When ScreenHub challenged me to write about my favourite Christmas movie, my thoughts drifted instead to a zeitgeist that now feels so long ago.
Barack Obama was US president. Queen Elizabeth II became the longest-reigning British monarch in history. Rosie Batty was Australian of the Year. Barnaby Joyce menaced Amber Heard’s dogs Pistol and Boo.
And away in a multiplex, the stars on the bright screen looked down where we lay …
These reliably satisfying Christmas crackers – all from 2015 – are perfect viewing when you’re as glazed as a ham. More importantly, they all still shine with human craft. Could we say the same in a decade?
Christmas movies – 2015 style
Joy (dir. David O Russell)
Jennifer Lawrence stars in this zesty fairytale of upstate New York, loosely adapted from the life of festively named Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano. Hitting US cinemas on Christmas Day 2015, this Girlboss Christmas Carol is full of baubles, wreaths and fairy lights, narrated indulgently by Joy’s grandma Mimi (Diane Ladd).
What makes Joy peak Christmas viewing is that its plucky, practical heroine succeeds while carrying her bumbling family through their various exasperating delusions. Her fretful mother (Virginia Madsen) lives vicariously through a terrible TV soap. Her puppy-dog ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez) aspires to be a lounge singer. And her half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm) resentfully repeats, ‘I have ideas too, you know!’
Robert De Niro and Isabella Rossellini have a ball as the villains, Rudy and Trudy: Joy’s smug, thrice-divorced dad and his unbearable but very rich girlfriend. A different movie might have punished them for wanting Joy to fail. But Joy’s best revenge is to blanket them in a snowfall of generosity they know they don’t deserve.
The Night Before (dir. Jonathan Levine)
The high times of the 2000s stoner-movie renaissance were dragging down to a roach by the time childhood mates Isaac (Seth Rogen), Chris (Anthony Mackie) and Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) hung out together in this lowbrow Christmas Eve comedy. Rather sweetly, it turns familiar, raucous bro-antics into a pageant about accepting the party’s over.
One of the cheapest laughs comes from the gross little ‘elf face’ Ethan is forced to make as a costumed cater-waiter; valiantly clinging to manchildhood, he’s finally snaffled tickets to the exclusive Nutcracka Ball our trio yearned to attend as teenagers.
But now, lawyer Isaac is anxious about imminent fatherhood, while pro footballer Chris chases his teammates’ approval. You don’t have to be the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to figure out the ball isn’t all it’s ‘cracked’ up to be, either.
Bearish and exuberant, Seth Rogen’s Isaac gets absolutely off his holiday-sweatered tits on a boxful of substances provided by his pregnant wife (Jillian Bell) and ends up fighting for his life during midnight mass.
US comedy faces show up like sixpences in a pudding – Tracy Morgan, Jason Mantzoukas, Nathan Fielder, Randall Park … and Ilana Glazer as the Grinch. But perhaps the highlight is Michael Shannon as unsettlingly deadpan drug dealer ‘Mr Green’.
Love the Coopers (dir. Jessie Nelson)
Critics in 2015 hated this aggressively schmaltzy ensemble family dramedy, also known as Christmas with the Coopers. I, however, did as its title commands. Now I can warmly recommend this star-studded feast of emotional manipulation to anyone who liked Parenthood or Father of the Bride. Which I also do!
In the best Christmas-movie tradition, Sam and Charlotte Cooper (John Goodman and Diane Keaton) are delaying their upcoming divorce until they’ve hosted ‘one last perfect Christmas’, which of course airs their extended family’s yearnings and grievances.
This chocolate box of talent includes Marisa Tomei as Charlotte’s envious sister, June Squibb as Sam’s Aunt Fishy, and Ed Helms and Olivia Wilde as the adult Cooper children.
Alan Arkin has an innocent friendship with Amanda Seyfried! Timothée Chalamet is crushing on Molly Gordon! And as the Republican soldier Olivia Wilde picks up in a snowed-in airport bar, Jake Lacy is a delicious scoop of vanilla ice cream who makes me temporarily abandon my commitment to leftist politics.
Be ready for an absurd late twist revealing the identity of the wistful narrator (Steve Martin), so you will not expel your soul from your body with the mighty ‘HAAAAAA!’ you will roar.
Krampus (dir. Michael Dougherty)
Imagine a version of Home Alone in which young Max Engel (Emjay Anthony) loses all faith in seasonal goodwill after his vulgar relatives humiliate him at Christmastime, and his parents (Adam Scott and Toni Collette) are too stressed to care.
But rather than single-handedly fighting burglars, Max inadvertently summons Krampus: the horned, hoofed Bavarian Christmas demon who, in the heavily accented warning of Max’s Germanic grandmother (Krista Stadler), ‘comes not to reward, but to punish’.
During an uncanny blizzard, aided by sinister snowmen, angels, gingerbread men, jack-in-the-boxes and puppet elves, Krampus picks off the entire extended Engel family, one by one.
It’s wild that this frankly unsettling folkloric figure has been relatively unexplored in horror movies. Hardcore slasher fans might find Krampus too family-friendly – all tinkle and no bell. But Krampus indulges our inarticulate craving for a pagan justice meted out to cruel people.
Carol (dir. Todd Haynes)
One of the all-time greatest queer love stories is set at Christmas, and was released in 2015. Last year I observed that Carol is defiant and heartening because it frees Carol and Therese from suffocatingly normative ideals, while recognising their bubble of comfort and joy could pop at any time.
The most interesting Christmas movies use violence, comedy or fantasy transgressively, to expose the asymmetrical emotional and logistical labour that produce the illusion of ‘family togetherness’. Women usually work hardest to make Christmas ‘perfect’, repressing their own feelings and desires to ‘keep the peace’.
Carol and Therese meet in Christmas servitude: Carol to heteropatriarchy; Therese to capitalism.
Haynes’s swooningly meticulous 1950s period detail does not serve a contemporary viewer’s conservative nostalgia. Rather, it’s an ideological frame these two women gaze past and through, like Therese through her camera’s viewfinder, so they can access the romantic intimacy of being in love at Christmas as their true selves.
