All i really wanted for Christmas was a decent film but both the big seasonal movies this year are more accurately described as anti-Christmas films; and they seem to be part of a trend.
In his new alleged comedy, Jingle All The Way, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a workaholic businessman belatedly trying to buy his way back into his son's affections by finding him an elusive action doll on Christmas Eve. Far from being a bringer of goodwill, Schwarzenegger seems throughout to be suffering from a kind of pedestrian road rage. He assaults shop assistants, Santas, elves and a reindeer, destroys a toy shop, steals a Christmas present from the child next door, and wrecks a religious black family's Christmas meal. But then virtually everyone in the film is motivated by greed, envy, selfishness or lust. It has to be the most mean-spirited film of the year.
Jodie Foster's second film as director, Home for the Holidays, is set at Thanksgiving, but recognisably in the tradition of Christmas films such as The Holly and The Ivy (1953) and stage plays such as Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings: it is about the awfulness of families reuniting annually. Although by the end there is a conventional, feelgood rapprochement, the film's attempt to locate the "fun" in "dysfunctional" feels artificial. The one truly happy family that we see is when one of the characters-a homosexual-rings up his boyfriend at a gay party and asks wistfully: "How's my real family?"
The same preference for surrogate families lies at the heart of Kenneth Branagh's In the Bleak Midwinter, where the "real" family coming together at Christmas is not the gay, but the acting community.
The old-fashioned idea of Christmas as a time when families are happy to come together seems to have died out. In Hostile Hostages (1994), a crook is driven to distraction at Christmas time by the horrible, bickering family he is attempting to hold hostage. In Reckless (1995), a husband chooses Christmas Eve as the night to have his wife murdered, whereupon she spends the festive season on the run.
Reckless is only the latest in a string of horror chillers set at Christmas, including such alluring titles as Black Christmas (1975), You Better Watch Out (1980) and Silent Night, Deadly Night, a 1984 slasher film memorable only for the fact that a serial killer went about his bloodletting in a Santa suit.
Only three movies in the past two years have evoked a secular ideal of Christmas as a coming together of families-the remake of Miracle on 34th Street, The Santa Clause, which updates the notion of family for the benefit of children with more than two parents and While You Were Sleeping, in which a young woman without a family is adopted by one over the Christmas period.
Even Home Alone (1990) and its sequel (1992) are semi-ironic-about an eight-year-old child happier to spend Christmas without his family, in a hostile and lawless environment. Most other Christmas movies recently have been exercises in seasonal cynicism. Even Babe, that most delightful of family films, depicts Christmas as a time when innocent animals are slaughtered, and humans give each other unwanted presents.
In the animated film, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), a Hallowe'en skeleton tries to get into the cosy Christmas spirit but ends up distorting it into his own likeness-by giving unsuspecting children gaily gift-wrapped presents which turn out to contain shrunken heads. The film, untypically for Disney, even includes a scene in which Santa Claus is tortured, for laughs.
A similar gallows humour operates within Gremlins (1984), when one of the little monsters launches an attack from a Christmas tree, and The Addams Family (1991), in which carol singers rejoice outside the Addamses' front door, while above them on the battlements the family prepares a cauldron of boiling oil.
As for the British film industry, the only Christmas scene I can recall from the last ten years occurs in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), where a family is terrorised by a near-homicidal maniac father who sweeps the Christmas dinner off the table on to the floor. Very uplifting.
The religious aspect of Christmas has been avoided by filmmakers since The Bells of St Mary's (1945) and The Bishop's Wife (1947). Even the season's moral side has been left unexamined, except in the versions of Dickens's A Christmas Carol-of which the best remains the Alastair Sim Scrooge of 1951.
The greatest Christmas movie of them all remains Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946)-mainly because it has the courage to reflect both extremes of Christmas: as a time when families come together, and a season when a high number of lonely individuals commit suicide.
It's a Wonderful Life is a rare exploration of middle class self-sacrifice, and the friction between personal fulfilment and family life. It is still a wonderful film, and light years away from the dog-beat-up-dog world of Jingle All The Way. Modern film-makers could still learn from it.
