I have to admit I wasn’t sure going in how I was going to
appreciate “A Christmas Story Christmas,” the sequel to “A Christmas Story,
(1983)” the perennial holiday favorite, directed by Bob Clark, based on the
works of writer/humorist Jean Shepherd. The new film finds his children serving as Executive Producers. Shepherd and I go back a long way. Not
that I knew him personally—it just feels like I did.In the 1960s during my high school and
college years I used to listen to him on WOR-AM on my little transistor radio. He
was on for about an hour every night and all he did was talk. But not just
talk. He told stories, stories about growing up in Hammond, Ind., and stories
of his days in the Army Signal Corp in World War II. Or he’d read some haiku
poetry, or render verse about the Yukon by Robert Service, or stories by George
Ade. He was one of a kind, a man who left a deep, if almost relatively unacknowledged,
influence on American popular culture. He’s not mentioned much by comedians and
writers today, but at least Jerry Seinfeld has said he learned comedy from
listening to Shepherd. Marshall McLuhan said Shepherd was writing a new kind of
novel night after night.
Some of the stories he told on the radio went into his
novel, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,” which he later adapted into a
script for Bob Clark’s film, “A Christmas Story.” We all know that movie, the
story of Ralphie Parker who wants a Red Ryder .22 shot Range Model Air Rifle for
Christmas. Who can escape it? It runs every Christmas Eve for 24 hours on
cable. Well, here we are in the Streaming Age and HBO Max is streaming a sequel
to the original, and despite a few missteps, as Larry David would say, “It’s
pretty, pretty, pretty good.”
It’s 1973, 33 years after the original film, and Ralphie,
now living in Chicago, has grown up to be something of a loser. He’s being
supported by his wife Julie (Errin Hayes), while he struggles to achieve his
dream of becoming a writer. He’s having a hard time finding any publisher
interested in publishing a 2,000 page science fiction tome entitled “Neptune
Oblivion.” He tells Julie he’ll give himself until the end of the year to sell
his book and if he has no luck, he’ll give up and get a mainstream job. Tragedy
strikes when Ralph gets a call from his mother (Julie Hagerty) back home in
Indiana, informing him the The Old Man (Shepspeak for Ralphie’s father) has
died. Darren McGavin, who passed away in 2006, played The Old Man in the
original film, and his presence is felt all through the movie, via short flash
backs and soundtrack clips. He’s as important a character as any member of the
cast.
The family drives from Chicago to be with Ralph’s mom.
Instead of wallowing in grief, Mom reminds Ralph how his father always made
Christmas something special for the family, and she makes Ralph promise to make
this Christmas as good as the ones his father made. Ralph doesn’t have a clue
how to do that, but he’s going to try. Mom also asks him to write an obituary
for The Old Man for the local newspaper. He balks, saying he doesn’t know how
to write something like that, but she reminds him: “You’re the writer in the
family.”
Part of the charm of “A Christmas Story Christmas” comes
from the scenes in which Ralph goes into town and meets up with some of the
characters from the original film, including Flick (Scott Schwartz), and Schwartz
(R.D. Robb). Even yellow-eyed bully Scut Farkas (Zack Ward) shows up before
it’s all over. One of the funniest scenes in the movie is a reversal of the
scene in the original where Schwartz tricked Flick into sticking his tongue on
a frozen telephone pole. All these years later, Ralphie’s voice-over informs
us, Flick’s been holding a grudge. He maneuvers Schwartz into “Riding the Ramp”—a
triple dog dare that involves riding a sled down a giant sluice left at a
construction site by the Army Corps. of Engineers. “They say revenge is a dish best
served cold,” Ralph says. “This was a frozen dinner.”
Director Clay Kaytis (“Angry Birds” (2016)) directing
only his second live action film, the first being “Christmas Chronicles” (2018),
moves the story at a fairly brisk pace and hits a lot of the right notes. It only
slows down slightly in the middle, where he seems to have set up a list of
highlights from the original film to revisit, including having the Parker
family trek downtown to the Christmas window at Higbee’s Department Store. Ralph
ends up doing all the shopping as wife and mother sit in the lounge, and the
kids climb up the papier mache mountain to tell Santa what they want for
Christmas. Julianna Layne as Julie and River Droche as Mark are very good as
the kids. Julie scores some extra points interrogating Santa to see if he’s the
real deal, including asking him for his Christian name and the coordinates for
his workshop at the North Pole.
Billingsley for the most part does a good job playing the
grown-up Ralphie. He was made up to almost look like Jean Shepherd himself. Occasionally
I thought he played him too soft, almost like John Boy of the Waltons clan.
Shepherd had a sharper edge to his delivery, cynical with a touch of the
sardonic. But as the plot thickens and things heat up, Billingsley comes close
enough.
The script by Nick Schenk and Billingsley is remarkably
good. Schenk, whose previous work includes screenplays for three Clint Eastwood
movies, including “The Mule” and “Cry Macho,” sneaks quite a few inside
references into the screenplay that only Shepherd’s biggest fans would
recognize. For example, a scene where a bunch of kids sled down a steep hill at
breakneck speed features “Bahn Frei, Op. 45,” by Edward Strauss on the
soundtrack—the music that Shepherd played every night at the opening and close
of his WOR radio show.
Overall this is a film better than anything you might
have expected, certainly better than the abominable “A Christmas Story 2”
(2012), and even better than “My Summer Story” (1994), which Shepherd wrote and
Clark directed. Any flaws “A Christmas
Story Christmas” may have are forgiven and forgotten by the ending of the
movie, which, frankly, left me speechless. I can’t reveal what happens but it
puts the movie into a special category very few films achieve.
“A Christmas Story Christmas” has been described as a
tribute to the late Darren McGavin, but it’s also a tribute and homage to
Shepherd, who is given a writing credit in the opening titles. Also listed in
the titles are Randall and Adrian Shepherd, Shepherd’s two children—children
whose existence he reportedly never recognized after divorcing their mother,
the second of his four wives. It’s a sad fact that after he walked out of the
marriage, he never had anything to do with his kids. Yet somehow here they are now
involved in a film based on his work. Perhaps “A Christmas Story Christmas,” is
not only a tribute to McGavin as The Old Man, a father, who in the end, does
make it a Christmas to remember, but also a tribute to and an attempt at reconciliation
with a father who didn’t.
(The film is currently streaming on HBOMax).
John M. Whalen is the author of "Tragon and the Scorpion Woman...and Other Tales". Click here to order from Amazon