhibit enough Christmas spirit. She affected the outcome in the way that all things can be said to have affected all outcomes if you trace them back far enough, but ultimately Harry's a sane adult, and he's accountable for the fact that he chose to pull a trigger on Jack, not Ginny. It also seems to me that there is one really significant victim who's been forgotten in all of this - Harry's son, whose fate is never actually addressed. He lost his father too, and there's nothing to suggest that his mother is still around, so what's to become of him? His situation is potentially even more tragic than the Graingers' if you stop and think about it, yet the film gambles on the assumption that you won't. Ultimately, Harry's son has no real narrative consequence other than to underscore his father's desperation and to make his actions seem less despicable (since he's driven by the need to provide for someone else).

In practice, though, the whole scenario just proves to be a roundabout way of getting Abbie to visit the North Pole (thanks to Gideon's teleportation skills) and speak to Santa (Jan Rubes), so that he can retrieve an old letter from his archives and get Abbie to pass it onto Ginny. (Given that Santa is basically God in this film, I do like that he's depicted as a very human, imperfect figure; every time a mortal's name is brought up, he has to pause for a few moments to remember whom it refers to.) Abbie makes her way back home with the letter in hand and finds Ginny frantic because she believed that she'd lost her again. As Abbie retires to bed, Ginny opens up the letter and is shocked to find herself holding a missive that she penned to Santa in 1959, back when she still believed in the magic of Christmas and wanted a Mr Potato Head (another reference that was totally lost on me as a small child and that popular culture, in this case Toy Story, obligingly explained to me a little later in life). It's a letter to Santa, but it's clear that the actual dialogue going on here is between Ginny's past and present self; she's given the opportunity to reconnect with the innocent and hopeful child she once was, reminding herself of what Christmas once signified for her and instilling her for the first time with a sympathy for Abbie's own desire to be a part of that experience. As such, she's finally spurred to go outside and post Abbie's letter, and in doing so inadvertently presses a giant reset button (symbolised by the neighbourhood lights suddenly firing up again); she finds herself miraculously back in the evening of December 23rd, and who should be strolling around the corner but Jack, who is alive and well and apparently has no memory of ever being gunned down in a hold-up.

I did wonder if perhaps the events of that Christmas Eve were simply a dark alternate fantasy that Ginny had ventured off into (similar to It's A Wonderful Life and the Christmas Yet To Come portion of A Christmas Carol), and that this is what the disappearing/reappearing Christmas lights were intended to signify. However, I don't think so, as Abbie was actually the one who had most of the agency therein, and in that sense it's somewhat bizarre that only Ginny seems to retain her memories of their brush with alternate Christmas 1985. Maybe Abbie saw too much in traveling all the way to Santa's workshop and so it was imperative that she had her memories wiped. Anyway, the thing about those respective visions experienced by Bailey and Scrooge is that, for how grueling and horrific they were wont to get, their primary purpose was never to punish their recipients so much as to grant them insight into the fruits of their actions and what a terrible place the world would be if nobody looked out for anybody else. In Ginny's case...not so much. For the most part, it's Abbie's resolve, trust and devotion toward her family that's really tested throughout the latter stages of the film, as she first seeks out Gideon and then makes her journey to the North Pole to ask Santa for his help. Ginny may perform the final, all-important action in putting things right again, but she spends most of the alternate timeline helplessly enduring all kinds of horrific emotional torture because her husband is murdered, her children are kidnapped and ostensibly drowned, and then her daughter wanders off and disappears into thin air. In some respects, it is nice that it ends up being a joint effort, a combination of Abbie's unbroken innocence and Ginny's renewed clemency, so that the mother-daughter relationship that drives so much of the story ends up being the key to its redemption. But again, I find myself questioning if Gideon really had to be quite this hard on Ginny simply because she originally declined to post Abbie's letter to Santa. She ends up with a renewed appreciation for what she has and a realisation that things would be so much worse if her loved ones were taken away, but as I say, her underlying love and commitment to her family were never really in doubt anyway. Yeah, Gideon's plainly a jerk (even if he is played by someone as cool and dearly-missed as Stanton), but then I never thought that Clarence from It's A Wonderful Life was all that much of a charmer either (in fact, he's actually my least favourite part about Capra's film).

The ending of the film has a sort of Groundhog Day air about it, with Ginny getting to relive her Christmas Eve again but doing everything right this time. She buys a camp stove from Harry at the gas station, giving him enough money to afford a decent Christmas for himself and his son (well, $50, which admittedly won't last them long, but perhaps we're supposed to assume that Ginny's act of kindness and generosity toward Harry did something to bolster his own faith in humanity). She stands up to Herbie and convinces him to let her have time off to watch a local lights display with her family. Finally, she writes out a cheque to Jack, giving him enough funds to get his bike shop rolling and officially giving the proposal her blessing. In the closing scene, she wanders downstairs at just the right time to see Santa stocking up some additional presents under the family tree. He wishes her a merry Christmas and, for the first time, Ginny manages to say it back. Santa then spirits himself away into the night sky, as Gideon gazes on from amid the trees.

The Verdict:

That should've been called One TRAGIC Christmas, amirite?

 

I still love this movie, although I have to admit that I find it a stronger, more honest experience during the first half when it's more of a down-to-earth drama about a family struggling to make ends meet at Christmastime, with only the sequences with Gideon the angel threatening to drag it into the realm of airy fantasy. The gulf between Ginny and Abbie's respective outlooks on the season is poignant and well-observed, illustrating how, with enough time and experience, the things that once seemed the most beautiful and magical might end up betraying us in being exposed as hollow facades. Also, thus far I've focused mainly on the story and the characters, but the cinematography also bears mentioning, as much of it is fantastically beautiful. Alas, the screenshots I've used here simply don't do justice to it.

When we get to the second half the film descends into heavy-handed didacticism and becomes almost risible in terms of how shockingly, appallingly catastrophic it insists on getting. I'll admit that I still get a tremendous amount of emotional catharsis from the climax; I'm moved when Abbie goes to the North Pole to implore Santa to bring her dad back to life, I choke up when Ginny reads out her letter from 1959, and I even cry when Ginny posts Abbie's letter and Jack is suddenly restored to life, I'm such a sucker for the film's merciless manipulations. It all ends happily, but I think its efforts at providing a contemporary equivalent of the It's A Wonderful Life/A Christmas Carol formula (hardship and horror, followed by a well-earned dose of feel-good redemption) don't quite get the balance right, resulting in a film that's just too odd and dour for its own good. I wholeheartedly recommend it as an "alternative" Christmas movie for those of you who've had your fill of other "alternative" Christmas films like Die Hard and A Christmas Story, though you'd have to share my extreme gluttony for punishment to get through several key scenes.

To return to my original question, could this really be the edgiest Christmas movie of all time? Well, it depends on your definition of "edgy". It's the most tenaciously depressing Christmas movie of all time, no question, and the fact that it also happens to be a Disney called One Magic Christmas in itself gives it a weird tonal dissonance, but it's probably not the darkest of all time, even if we stick purely to the family pantheon. I mean, Home Alone is a pretty ugly story, and it doesn't even have the luxury of ending well. Like I say, the Graingers clearly love one another, even when they have their disagreements, and during times of hardship we can be confident that they're all going to support one another. The McAllisters...well, we have to ask ourselves if we're really happy at the end when this future serial killer is reunited with his smarmy negligent clan, and they're just allowed to carry on as if everything's normal? Christmas movies are an odd bunch.