Reviews Film / A Christmas Story

A wonderfully honest yet warm depiction of Christmastime.

This is my favorite Christmas film because it just gets the feeling of the holiday, or at least as I have experienced it. Despite being written by a person I have likely little in common with and being set in a time period I did not live through, the film taps into some truly universal, and if not directly relatable, completely accessible experiences of being a child at Christmas.

The plot of the film is episodic, with the overarching plot of Ralphie Parker wanting a new Red Ryder BB gun, which everyone says is dangerous. I don't get the wish myself, but I can let it slide. Ralphie and his family go through several memorable scenes and vignettes, and all of the characters feel authentic, if not always fully realistic. I have a ton of respect for the caring nature shown in the adult characters in the film, and Ralphie's mom is one of the best I've seen in film. While the film is a period piece, many of the experiences feel authentic to what I've been through. The unbridled greed of Christmas, disappointing presents, awful best friends, getting in trouble...it really feels like growing up and Christmases as a kid.

The main schtick of Jean Shepherd's writings, upon which the film is based, is self-aware ironic nostalgia- indulging in the grandiose, ridiculous wonder and terror a child experiences before they grow up and looking back at those mentalities with a balance of humor and sincerity. I think the film adaptation was really the magic ingredient to make that land, though. Shepherd's writing suffers the written word's weakness of struggling to convey irony, leaving some of his exultations too easy to take seriously...and when it comes to the rigid social archetypes and more black-and-white thinking of the time as Shepherd wrote it, those values can be very distasteful when spoken of as True while the line of irony is shaky. The film is the perfect tonal filter. It uses a nostalgic style, but still lets the live-action ground the story in a little reality, such that the grandiose narration (which thankfully happens to omit many of the hierarchical and dichotomous maxims of the source) can be visibly contradicted by the onscreen action. This makes the narration more clearly inflated so the irony and charm land better. The film also selects Shepherd's stories into such a narrative that has a great balance of warmth and misfortune. The story shows a lot of bad things happening to combat the rosy nostalgia of the adult narrator, and there's good comedy in the crappy experiences contrasting the epic, loving tone of reflection...but there's still enough genuine heart to the characters that makes the film uplifting. It says that things suck and life is hard, but also that there are wonders and joys to life as well. The story may sell itself as that of a kid working and scheming to get a forbidden present...but the true meaning of the film is the love and generosity, not the planning, that leads to him getting it in the end.