Ten Films for the Holiday Hangover
This year, resolutions are out. Decadence is in.
In that spirit, I am proposing a new genre of film: The Post Holiday Movie. The ideal Post Holiday Movie deals with winter in some fashion, is ruminative rather than rousing and may incorporate dark humor and/or meaningful reflections on life. The protagonists of these films will typically go through some type of transformation, as any protagonist might, moving from the winter of their discontent to something that might be described as a sunnier disposition toward life. Or that might not happen at all.
The list that follows is divided into two sections. The first five entries are suitable for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Best enjoyed in the warmth of a still-lit evergreen with a few leftover sugar cookies, these films represent the holiday afterglow.
The second five entries are best suited for the days after the New Year, when the tide has already turned but spring still feels far away.
1. Wonder Boys (2000), dir. Curtis Hanson
In this adaptation of a Michael Chabon novel, Michael Douglas plays Professor Grady Tripp, a aging writer experiencing personal and professional crises. Tobey Maguire plays his troubled student, Frances McDormand his boss and the woman with whom he’s having an affair, Katie Holmes his teaching assistant, and Robert Downey Jr. his smooth-talking agent.
The movie is set in Pittsburgh in the kind of slushy, dirty winter that comes after the sparkling lights come down. This isn’t the breast of the new-fallen snow, it’s a washed-up writer answering a cop’s knock on his front door in his ex-wife’s pink bathrobe while a freezing rain comes down in sheets.
2. Gladiator (2000), dir. Ridley Scott
The opening sequence of this movie, which features a grisly battle in Germania, nicely satisfies the winter requirement. You can see Maximus Decimus Meridius’s breath. Are you not entertained?
3. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), dir. Wes Anderson
There is, to my knowledge, no snow in the Royal Tenenbaums. There is, however, the barren urban winter landscape of Wes Andersen’s imagination. The New York City depicted in this movie does not exist in real life but it is charming as hell.
There is a sadness that permeates this film, which makes it the perfect down-tempo movie to watch on a cold winter’s night.
4. The Family Man (2000), dir. Brett Ratner
Nicholas Cage, a man who occasionally turns in an Oscar-worthy performance, plays Jack Campbell, a Wall Street wheeler and dealer who wakes up one Christmas morning in New Jersey with a wife and two kids. Initially dismayed at the strange turn his life has taken, he comes to embrace his new role as father and mini-van driver, just in time for fate to intervene again.
This movie is high-holiday schmaltz at its best. It’s not a bad movie, however. The performances are actually pretty good and the whole suburban dad existential crisis is made somewhat fresh by Cage’s typically manic delivery. Also Don Cheadle, Tea Leoni and Jeremy Piven are great in this movie.
5. Prometheus (2012), dir. Ridley Scott
Prometheus is the perfect post-holiday science fiction movie. It’s long, it’s inexplicable, it’s dark and brooding. Noomi Rapace turns in a great performance as Elizabeth Shaw, one of a pair of scientists who have discovered evidence of alien life on the moon of a distant planet. Idris Elba plays the captain of the ship that ferries the scientists to this place. Stringer Bell is not in enough movies.
Bonus: The follow-up to Prometheus, which is a entry in the Alien catalog, is coming out in 2017.
6. Coming to America (1988), dir. John Landis
This movie is on Netflix right now. It’s funny. And it has snow. Enough said.
7. 25th Hour (2002), dir. Spike Lee
In this adaptation of the novel by Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff, Edward Norton plays Montgomery Brogan, a convicted drug dealer about to start a seven year prison sentence for his crimes. Rosario Dawson plays his girlfriend, Naturelle Riviera, while Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper play his two best friends from high school.
The cast is superb, especially Dawson, who turns in a great performance as the woman Brogan suspects may have turned him in to the DEA, but the real standout here is Barry Pepper, who plays Brogan’s Red Bull-chugging stockbroker friend and sometime rival. I’ve sometimes wondered why Pepper hasn’t received more recognition and this movie is more evidence that he is one of the best supporting actors in Hollywood.
The story begins as Brogan spends his last day on the outside, taking his dog for a last walk, visiting his father at his bar, spending the night out with his friends and his business associates. During this time, Brogan reflects on his past, both the good and bad aspects of it, and spends some time thinking about the choices he made. He expresses little guilt over the lives he ruined peddling poison but regrets that he didn’t get out of the game soon enough.
There is an elegiac quality to the 24 hours preceding the trip upstate to prison, which makes this film an interesting counterpoint to the hopeful, go-get-’em narrative so prevalent at the beginning of a new year. Spike Lee also takes Benioff’s original material and adds a special mix of post-9/11 commentary on race and cultural relations in New York.
8. Somewhere (2010), dir. Sofia Coppola
This film captures the ennui of mid-winter pretty well even though it’s set in sunny Southern California. Stephen Dorff plays film star Johnny Marco, a man who has everything but seems bored with it all until his daughter, played by Elle Fanning, enters the picture and helps him regain some of his joie de vivre. And — cameo of cameos! — Jackass star Chris Pontius plays his best friend. Driving a really nice sports car never looked so sad.
9. Blue Valentine (2010), dir. Derek Cianfrance
Ryan Gosling has a talent all right. A talent for breaking my goddamn heart. DO NOT watch this movie if you have recently gone through a bad breakup. It might just kill you.
Gosling and Michelle Williams play Dean and Cindy, a married couple going through a particularly rough patch. The movie starts with their last ditch effort to save their union and then takes us back to when and how it all began, pushing the emotional stakes to unforgivable heights. Gosling and Williams prepared for the movie by renting a house together for a month, living on a budget and learning to argue. The effect is near-perfect mimesis — the painful feeling you are watching reality.
I might suggest, as a complement to Blue Valentine, the movie Lars and the Real Girl (2007), dir. by Craig Gillespie, which, in addition to being set in winter and starring Ryan Gosling, is also heartbreaking. There’s a reason why Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal was a thing. The man can make any action, no matter how trivial, emotive.
10. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), dir. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
And then they came to the end.
This is the story of folk singer Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, who tramps around the West Village in the snow, gets his best friend’s wife pregnant, and tries to make it in show business, to little success. The first time I saw this movie, I wasn’t sure that I liked it. Since then, I’ve watched it maybe a half a dozen times and I’ve come to appreciate it more and more. It’s not necessarily the most uplifting of narratives but, with all the typical sentimentality stripped away, it amounts to a kind of unvarnished observation of the tiny triumphs and tragedies of an otherwise unremarkable life. There is some redemptive truth in that, I think.
Honorable mentions: Out of Sight (1998) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001), dir. Steven Soderbergh; Catch Me if You Can (2002), dir. Steven Spielberg; The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003), dir. Peter Jackson.
Note: I’d like to think of this as a kind of working document. This list is not meant to be comprehensive. I haven’t seen every post-holiday movie ever made and, even if I had, my compilation of the top hits would be inherently subjective. If you have additions and/or subtractions, comments or criticisms, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
