Can Die Hard – the 1988 action movie starring Bruce Willis as an NYPD detective hoping to reconcile with his estranged wife on Christmas Eve – be called a Christmas film? The annual debate had officially reached my street WhatsApp group when a happily married couple decided to launch a poll. With 18 votes against four, the result from my road was a landslide “yes”. One neighbour even shared a picture of their Die Hard tree baubles to prove the point.
But an official poll by the British Board of Film Classification has now asserted the contrary – with 44% deciding that Die Hard should not be designated a Christmas movie, against 38% in favour. To some, even with the odd tinsel-strewn tree thrown in, the gun fights, violence and hostage-taking just don’t feel festive. For an admirable 5% of respondents, it remains their favourite Christmas film of all time.
The case against it seems to simmer down to the fact that Christmas is only used as a backdrop, not in order to reify some core message about togetherness, renewal or hope. The postwar era saw a boom in such Christmas films. Take festive classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), in which a man’s suicide attempt is thwarted by a guardian angel who shows him the positive effect he has on the world, and other Christmas films, such as White Christmas (1954) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which emphasise optimism and themes of family and nostalgia.
By the 1990s, festive films became huge commercial events, with titles such as Home Alone (1990) grossing $477m (£359m) worldwide. Perhaps this is why the Christmas decorations started to be slapped on by set designers a little too liberally. No one seems to debate whether romcoms such as Richard Curtis’s Love Actually (2003) or Nancy Meyers’s The Holiday (2006), starring Kate Winslet as hopeless singleton Iris and Cameron Diaz as neurotic, cheated-on Amanda, are Christmas films. But the latter’s life-swap intrigue, which spawns couplings as neatly as in a Shakespearean comedy, could very well take place at any time of year. The festive vibes are surely part of a further marketing decision, to ensure the title’s longevity and a second chance beyond the box office. I was taken to see the film as a 12-year-old, and remember being mortified when my Catholic parents made us leave early on, when Diaz made a drunken pass at Jude Law. It’s a Christmas memory I’d rather forget.
But what makes a truly worthy Christmas film? For me, the best festive films approach Christmas as aesthetic or intellectual terrain, rather than as a vehicle for happy-ever-after normalcy (bah humbug, I know). Released last week, Harry Lighton’s breakout film Pillion is a welcome example of this. Based on Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Box Hill, it follows a sub/dom relationship between biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) and Colin (Harry Melling). Set in suburban Bromley, the first portion of the film takes place during Christmas – Ray asks Colin for a date on Christmas Day (5pm, round the back of Primark). The fuzzy but slightly suffocating feeling of Colin’s loving family home – with its novelty jumpers and Christmas crackers – stands in stark relief to the non-conforming, unsentimental tone of the ensuing BDSM relationship, and Ray’s spartan, leather-clad world. Lighton has said he wanted to comment on the way queer relationships don’t fit inside the mould of heteronormative domesticity (that Christmas encapsulates). Like The Holiday, the film isn’t family viewing.
Conjuring Christmas without sentimentality is its own skill. In 1999, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was released, a film that, despite seemingly having a bigger budget for Christmas trees than most festive films, manages to avoid fuzziness altogether. In the movie, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Christmas is a time to explore themes of marital infidelity and the trees, which parody the hyper-consumerism of 1990s New York, create a kind of alien land in which Kubrick’s protagonists appear anything but merry.
Yet for Christmas movies, it’s ultimately best to strike a bit of a balance between cynicism and nostalgia. Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002) is a masterclass for this reason, and in my opinion, contains one of the best festive sequences of all time. In the final reckoning, fraudster Frank Abagnale Jr (Leonardo DiCaprio) is arrested in a French village to the backdrop of twinkling fairy lights and carollers. In the US, Frank, who escapes once again, watches his estranged family through a window, celebrating the holidays with their new son, as the FBI closes in on him. It’s a perfect encapsulation of that peering-through-the-window feeling you can get at this time of year, when it feels like everyone else is having a better time than you.
Kitty Grady is a writer and digital editor at A Rabbit’s Foot film magazine
