David Gordon Green hangs a left turn into heartwarming kid antics with Nutcrackers
Another surprise from David Gordon Green: a Ben Stiller comedy that could have come out 20 years ago.
Photo: Hulu
Ben Stiller could have easily made Nutcrackers, a Christmas-season comedy about a work-obsessed single man who becomes a reluctant guardian to his four unruly nephews, in 1999, as he was making the transition from broad comedy support into more shaded leading roles. He could also have made it in 2009, after becoming a family-comedy brand name with the Meet The Parents and Night At The Museum series. In fact, he probably could have made it at any point in the past 30 years. He also could have skipped making it entirely; do we really need another movie where a superficial yuppie always barking into a cell phone learns how to parent against his will?
Sometimes, though, a bunch of heartwarming bullshit is nonetheless part of someone’s artistic process. Nutcrackers seems to be a part of Stiller’s, enticing him to his first starring role in seven years and his first original mainstream comedy vehicle in over a decade; more interestingly, it’s also the latest in director David Gordon Green’s ongoing series of genre pivots. Green was once known for making gently oddball, Malickian indies; then he was known for his unexpected swerve into Apatow-era stoner comedy. At this point, a quarter-century into his career, he’s executed several more of those hairpin turns: returning to indie character studies, making a couple of true-life dramas, doing a whole Halloween sequel trilogy (plus a bonus Exorcist nonstarter) and now, why not, throwing himself into just about the most uncool type of movie possible, one where adults learn life lessons from orphaned moppets.
As with so many great directors, though, familiar material becomes a comfortable fit for Green’s specific interests—and the process here was more direct than usual. After reconnecting with a college friend, Green met her four sons, loved their rambunctious energy, and wanted to put them in a movie, with that dynamic becoming a guiding force in Leland Douglas’ screenplay. Whether through the writing or Green’s direction, a lot of the boys’ quirks and dialogue feel observed, rather than recited. In its accessible way, Nutcrackers explores a theme Green has returned to repeatedly since his 2000 debut George Washington: How children attempt to make their way in the world when they’re left to their own devices, whether by choice or tragedy.
For siblings Justice (Homer Janson), Junior (Ulysses Janson), Samuel (Atlas Janson), and Simon (Arlo Janson), it appears to be a bit of both. Their parents have died, but that may only explain the degree of messiness in their rural-Ohio lives, not the lifestyle itself. Their ballet-dancing mom’s estranged brother Mike (Stiller) arrives to find a cozy farmhouse gone to seed, overrun with animals, food-mess, and long-haired boys who don’t hesitate to, at one point, steal Mike’s prized car and attempt to jump it over a small swimming pool. Clearly, they’ve been raised with freedom to indulge both their creativity and their baser little-boy instincts; the movie is muddy, figuratively and occasionally literally, about the precise philosophy that led the kids’ parents to raise them this way. (Are they home-schooled because they’re too free-spirited for institutional learning, or are they uncontrollable because they haven’t been to real school?)