BEFORE: It's one week to Christmas, and after tonight I've got just two films to watch this year - so why don't I feel very cheery? It's nearly "mission accomplished" for 2022, but I've been in a funk that I can't seem to shake off. My mother's been in the hospital, then rehab, since just after Thanksgiving, that may be part of it. My boss is running out of money yet again, so I feel like eventually the studio's going to close, but that's been the case for some time. I've also been over-worked and over-stressed, so on the days when I'm home I just want to sleep and watch TV and try to de-stress, but then that just means I keep going from one extreme to the other, I'm either working hard or doing nothing, and there's no in-between. So now after Monday I'm staring at a week of inactivity for the holiday break, and I'm somehow both looking forward to that, and also dreading it, it's not good for my mental condition, whatever that is.
Another part of the problem is that we decided to not travel and see my family for Christmas, I stand by the decision, but then that's a realization that there's a sadness to the holiday now, it's never going to be like it was when I was a kid, maybe every adult has to face this at some point, and it can be difficult to come to terms with. We'll do something for Christmas like make lasagna, and maybe we'll hit the outlet stores during the break, but right now holiday depression is a real thing. My Christmas music mix has been ready for over a week, but I can't seem to bring myself to sit down and address the Christmas cards. I'm going to force myself to do it today, by telling myself that the cards HAVE to go out on Monday to stand a chance of reaching people before December 25. We'll see if that works. Honestly, I have been very busy, but both jobs have now slowed down greatly, so there should be no more excuses.
Richard E. Grant carries over from "Withnail & I". The original plan was to watch TWO versions of the "Nutcracker" story here, as Mr. Grant also appears in the 2010 film "The Nutcracker: The Untold Story". This film was apparently one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, earning only $17 million against a $90 million budget. As a result, the film is not available anywhere, not on cable or any streaming service - perhaps there's a good reason for this, it might be THAT bad. Or perhaps since the film was made to be screened in 3D it can't be broadcast as a regular, non-3D film. Maybe Disney killed it somehow on all platforms to reduce any confusion over their own "Nutcracker" film that was released in 2018. Anyway, I learned a few months back that it wasn't popping up anywhere, so I had to factor that into my plans, and "Withnail & I" came up as a possible substitute. It's staying on my list in case it becomes available in the future, but I'm no rush to seek it out.
THE PLOT: A young girl is transported into a magical world of gingerbread clowns, toy soldiers and an army of mice.
AFTER: From what I understand of the famous Tchaikovsky ballet "The Nutcracker", very little of that story was retained for this Disney film. For that matter, the ballet was based on an 1816 short story called "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" by Prussian author E.T.A. Hoffman - O just reviewed that plot on Wikipedia, and it's all about a little girl, Marie Stahlbaum, having dreams about the toys in the cabinet coming to life, and there's a battle between the dolls, led by the Nutcracker, and the mice, led by the seven-headed Mouse King and the Queen, Madame Mouserinks. There's a complicated back-story for how Nutcrackers came to be shaped like bearded soldiers, and a bunch of lard that was supposed to be put into sausages, but wasn't. And a princess got turned into a Nutcracker, the cure for that was to eat a magic nut that could only be cracked by a man who had never shaved or wore boots, and who could take seven steps backwards without stumbling. It's complicated. But young Marie keeps dreaming about the Nutcracker at night, and one night she gives him a toy sword so he can defeat the Mouse King, this works and the curse is broken, he turned out to be the nephew of Drosselmeyer, the clockmaker and inventor, and once free he seeks out Marie in the real world, and a year later he finds her and brings her to the doll kingdom, where she's crowned the Queen, and she marries Drosselmeyer's nephew, even though she's only eight years old. Yeah, there's something wrong with that ending for sure.
The 1892 ballet scored by Tchaikovsky changed the story quite a bit, the girl's name was changed to Clara, for starters, and it starts on Christmas Eve during a party, which is interrupted by Drosselmeyer, the local councilman and part-time magician, also Clara's godfather. He brings four life-like dolls that dance at the party, also a Nutcracker in the shape of a man, which Clara likes, but her brother Fritz breaks. That night as Clara dreams, the Nutcracker grows to human size, and the room fills up with mice, who battle an army of gingerbread soldiers. The Nutcracker leads the army against the mice and the seven-headed Mouse King, and afterward the Nutcracker is transformed into a Prince, and he leads Clara into the forest. (Umm, and HOW OLD is Clara in this one?)
In Act 2, they reach the Land of Sweets, where the Sugar Plum Fairy has been ruling during the absence of the Prince. There's a celebration of sweets from around the world (which has been deemed to be fairly racist in modern productions of the ballet, with Caucasian dancers dressing up as Arabs and Chinese people, but whatever) and Mother Ginger has her children emerge from under her large skirt to dance at the party. After a final waltz, Clara and the Prince are ushered from their thrones to a reindeer-pulled sleigh, and they wave goodbye to their subjects. OK, so there's not a lot of story there, just one battle and then they're off to the magical land for a party, and "THE END". But I get it, it's become an annual favorite among ballet companies, and it's (more or less) a respected piece of classical music.
But times change and stories have to change too, and I'm sure there was a meeting at Disney about whether they should just leave the Nutcracker story alone or update it - and once you start talking about those Asian and Arab dancers and the fear of cultural appropriation, the plan became to scrap most of the Tchaikovsky ballet story, wipe the slate clean, and start over with a story that would appeal more to modern audiences. (Look, even Tchaikovsky thought that "The Nutcracker" wasn't his best work, he much preferred his version of "Sleeping Beauty".) But let's imagine what went on in that story conference - somebody probably said, "Why have just ONE magical land when we can have FOUR? We can have Candyland, the Land of Flowers, the Land of, umm, Snowflakes, and the Land of Amusements!" Gee, what other place is divided up into four lands, like Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland? This has got to be an inside joke...
So this is what got retained from the original story and ballet - there's still a Clara who gets transported to a magical land, there's still an inventor and toymaker named Drosselmeyer, there's still a Sugar Plum Fairy and a Mother Ginger, and there's still a ballet, but the whole thing isn't a ballet, the ballet is the story-within-the-story that explains how Clara's mother came to the magical realm before she did, and she invented this machine that turned the toys into people, or something. So, it was a giant magical land that was filled with non-living toys? That doesn't seem to make much sense. And then how did she build that machine, all by herself, and what powered it, and did she have an engineering degree, and so on... And then she built an egg for her daughter with the same lock on it as the transforming machine, and she made sure that her daughter would inherit the egg, but not the key that would open it? That seems all kinds of problematic.
The story-crafters here then decided to throw a whole bunch of other elements into the mix, and the result is that this film feels like a mash-up of "The Nutcracker" with "The Wizard of Oz", "Alice in Wonderland" and the "Narnia" movies. All of those stories feature very normal, regular girls who all want something more out of life, and they find it in after being transported to a magical land of fantasy that's probably some kind of metaphor for the real world and it's problems. They also all feel like stress dreams to me, where they have to figure out the rules of those fantasy realms and try to solve a problem, only more and more obstacles keep getting placed in their paths. Follow the Yellow Brick Road, obtain the witch's broom, eat the cake, drink the drink, win the chess game, defeat the evil power and then somehow solve the problems, save the land and wake up back in the real world.
Here Clara has to enter the magical forest, chase a mouse that has that key, cross the bridge into the Fourth Realm, face Mother Ginger, and only then can she determine who the REAL villain of the piece is and tinker with the Machine to defeat the evil power. Yes, there's a very modern twist here, in that the first character to be depicted as the villain isn't the villain at all, and the real villain is the one you'd most likely never expect it to be. I've still got some N.P.'s, though:
NITPICK POINT #1 - the egg turns out to be just a music box, but it also functions as the "ruby slippers" of this piece. It also enables Clara to realize that she had the power to act within her all along, which is an OK message, but it also makes me feel like the screenwriter couldn't think of something that was inside the egg that could be helpful to the plot.
NITPICK POINT #2 - in the early part of the story, Clara fixes Drosselmeyer's clock/device, which is running backwards. She tinkers with it and is able to reverse something so that it runs forward. This would be a great way to foreshadow how she tinkers with the machine at the end of the story, only it doesn't really work. It would make sense for her to similarly "reverse" the device that turns toys into people and people into toys, but instead her tinkering with it merely changes the AIM of the beam, which isn't the same thing. She should be able to "reverse" the function of the device, only the story won't allow that for some reason. Try again.
The seven-headed Mouse King is replaced here by one mouse who can rally the other mice around him to carry him, and together they all form the shape of a giant mouse. That's a pretty cool effect, similar to what was seen a few years later in "The Suicide Squad", with a bunch of rats all working together. This is perhaps the best use of special effects in the whole film, but some may also find it very disgusting.
NITPICK POINT #3: I was looking for something that would make me feel all Christmas-ey, but this just isn't it. Nearly every connection to Christmas was absent here, except for the fact that maybe the party seen at the beginning is a Christmas Eve party. Again, one wonders if this was all removed during a story conference at Disney. Try again.
Also starring Mackenzie Foy (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Jayden Fowora-Knight (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Keira Knightley (last seen in "Never Let Me Go"), Helen Mirren (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Morgan Freeman (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Misty Copeland (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Eugenio Derbez (last seen in "Geostorm"), Matthew Macfadyen (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Anna Madeley (last seen in "In Bruges"), Sergei Polunin (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Aaron Smyth, Ellie Bamber (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Tom Sweet, Jack Whitehall (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Omid Djalili (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Meera Syal (last seen in "Yesterday"), Charles "Lil Buck" Riley (last seen in "Her"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Charles Streeter (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express").
RATING: 4 out of 10 clockwork mice
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