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Spoilers Ahead by Rajeev Masand: ‘Tis the season for feel-good holiday films
Christmas always gets me all warm and fuzzy
Christmas always gets me all warm and fuzzy. There’s just something in the air (and I don’t mean the terrible pollution levels). You could put it down to streets that are all lit up, or the fact that work tends to wind down and everyone’s in a slightly better mood, or that December just feels like one big party.
As Billy Mack, the washed-up rockstar character played by Bill Nighy in Love Actually, croons: “I feel it in my fingers / I feel it in my toes / Christmas is all around me / And so the feeling grows / It’s written in the wind / It’s everywhere I go / So, if you really love Christmas / C’mon and let it snow.”
Elf service
Not much chance of snow in muggy Mumbai, but for Christmas nerds like myself, there is always solace to be found in the movies. Major streamers like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and Disney+ Hotstar are offering some 20 new holiday titles between them, including a Lindsay Lohan rom-com about an heiress who is left in the care of a handsome lodge owner after she is diagnosed with amnesia in the wake of a skiing accident (Falling for Christmas), and a Ryan Reynolds-Will Ferrell musical (Spirited).
But here’s a tip—’tis the season to revisit some of your old-favourite holiday movies. Round up a few friends and cue up Home Alone (plenty of laughs guaranteed; even on your nth viewing), Elf (is Will Ferrell ever not funny?) or Bad Santa (the black humor is perfect for an all-boys gathering), and you’ll never know where the hours (and the booze) went. Personally, I prefer the soppy stuff this time of the year, and Richard Curtis is always a good idea.
Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill aren’t technically Christmas movies, but they do the job. Julia Roberts’ movie star Anna Scott making a case for why she deserves the last brownie in that terrific dinner table scene where she lists all the ways in which her life is more pathetic than everyone else’s—pure gold.
The mother of holiday movies, though, has got to be Love Actually. In a film packed wall-to-wall with charming scenes (Alan Rickman losing it while Rowan Atkinson displays perfectionist gift-wrapping skills, or Andrew Lincoln confessing his love for Keira Knightley with a stack of cue cards while her husband thinks it’s carol singers at the door), the one that always gets me in the feels is the saddest one in the whole film.
We’ve been set up to love Emma Thompson’s character Karen. So, after she discovers a necklace that she assumes is her Christmas gift, when she unwraps her present to discover a Joni Mitchell CD, she realises that her husband is cheating on her. In a practically wordless scene that is likely one of the best performances by any actor ever, the magnificent Miss Thompson retracts to her bedroom, breaks down uncontrollably, then wipes her face, puts her smile back on, and returns to the family downstairs. If you don’t have a golf ball-sized lump in your throat by the time the scene ends, you’ve got a stone where your heart should be.
In the spirit
Another one you can’t possibly go wrong with is The Holiday, or what I like to think of as the cinematic equivalent of a mug of delicious and piping hot chocolate on a nippy evening (not a bad accompaniment for this film, either). Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz play a Brit and an American respectively, who swap homes just before Christmas to get over their broken hearts, only to meet new men to swoon over. Jack Black and Jude Law are their holiday distractions, and the film, in the hands of the always reliable Nancy Meyers, is an instant mood-uplifter.
Bollywood doesn’t really do Christmas movies, although Kolkata-set stories ranging from 36 Chowringhee Lane to Bada Din have staged their drama against the onset of the season’s festivities. In Rohit Shetty’s Dilwale, Varun Dhawan’s character, no doubt taking a leaf out of Love Actually, proposes to Kriti Sanon on Christmas with the aid of cue cards. And coming next year, Agent Vinod and Andhadhun director Sriram Raghavan has paired up unlikely bedfellows Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi for a romantic thriller that’s titled, quite simply, Merry Christmas.
So what if we don’t have sweater weather for the most part, or snowed-in driveways that need shovelling; for a lot of us living here in ‘Humidtown’, Christmas may be the sort of treat best enjoyed on screen.
Formerly a film journalist, Rajeev Masand currently heads a talent management agency in Mumbai
From HT Brunch, December 24, 2022
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