Merry and Dull
By Eric Cox
Christmas with the Kranks
Released by Columbia Pictures
Rated PG for brief language and suggestive content
Alexander
Released by Warner Brothers
Rated R for violence and some sexuality/nudity
The day before Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the Hollywood’s big holiday season, the time it sets aside for its big-budget family fare and what the various studios consider to be their Oscar contenders.
This season’s inaugural offerings are the family comedy Christmas with the Kranks and the Oliver Stone biopic Alexander.
The most exciting thing to me about Christmas with the Kranks (based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas) is that it is the first film in years to be written by former Hollywood wünderkind Chris Columbus.
Columbus, who wrote Gremlins (1984) and The Goonies (1985), has not been the screenwriter on a movie since the 1995 release of the Hugh Grant-Julianne Moore comedy Nine Months. It’s been too long.
Although Columbus has had some huge hits as a director—most notably Home Alone (1990) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)—there aren’t nearly enough screenwriters working today with his special comic touch.
Christmas with the Kranks has it, and it is the perfect holiday family film. The movie’s simple premise is that a typical suburban couple, Luther and Nora Krank (Tim Allen and
Jamie Lee Curtis), decide to save the money they would ordinarily spend on presents and Christmas parties and instead take a Caribbean cruise, rather than spend the holidays without their college-aged daughter for the first time.
Their simple plan is soon complicated by all their friends, neighbors, and coworkers, who can’t understand the Kranks’ insistence on not celebrating Christmas in their usual way. With a fine supporting cast of Dan Aykroyd, Cheech Marin, Austin Pendleton, Tom Poston, Caroline Rhea, and Felicity Huffman, the movie has plenty of laughs and enough holiday spirit to lighten anyone’s mood after a long day of shopping.
The same cannot be said for Alexander, which, at nearly three hours in length, is not so much an escape as it is an ordeal.
The film gets off to a very slow start with a long-winded monologue delivered by Anthony Hopkins (Old Ptolemy) and an exposition-filled first act depicting Alexander’s (Colin Farrell) childhood development, with particular attention paid to his ambivalent relationship with his parents, Olympias (Angelina Jolie) and King Philip (Val Kilmer).
Writer-director Oliver Stone is characteristically heavy-handed, for instance in hammering home his thesis that Alexander’s motivation for empire-building was the psychological need to outperform his father. The parallels to the Bush family are obvious, but not as overtly emphasized as one might have expected from Stone. (It is difficult to imagine that Stone did not have the First Family in mind when he wrote the scene in which some of Alexander’s advisers complain that he doesn’t listen to them as Philip did.) In fact, remarkably enough, Stone seems to admire Alexander, casting him as a forward-thinking bearer of civilization to the Asian hordes.
The many battle sequences are dull, cartoon-violence-splattered affairs accompanied by a sweeping orchestral score, not at all the realistic, anti-violence depictions of war that Stone has attempted in the past.
I find these things very odd. Perhaps Stone has mellowed out in his old age, or maybe Warner Brothers forced him to make changes to the film. In any case, except for its excessive length (173 minutes) and pretentious psychoanalyzing, Alexander does not feel quite like an Oliver Stone film. Nor is it Oscar material.
What is at times gripping is the appreciation one gets for just how ambitious Alexander’s exploits were, just what an accomplishment his vast empire was. This was a young man, after all.
But if Alexander is not a great movie, it is at least better than this year’s earlier release Troy, the first installment in what will be several ancient epics to come. On the other hand, that’s not saying much.
Hollywood’s big season is off to a shaky start. There will, of course, be much more to come.
Eric Cox is a Research Fellow at the Sagamore Institute (www.sipr.org) and a movie columnist for TAEmag.com.
