Well, here we are once again, holiday season, which includes Christmas season, and among other things, it's a time, if you're so inclined, to watch your famous Christmas movies. Films with a Christmas season connection of whatever type and genre. Apropos of that, I thought it would not be out of line to mention a Christmas film favorite of mine, even though it's a film I've written about before. That piece was for the unfortunately defunct blog that Jed Ayres, film maven extraordinaire, used to administer, called Hardboiled Wonderland, and I thought I would repost the piece here, because it's a film that still somehow seems a bit under the radar when it comes to Christmas films. I'm talking about Abel Ferrara's 'R Xmas, from 2001, a film that's not all that easy to find but well-worth seeking out. It's a small gem of an unconventional Christmas film, with crime involved of course, and anyway...here's the piece:
Few movies integrate a crime plot and a Christmas story as well or as completely as Abel Ferrara’s ‘R Xmas. And it’s Christmas in a very specific time and place, as a pre-credit scroll tells us: “In December of 1993 the Honorable David Dinkins was completing his first and only term as Mayor of New York.” I’m not sure how much these words mean to somebody not from New York City, but for those who lived in New York through the Dinkins years, from 1990-1993, it has a clear connotation. New York City was at a low point, with both crime and economic struggle high.
Even if you’re not
from New York, you sense from the words that the city could not have been
thriving. If it had been, wouldn’t the mayor have been elected to a second
term?
The movie opens with what’s clearly
a scene from a Christmas past. Little
children wearing adult costumes, we soon realize, are performing a theatrical
version of A Christmas Carol for an elementary school production during
the holiday season, and in the auditorium watching are all the parents. The school looks like one with resources; the
parents, nearly all-white, are well-dressed and apparently affluent. One father (Lillo Brancato) has his camcorder
trained at his daughter, who has a lead role, and we’ll follow this father as
he leaves the school with his daughter and wife (Drea de Matteo) after the
play. The daughter has brown skin, and
the family speak Spanish together as well as English, since they are, we
realize, Latinx. On a horse and buggy
ride downtown, as they proceed down Museum Mile on 5th Avenue in
Manhattan, the mother asks her daughter what museum they are passing – the
Guggenheim Museum – and they have a humorous back and forth about how to
pronounce the word “Guggenheim”. The
parents seem like they are intent on educating their child well, with culture,
but their manner and down to earth way of talking mark them as grounded. They take their daughter to a department
store Santa – how much more typical a Christmas thing could you do – and while
at the store, the father does all he can to acquire for their girl a Party Girl
doll, the must-have toy that year. He
fails at the store when another woman grabs the last doll off the shelf just before
he reaches it (and he gets to watch the fortunate woman nearly come to blows
with another woman who puts her hands on the doll), but that doesn’t mean he
and his wife will give up their pursuit for that gift.
‘R Xmas is Abel Ferrara
working in top form, quietly subversive. The mother and father’s drug dealing
is viewed with the matter-of-factness you’d give to any job. It’s somewhat mundane, takes focus, and comes
with aggravations and anxieties. But it
allows them to live the life they want to lead in a very expensive city. They can support family members, and most of
all make a good life for their daughter. As the mother says at one point, without a
hint of snobbery but with a sincerity you can’t but feel for when you think of
the state of many public schools, she doesn’t want to take their daughter out
of private school. Their daughter is clearly the apple of both
their eyes, and on Christmas Eve, unwilling to let the holiday pass without
getting that Party Girl doll for their daughter, they make a trip to an outer
borough to get the doll from a guy who sells them on the black market. While the mother is at the guy’s warehouse
getting the toy, her husband leaves the car to take care of some unnamed
business, and it’s here that we learn there are other forces watching them who
have their own nasty holiday agenda.
That agenda entails extortion, or what you might call forcing “gifts”
from them. Tis the season for taking as
much as it is the season for giving.
At 85 minutes, ‘R Xmas is a fast, easy watch. But there’s a lot going on in that short running time. Everyone gives committed performances – Drea de Matteo, in particular, shines – and Abel Ferrara directs with his usual rigor. Has the man ever made a sloppy film? I don’t think so. Some of his movies work better than others, but Ferrara is never slack. You’ll find Christmas films more famous than this one, more celebrated and on a larger scale, but ‘R Xmas ranks among the most trenchant.
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