Prancer (1989)

Let's take a look at another forgotten Christmas flick that haunted the back alleys of my youth. Nowadays, you won't find John Hancock's Prancer (1989) featured in many Top 10 Xmas Movies lists, but there was a patch throughout my childhood when it was guaranteed to pop up on TV schedules in the run-down toward Christmas. It was one of those movies you tended to watch, not because it made for amazingly compelling viewing, but because you urgently needed something to kill the time on Christmas Eve. Prancer is an infinitely more genteel experience than One Magic Christmas, although it is in many respects as much a curiosity, grounding strange and sentimental fantasy within the context of a downbeat (albeit more muted) family drama, and being most intriguing for its central metaphor about coming to grips with the grieving process, as represented through the titular deer.

Like One Magic Christmas, Prancer deals with a young girl experiencing a crisis of faith in Santa, albeit on entirely the opposite side of the spectrum. Six-year-old Abbie was in danger of getting her innocence crushed prematurely by the hardship afflicting herself and neighbouring families. Here, protagonist Jessica Riggs (Rebecca Harrell) is close to nine years old and around the age that you'd expect a child to become slightly less incredulous about the existence of a chubby man in a red suit who can reputedly squeeze down every chimney on Earth over the course of a single night. As her peers casually declare that they've outgrown such an infantile notion, Jessica clings to her belief with an almost religious reverence; in fact, it's made explicit early on that Jessica has conflated her belief in Santa with religiosity, arguing that if Santa doesn't exist then maybe Heaven doesn't either, and if that's the case then where is her deceased mother going to spend eternity? Therein lies the real root cause of Jessica's reluctance to take her first steps toward joining the adult world; her fear of growing up is clearly spurred by her fear of becoming ever more detached from her mother, whose untimely passing has understandably torn a gaping hole in her psyche. Jessica's memories of her mother are buried deep within in her childhood, and indulging in the fanciful whims of yore is what enables her to retain her sense of connection to her mother. Whether the film wants us to see Jessica's fierce devotion to childhood custom as admirable or symptomatic of her being in dire need of counseling is up in the air; I suspect the former, although Jessica's fixation is pushed to somewhat alarming extremes, particularly during a scene where she screams at the top of her lungs at her long-suffering friend Carol (Ariana Richards, whom you might recognise as the future Lex from Jurassic Park) for daring to admit that she's now past believing in Santa and also has second thoughts about Heaven. I'm certainly of the opinion that Jessica treats Carol very poorly - there's a scene later on in the film where she falsely accuses Carol of failing to keep a secret and then never apologises, even when she learns of her misjudgement.

Jessica revers Santa as serious business because her love of jolly old Saint Nick was instilled in her by her mother, and to do otherwise would be an affront to her mother's legacy. Despite Jessica indicating the aforementioned scene that she believes a deity (primarily as a means of facilitating her belief in a Heaven), it seems that the centre of Jessica's religiosity is actually her mother, as illustrated in another scene where she's glimpsed presenting a toy teacup to a photograph of her mother in a manner reminiscent of a religious offering. Once again, Jessica's honoring of her mother's memory is rooted in the world of childish play pretend, as represented by the teacup. Needless to say, Jessica is not the kind of girl who relishes change, but her world is threatened by it. Her father (Sam Elliott) isn't able to connect to her in the way that her mother did, and with the family's apple farm having fallen on hard times he doubts that he'll have the resources to provide for her for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, Jessica's aunt Sarah (Rutanya Alda) is spending more and more time in the family home, ostensibly to help out with the running of the farm, although it later becomes apparent that Mr Riggs is looking to get her better acquainted with Jessica so as to smooth the transition when Jessica is inevitably transplanted into her care. Jessica may have little in common with her gruff, no-nonsense father, but she's nevertheless horrified at the prospect of being uprooted from her family home (we don't get to spend enough time with Aunt Sarah to form a judgement as to whether she'd be a good mother substitute for Jessica or not, but the fact that she shares her name with the crazy cat lady from Lady and The Tramp is possibly meant to be a turn-off in itself). Jessica has an older brother, Steve (John Joseph Duda), but there's no threat of him going anywhere as he and Mr Riggs have a thread of common ground in that Steve is able to pull his weight by doing errands around the farm. Mr Riggs plainly doesn't know how to handle Jessica, and she's hurt by the insinuation.

Unlike One Magic Christmas, Prancer keeps the tragedy of its scenario predominantly understated, offering a grand total of only two really unsettling images throughout. The first of these occurs at the start of the film, when Jessica and Carol are walking home from school and happen to witness a local Christmas display comprised of Santa and his eight reindeer (in the form of kitschy plastic ornaments) being strung up across the town, only for one of the reindeer to become loose and fall onto the road, where a passing car makes short of work of it. As the shattered reindeer is declared out of commission and carted away, Jessica is deeply concerned for the welfare of the garish decoration, and troubled that the powers that be are seemingly quite content for Santa's sleigh to be pulled by only seven reindeer. She also notes that the fallen deer was the third from the front, and concludes that it was Prancer, the third reindeer named in the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas". Looking up at that egregious gap in Santa's line-up, she feels that a great unbalancing has just occurred within the natural order, to the extent that the image of that tumbling reindeer continues to haunt her in her sleep. Later, as Jessica is wandering through the local woodlands, she happens to run into an actual flesh-and-blood reindeer - a creature which, as noted by Dr Benton (Abe Vigoda) a surly veterinarian with a heart of gold, wouldn't ordinarily be roaming as far down as Michigan. Right off the bat, we can tell there's something very peculiar about this reindeer. It shows no fear of humans and will allow Jessica to walk right up to it. Occasionally, it also emits a strange twinkling from its antlers, which for a while is our only major hint that this deer may be magically inclined.

For the most part, Prancer plays its subject matter straight, as down-to-earth drama where all hints that anything fantastical is happening remain squarely on the sidelines. Which is not to say that it doesn't encourage the viewer to make some freaky leaps of faith at times. Jessica notices that the reindeer has an injured leg and concludes that it must be none other than Prancer, whom she saw fall and get separated from Santa and his seven reindeer brethren earlier that week. I'm left pondering if the film really wants us to assume that there's a literal connection between the reindeer decoration that took a tumble at the start of the film and this injured reindeer showing up in the woods outside Jessica's home. Jessica explicitly makes the link, but unless this flesh-and-blood reindeer's life force was somehow connected to that tacky plastic monstrosity, I'm not sure how that's even meant to work. Nowadays, I find it easier to read the film as a parable for loss, grief and letting go, with Prancer the reindeer serving as a kind of metaphor for Jessica's mother, and Jessica's fervent desire to restore Prancer to his rightful place on Santa's sleigh signifying her need to make peace with her mother's departure. We might even see the reindeer as the literal manifestation of her mother's wandering spirit, a reading which feels all the more persuasive given the ghostly, haunting presence the reindeer gives off during its first couple of appearances. With that in mind, the link between the real and fake reindeer becomes less puzzling, the gap in the display pointing to the parental void that Jessica feels all too deeply in her life. Jessica and her father later encounter the reindeer together while driving home in the dark. Upon noticing its injured leg, Mr Rigg's first instinct is to pull out his shotgun, insisting that the most sensible course of action is to put the creature out of its misery. In this, we see shades of his attitude toward his troubled relationship with Jessica - rather than attempt to heal what's broken, he'd prefer to give in and terminate it altogether.

Fortunately, the reindeer disappears before Mr Riggs can take a shot at it, but Jessica later discovers it hiding out in the barn with her family's cattle and, concerned that her father will kill it if he finds it there, manages to relocate it to a shed on the other side of the farm. She achieves this by luring the wounded reindeer out with a trail of Christmas cookies, which it feasts on eagerly. I'll be the first to admit that I know little about reindeer nourishment, but cookies do strike me as a pretty odd item to be feeding them, particularly in bulk, and it's here that Prancer's arc takes a turn from the charmingly uncanny into the just plain goofy. The reindeer's early appearances do a wonderful job of capturing the magnificence of the animal and keeping it at a safe enough distance for it to seem genuinely awe-inspiring. As we get closer to the creature, it inevitably loses much of its mystique, and when we're at the point that Prancer is indulging his fantastic appetite for sugary, tree-shaped biscuits, he's reduced to performing the kind of dumb pet tricks one would readily encounter on YouTube (or, this being 1989, America's Funniest Home Videos). Later, when Jessica persuades Dr Benton to tend to Prancer's wound and insists that he's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen in her life, Benton observes that he "looks like a cow with antlers", and yeah, when you look him closely enough, he kind of does.

Jessica attempts to keep the infirm Prancer's spirits high by reading him the infamous "Yes, Virginia There Is A Santa Claus" editorial (you know, the one that makes the bizarre assumption that a child who doesn't believe in Santa can be won over by appealing to their enduring belief in fairies) as her mother used to do for her. Jessica's interactions with Prancer indicate that her desire to fill the gap left by her departed mother is twofold. She strives to keep her legacy alive by assuming the role of the caring parental figure who reads cheering bedtime stories to her weakened dependents. At the same time, she demonstrates her yearning for the affirmation she used to receive from her mother and isn't finding in her father, telling Prancer that she loves him and asking plaintively if he loves her too. Despite her attachment to the beasr, Jessica's ultimate goal is to reunite him with Santa's team in time for their all-important delivery on the night before Christmas, and she formulates a plan to release him at a site called Antler Ridge on midnight December 23rd.

There is something sweetly noble about Jessica's desire to help this wounded creature, even if comes from a slightly loopy place, although there are points where Jessica's (willful?) naivety becomes a little much to bear - like when she seeks out a mall Santa (Michael Constantine) with a Polaroid of the reindeer, asking him to pass on a message to the real Santa that she has Prancer and of her plans to reunite them. Unsurprisingly, the mall Santa can't make good on her request and hand her Polaroid to the being he impersonates for a living. Instead, he hands it in to a local press office, who are inspired to use Jessica's emotional problems as the basis for a condescending fluff piece about the preciousness of a child who still believes in Santa, which in turn has the entire community gushing. The title of the piece is "Yes Santa, There Are Virginias". Oh barf. It's around here that the film introduces a plot element about Jessica inadvertently coaxing out the Christmas spirit from her uncaring community, even its more cynical members like Dr Benton and Mrs McFarland (Cloris Leachman), a cartoonish recluse who runs around brandishing a shovel (with just case) whenever she spies the children sledding too close to her flower garden. The idea that Jessica's delusional fantasies have redemptive value for the rest of the town is by far the film's most toe-curling, coming off as an attempt to milk the warm festive fuzzies from what would otherwise play as a sad, haunting drama about a child's unresolved grief for her dead mother. It's not helped by the heavy-handed extremes to which it insists on belaboring this point, to the extent that it incorporates a scene where a priest uses the story as a basis for a sermon in which he spells out what I presume to be Hancock's intended takeaway directly to the audience. I can't help but feel that all this talk of Jessica's saintly virtue is undermined by it occurring in the very same scene where Jessica viciously chews out Carol based entirely on false assumptions. Earlier, Jessica had shown Prancer to Carol and made her promise to keep him a secret. She assumes that the townspeople come to learn about Prancer because Carol blabbed, unaware that it was her own misplaced trust in the mall Santa that let the cat out of the bag. (What's regretful that we don't even see Jessica and Carol talk to one another again for the remainder of the film; they do smile in one another's direction toward the very end, so we can probably assume that they reconciled, but I'm not a fan of how this particular thread is essentially left hanging.)

Jessica doesn't welcome Prancer's newfound celebrity, for she knows that her father won't be thrilled once the news reaches him. By this point it wouldn't have mattered anyway, for Prancer has taken it upon himself to go for a wander around the farm and into the Riggs' home, where he surprises Mr Riggs by causing all kinds of havoc round the property. His degradation from noble beast to circus critter is finally completed when Mr Riggs sells him to a local merchant who wants to exhibit him for profit. The film then transforms into a proto-Free Willy, with Prancer confined to a ridiculously small pen (there's barely enough space for him to turn around in there) and forced to endure the local yobs flicking snowballs at his nose. Feeling betrayed by her father, Jessica resolves to run away from home and cut Prancer loose during the night, and finds unexpected solidarity in Steve, who accompanies her out of concern for his sister. Things take a disastrous turn when Jessica attempts to pry open the roof of Prancer's enclosure by climbing atop it, believing that Prancer can be persuaded to fly out, only to fall and hit her head in a brutal (if bloodless) manner (that's the second of the film's two mildly disturbing images). As Steve runs to get help, Prancer suddenly manages to tear open the cage himself. He wanders past Jessica's crumpled body and into the street, as if momentarily tempted to make a bid for freedom while he has the chance, but ultimately decides to return to Jessica and lie beside her until help arrives. It's an immensely sentimental moment that nevertheless enables the reindeer to regain a little piece of its mystique, for in assuming the role of the nurturing, protective parent, we again see the subtle suggestion that the reindeer embodies something of her departed mother.

After being discharged from hospital, a bedridden Jessica is left the bitter aftertaste of reality sandwich permeating through her gullet, as she admits to Aunt Sarah that it probably is time that she came down from her cloud cuckoo land. Jessica is now ready to accept that the creature she's been nursing all this time is just an ordinary reindeer, and not the magical flying sidekick of Santa, but it seems that everyone else around here isn't quite so willing for her to let her give up on her mission that easily. Shaken by the shock of nearly losing her, Mr Riggs finally summons the will to speak openly to Jessica, assuring her that he loves her and would miss her terribly if she was sent away. Jessica admits that she ran away because she wanted to test his devotion to her, not because she didn't want to be with him anymore. As a symbol of their renewed bond, Mr Riggs reads the final portion of "Yes, Virginia" to Jessica, thus affirming his newfound willingness to step up and fulfill the needs that her mother had previously always satisfied. I remember coming across the "Yes, Virginia" editorial when I was about Jessica's age and not being overly impressed with it, shutting the book when I got to that, "You might as well not believe in fairies!" line (and no doubt killing one or two fairies in Neverland in the process), but I suppose there is an alternate way of interpreting its conclusion that Santa Claus lives forever and ten times ten thousand years from now, will continue to make glad the heart of childhood. By the end of the film, Jessica seems to accept that she can't cling to her old ways forever, but as she moves forward in life she can find new ways of enabling the heart of childhood to endure, by bringing inspiration and encouragement to those around her in much the same way that her mother did for her (perhaps that's what the whole "Yes, Santa, There Are Virginias" thread was supposed to represent, but I wish it had been handled better).

Finally, Mr Riggs reveals that he purchased Prancer back so that Jessica can release him at her scheduled time and place. Jessica isn't so sure that all this is necessary any more, but the entire town have turned out to bid Prancer farewell, eager to see Jessica complete the narrative she sold them, and she decides not to let them down. Mr Riggs drives Jessica out to Antler Ridge with Prancer in the back of the truck; once there, Jessica tells Prancer that she loves him and wishes she could keep him but understands that she has to let him go (serving, no doubt, as a proxy for the heartfelt farewell she longs to give to her mother, now that she's able to release her grief and move forward with her life). Prancer then turns and flees into the woodland, whereupon Jessica follows his tracks and sees that they lead all the way up to a cliff edge and disappear. Jessica fears that Prancer has fallen to his death, but her father reassures her that he probably managed to fly and find his way back to Santa. He tells her to listen closely and asks if she can hear sleigh bells; as the two of them stand there embracing, Jessica assures him that she can. It looks as if the film is all poised to end here, on a note of haunting ambiguity. Unfortunately though, having spent its entire running exercising admirable restraint in its depiction of the fantastical, it ultimately can't resist tossing in some physical proof of Santa's existence in the final moments, having him manifest as a silhouette in the night sky and showing Prancer rejoining his sleigh team. Or maybe this is pure symbolism, an illustration of how the void in Jessica's life has finally been filled, now that she's strengthened her relations with her father and achieved some form of outlet for her feelings toward her mother (in addition to providing some pay-off for the smaller kids in the audience who'd be inclined to take the story at its surface value). That's all well and good, but I'd still prefer if it wasn't there at all. It's an ending that would have had more potency if it had just allowed the audience to draw their own conclusions.

We close with an aerial shot over Jessica's town. Whatever perspective this is intended to symbolise (Santa's sled team doing their annual rounds? The ghost of Jessica's mother as she floats on her merry way? One final moment of catharsis for Jessica as she achieves a kind of emotional freedom?) it's a beautiful shot, and enables the film to go out on a visually captivating high.

The Verdict:

As a kid, I was never overly enthralled by Prancer, which always struck me as just a little too thin and plodding and with only the titular reindeer providing much in the way of interest. As an adult, I find it more of an intriguing oddity now that I can grasp its subtext about letting go of grief, accepting change and finding renewed purpose in moving forward. As a family drama, there is certainly a lot to recommend it - the troubled relationship between Jessica and her father is handled with a delicate understatement, and the ghostliness of some of its nocturnal outdoor shots gives off a marvelously atmospheric chill (if I'm to believe there are unseen forces at work in this world, it's in the quiet shadiness of those woodlands). I like much of what this film attempts. And yet it's only partially successful, thanks to its periodic tendency to dip into mawkishness and didactism - the "Yes, Santa, There Are Virginias" and Ms McFarland's attic scenes are good reasons to be appreciative of the fast forward button on your remote. Should my local cinema ever decide to show a screening of this film, I would positively leap at it, if only for the experience of seeing the closing aerial shot on the big screen. Sadly, you don't get the luxury of a fast forward button with the theatrical experience, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth.

Oh, and in the process of researching for this review, it came to my attention that this film apparently received a belated direct-to-video sequel called Prancer Returns in 2001. Well, I'm not even going to think about touching that one (if at all) until we're closer to December 2018. For now I think I'm all Xmas-ed out. To all a good night.