Colin Firth, on the other hand, must unbend to become lovable, and when we do finally love him, it’s largely because we know what an effort it took on his part. Bridget Jones’s Diary is famously, if vaguely, patterned after Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Firth played Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of the novel, and now plays another Darcy here. I didn’t see the TV version but learn from the critic James Berardinelli that Firth “plays this part exactly as he played the earlier role, making it evident that the two Darcys are essentially the same.”
It is a universal rule of romantic fiction that all great love stories must be mirrored by their low-comedy counterpoints. Just as Hal woos Katharine, Falstaff trifles with Doll Tearsheet. If Bridget must choose between Mark and Daniel, then her mother (Gemma Jones) must choose between her kindly but easy-chair-loving husband (Jim Broadbent) and a dashing huckster for a TV shopping channel.
The movie strings together one funny set piece after another, as when Bridget goes in costume to a party where she thought the theme was “Tarts and Vicars.” Or when she stumbles into a job on a TV news show and makes her famous premature entrance down the fire pole. Or when she has to decide at the beginning of an evening whether sexy underwear or tummy-crunching underwear will do her more good in the long run. Bridget charts her own progress along the way, from “tragic spinster” to “wanton sex goddess,” and the movie gives almost unreasonable pleasure as it celebrates her bumpy transition.
Christmas in the Clouds
PG, 97 m., 2005
Tim Vahle (Ray Clouds on Fire), Mariana Tosca (Tina Pisati Little Hawk), Sam Vlahos (Joe Clouds on Fire), M. Emmet Walsh (Stu O’Malley), Graham Greene (Earl), Sheila Tousey (Mary), Rosalind Ayres (Mabel Winright), Jonathan Joss (Phil). Directed by Kate Montgomery and produced by Montgomery and Sarah Wasserman. Screenplay by Montgomery.
Christmas in the Clouds is part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part historic breakthrough. The history is made because the movie is about affluent Native American yuppies. So many movies about American Indians deal in negative stereotypes that it’s nice to find one that takes place at an upscale Indian-owned ski resort. The only alcoholic in the cast is a white undercover investigator for a guidebook.
The romance begins through a misunderstanding. Through an online dating service, Joe Clouds on Fire (Sam Vlahos) is paired off with Tina Pisati (Mariana Tosca). She’s a chic New York professional woman whose name sounds Italian but whose family name is Little Hawk. He’s a likable codger whose son, Ray Clouds on Fire (Tim Vahle), manages the resort. Joe has not been entirely honest about his age and is about thirty years older than Tina. Meanwhile, the resort is expecting a surprise visit from the critic of luxury hotels, and Mary the reservations manager (Sheila Tousey) keeps an eagle eye for anyone checking in who looks like he can spell Zagat.
This is the setup for an Idiot Plot, in which all misunderstandings could be cleared up with one or two lines of dialogue. Yes, but some Idiot Plots are charming, while most are merely dumb. This one I enjoyed, mostly because the actors have so much quiet fun with it. Of course Mary the manager thinks Tina Pisati is the critic. Of course Tina thinks that handsome young Ray is her pen pal, not crusty old Joe. And of course when Stu O’Malley checks in, no one fingers him as the critic, because he is grumpy, unkempt, and half loaded; it’s M. Emmet Walsh, playing his usual role.
Tina is upgraded to a luxury corner suite. O’Malley gets shunted to a budget room, where he suffers from what passes for flu and may involve a large percentage of hangover. Tina has her eye on Ray. Ray thinks Tina is beautiful and sexy but refuses to cater to her because he is too ethical to kowtow to a critic. Old Joe knows the score but maintains a studious silence about his pen-pal correspondence, which no one at the resort knows about.
And then there is the matter of Earl (Graham Greene), the resort’s chef, who has become a devout vegetarian and tries to discourage the customers from eating meat. He has a disconcerting way of referring to the animals on the menu by their first names and grows sorrowful when someone orders the turkey, which is a beloved pet.
Old Joe dreams of winning a Jeep Cherokee in an approaching bingo tournament. Grumpy old O’Malley hauls out of bed to play bingo. Eventually the two old-timers both end up in the Cherokee, stranded in a blizzard, while misunderstandings pile up back at the resort.
There is nothing here of earthshaking originality, but Kate Montgomery, the writer-director, has such affection for these characters that we can feel it through the screen. They’re not simply pawns in the plot, we sense; they represent something she wants to say about the Native Americans she knows. And the actors, all with successful careers behind them, must be fed up with playing losers in social problem dramas; Greene, a natural comedian, expands magnificently as the vegetarian chef with an effortless line of patter about soy products, analogue foods, and healthy nutrition. There may be a sitcom job for him lingering somewhere near this role.
As for Ray and Tina, well, in all versions of basic romantic comedy, we want them to kiss, they want to kiss, and the plot perversely frustrates all of us. But at the end of Christmas in the Clouds, after everything has worked out more or less as we hoped it would, I felt a surprising affection and warmth. There will be holiday pictures that are more high-tech than this one, more sensational, with bigger stars and higher budgets and indeed greater artistry. But there may not be many with such good cheer.
A Christmas Story
PG, 94 m., 1983
Peter Billingsley (Ralphie), Darren McGavin (The Old Man), Melinda Dillon (Mother), Ian Petrella (Randy), Zack Ward (Scut Farcas). Directed by Bob Clark and produced by Clark, Rene Dupont, and Gary Goch. Screenplay by Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown, and Clark.
One of the details that A Christmas Story gets right is the threat of having your mouth washed out with Lifebouy soap. Not any soap. Lifebouy. Never Ivory or Palmolive. Lifebouy, which apparently contained an ingredient able to nullify bad language. The only other soap ever mentioned for this task was Lava, but that was the nuclear weapon of mouth-washing soaps, so powerful it was used for words we still didn’t even know.
There are many small but perfect moments in A Christmas Story, and one of the best comes after the Lifebouy is finally removed from Ralphie’s mouth and he is sent off to bed. His mother studies the bar, thinks for a moment, and then sticks it in her own mouth, just to see what it tastes like. Moments like that are why some people watch A Christmas Story every holiday season. There is a real knowledge of human nature beneath the comedy.
The movie is based on the memoirs of Jean Shepherd, the humorist whose radio programs and books remembered growing up in Indiana in the 1940s. It is Shepherd’s voice on the soundtrack, remembering one Christmas season in particular, and the young hero’s passionate desire to get a Daisy Red Ryder 200-shot Carbine Action BB Gun for Christmas—the one with the compass in the stock, “as cool and deadly a piece of weaponry as I had ever laid eyes on.”
I owned such a weapon. I recall everything about it at this moment with a tactile memory so vivid I could have just put it down to write these words. How you stuffed newspapers into the carton it came in to use it for target practice. How the BBs came in a cardboard tube with a slide-off top. How they rattled when you poured them into the gun. And of course how everybody warned that you would shoot your eye out.