Ben Stiller returns from relative dormancy (he hasn’t starred in a movie in seven years!) to headline Nutcrackers (now streaming on Hulu), a holiday comedy in which he’s absolutely upstaged by four young boys. This is not a bad thing! Director David Gordon Green was inspired to make the film after visiting a friend in rural Wilmington, Ohio with four young sons who studied ballet. And that’s who you see in the movie – Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo Janson, real-life brothers playing fictional versions of themselves, with the film shot in their actual home, to boot. This making-of story is probably better than the actual story in the screenplay, but still, your heart may be chalky-cold like coal if the movie doesn’t move you at least a little bit.
NUTCRACKERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Four ragamuffins bust into an amusement park after hours, fire up the tilt-a-whirl, and let rip for a free ride until the machinery fritzes and they run away from a snoozy security guard. Whoever has to watch over these boys is doomed. DOOOOOOMED! Cut to: Michael Maxwell (Stiller) zooming down rural two-laners in his banana-yellow Porsche. Is he on his phone talking about mergers and assessments and spreadsheets and other important-guy work shit? You bet he is. He promises this trip from big, busy Chicago to the oh-so-beige environs of Nowhere, Ohio will be brief – he just has to sign some papers, he thinks, and then he can get right back to synergizing the optimizationalism of the big presentation or whatever. Now, if you believe that the plot will actually allow Michael to accomplish any of this, that’s amazing, since you must have been recently born – this world can be awful and it also can be pretty great, so welcome to it! – and enjoying your first movie ever.
Michael’s destination is a farmhouse with pigs in the kitchen, a snake in the toilet and a guinea pig in his bed, all of which he discovers incrementally, as he attempts to use said things. The place is also populated with four monkeys: 12-year-old Justice (Homer Janson), his younger brother Junior (Ulysses Janson) and the youngest, twins Samuel (Atlas Janson) and Simon (Arlo Janson). They’re Michael’s nephews. He doesn’t seem to know them very well; something unspoken but very much implied tells us he wasn’t invited to birthdays and Xmases and such, evident when one of the boys reveals that their mom said Uncle Mike “is incapable of love.” Oof. Somewhat miraculously, nobody in this movie ever gets socked in the groin, but that one is the metaphorical emotional equivalent.
Kleenex time: The boys’ parents are dead. Car wreck. They’ve been barely supervised since. Things are a bit, shall we say, feral in the house. And somebody has to take responsibility. Hmm. Who could that be. Local caseworker Gretchen (Linda Cardellini) is hoping to find a foster home, but until then, Uncle Mike’s gonna hafta get some unidentified animal’s dookie on his schmancy wingtips and oversee this zoo. The boys are homeschooled – guess who’s on the hook for a sex-ed lesson? – and gnawing on dry ramen cakes and stealing his keys and doing donuts in the Porsche. They’re pantloads of fun! And Uncle Mike soon finds himself in a montage where everyone finally cleans up the house, and another montage where he spearheads the production of the boys’ custom homestyled version of The Nutcracker, since their dear late mom taught them ballet in her dance studio. Meanwhile, he’s hoping to find a suitable home to dump them in, so he can get back to his stupidass real estate deal. Will Uncle Mike learn his lesson here, that the most important things in life are work, fancy cars and being neat and tidy all the time? NO SPOILERS!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Couldn’t help but remember the Viggo Mortensen-raises-too-many-kids-in-a-bus movie Captain Fantastic, which had similar look-at-the-anarchic-children energy. But Nutcrackers is also vying to be this year’s version of bittersweet neo-holiday classic The Holdovers, a tall task it’s not quite cut out for.
Performance Worth Watching: More on this in a second, but the Janson boys truly make the movie, their authentic screen presence clearly nurtured by Green, for whom naturalism is a stylistic calling card.
Memorable Dialogue: Uncle Mike sits down with a potential foster mom, Rose (played by Edi Patterson of The Righteous Gemstones), who has a houseful of adoptees:
Uncle Mike: So… how many kids do you have?
Rose: More than a treehouse, less than a volleyball team.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: OK, this one got to me. Leland Douglas’ screenplay is rote and heavily populated with sentimental bromides, but Green leans away from the cliches and turns out a film that’s as endearingly ramshackle as the family at its center. For all its wearyingly familiar holiday-movie trappings, Nutcrackers frequently shows that a truly talented director is at the helm, and it feels more like Green’s early indie dramas like Undertow or Snow Angels than his more mainstream work (e.g. stoner-bro shit Pineapple Express or horror-revamps Halloween and The Exorcist: Believer; weird filmography this guy has amassed). The filmmaker gets his boots muddy in the rural setting, nurtures the real-life brotherly dynamic of the four boys and inspires Stiller to find a smidgen of nuance in a stereotypical loner-workaholic character – and that’s enough to stir a little genuine emotion from a familiar broth of sad orphans, too-cool-for-you city slicksterism and rural-living eccentricity.
Refreshingly, the film isn’t another grief-and-trauma therapy session, but there’s enough melancholy in the air to prevent it from cynically using death as a plot construct. That contributes to the classic Christmas atmosphere, the bittersweet blend of joy and sadness that defines the season and the many, many movies depicting it – the Christmas movies that truly matter, anyway; show me a full-on happy one, and it’ll almost certainly be more phony than styrofoam snow. Within that emotional framework, Nutcrackers finds plenty of heartwarming comedy that emerges from the characters and their interactions, and is noticeably free of try-hard stabs at big, broad laughs. Nobody will accuse the movie of being profound, but it might choke you up just enough in spite of its highly predictable nature – which, in a landscape dominated with cheeseball Hallmark-holiday junk, feels like an eensy-weensy Christmas miracle.
Our Call: Nutcrackers is a pleasant little surprise. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
