Merry Christmas Movie Review:


This is such a great true story that it's a pity the film's so heavy-handed and deliberately weepy. But writer-director Carion over-stresses every emotional point, fills the dialog with mini-sermons and hypes the modern-day parallels.

It's December 1914, and the French and Scots are fighting in the trenches against the Germans. In a moment of tranquillity on Christmas Eve, the sound of bagpipes and then the voices of a German opera-singing soldier (Furmann), followed by his diva girlfriend (Kruger), waft across the battlefield. Soon the three leaders (Canet, Ferns and Bruhl) are meeting in the middle, declaring a cease-fire for Christmas. And a priest (Lewis) says mass for the mixed crowd. Will they ever be able to shoot at each other again?

Carion expertly recreates the settings and the superb cast beautifully brings the characters to life, bringing out the moving back-stories and adding the subtlety lacking in the script. But Carion is clearly trying to tell a Much Bigger Story, so every character is standing in for thousands of souls, and their willingness to lay down arms is a harbinger of an idyllic new world order that was never meant to be.

Maybe this is true, but the film would be much stronger if Carion allowed us to find the message ourselves. From the very beginning, he's wringing every drop of sentimentality out of each scene, contriving the various plot strands so he can drop thematic bombs on us. Some of these hit their target; there are real moments of honesty and provocative insight. But most of it leaves us cold, simply because it's so cloyingly obvious.

And despite the remarkable events, Carion doesn't seem to know how to tell the story. The structure is clunky and pushy, the dialog is pretty basic, attempts at humour are strained and repetitive, the opera-and-sex interlude is sweet but spurious, and of course one German officer is Jewish (irony alert!). In this sense, the film feels like the similarly award-grubbing The Chorus. At least the characters are engaging, and underneath the slush the film highlights a genuinely moving moment in history.



Rich Cline

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