Nobody's Fool (1994)

I'm curious whether this was just in a blind spot for me, or if various factors surrounding the film resulted in an exceptional Oscar-nominated comedy/drama Christmas movie anchored by a legendary actor (and supported with an incredible cast) to fade from collective memory. Or maybe it never embedded itself far enough into cultural memory to begin with: it was at best a modest box-office success, so any real staying power would have come from VHS and cable. And while its Christmas credentials are in my mind unimpeachable, they're far less prominent than those in holiday movies from the same era now considered classics (few of which are anywhere near as good as Nobody's Fool, but we'll get to that).

If it hadn't gotten a mention in Alonso Duralde's "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas," I might never have found it, which makes me wonder how many other brilliant forgotten holiday movies exist. At any rate, this one's very good and well worth tracking down.

The best description I can come up with is "whimsical dramedy." Considered objectively, the movie's characters and setting are dismal and depressing, but the tone and humor invert this, resulting in something strangely upbeat and funny. If the movie were less loving in its portrayal of small-town America, it would read like a satire, but it expresses genuine empathy for its characters, even as it exposes their flaws and the limitations in their perspectives.

There's no shortage of examples of this paradox, but it's most readily apparent in its protagonist, Sully (Paul Newman), an aging contractor nursing a bad knee, who finds himself reunited with the family he abandoned when his son was a toddler. Again, if we were to look at the character objectively, we'd conclude he was irredeemable - he had no good reason for leaving when he did, and he has no shortage of other flaws. He's brash, arrogant, and seems virtually incapable of an honest emotional exchange. I've met people like Sully, and in the real world I have no interest in knowing them better. But between Newman's acting and both the writing and direction of Robert Benton (who co-wrote Bonnie and Clyde, The Ice Harvest, the 1978 Superman, and "What's Up, Doc?", which I coincidentally also saw for the first time this week), I found the character endearing. This is a movie about the exceptional qualities found in flawed people and places, and it delivers.

The supporting cast is likewise incredible, including Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jessica Tandy (in her final performance). Despite playing a significant role, Willis was apparently left out of marketing (his name doesn't even appear in the opening credits, so I was surprised when he showed up), supposedly because the producers were worried audiences would assume this was an action movie (ironic, since six years earlier executives pushed back against casting him in Die Hard because they were worried his presence would undercut that genre). Maybe if they'd been less embarrassed one of the most popular actors alive appeared in their movie, it would have made more money.

Willis is great here, by the way. He plays against type as Carl, a slimy contractor with a complicated relationship with Sully. The two are ostensibly enemies - Sully is suing over a knee injury sustained while working for Carl, he has a crush on Carl's wife (Melanie Griffith), and they spend the movie breaking into each other's property to steal (and steal back) an expensive snowblower. But despite all this, Sully continues accepting jobs from Carl (who keeps offering him work), and at one point Sully lets Carl crash on his couch when his wife, Toby, throws him out for cheating. The movie implies they genuinely like each other and equally genuinely hate each other.

Sully's relationship with Toby is the only one that doesn't work. For the majority of the movie, the two are shown flirting playfully and bonding over their shared objections to Carl's infidelity. I didn't have a problem with this while it the flirtation was a shared joke, nor do I mind Sully having a crush on the younger woman. But Griffith's character is much younger than Newman's, so when she actually offers to run away with him to Hawaii at the end, it's both hard to believe and a somewhat glaring example of Hollywood's double-standard that men should be perceived as attractive longer than women.

There are a lot of caveats to this. Toby is partially motivated by anger - when she offers to take Sully on vacation, it's as much to get back at Carl for his ongoing affairs as it is interest in Sully (though she does seem to like him). But she's also pregnant, which makes the whole situation weirder and less believable.

At any rate, Sully decides against it, kisses Toby, and watches her leave. Over the course of the movie he's come to feel a sense of fulfillment from his connections and responsibilities. He's got a long way to go before he's a good father or grandfather, but he's started down that path. He's also found a sense of purpose in his even stranger relationship with his landlord, a woman significantly older than him (this would be Jessica Tandy's role). Their relationship isn't physical or even romantic, but we see them taking care of and looking out for each other. They behave much like a married couple, a fact Sully seems to finally realize in the closing minutes of the movie.

I'm almost inclined to give the movie a pass for his relationship with Toby because of this, by the way. There's absolutely a sense in which this is a story about a man coming to terms with his age and embracing a role more in keeping with that age. Passing up the opportunity to have an affair with a younger woman and settling into a secure, non-physical relationship with an older woman suggests there might have been a little more thought behind the age gap between Newman and Griffith than you normally see in these movies.

There's a great deal I barely touched on and even more I haven't mentioned, such as his rivalry with the small town cop played by Philip Seymour Hoffman or his son's marital problems. But relaying more details won't provide much insight into the what the movie is like, in part because - as you may have noticed - I haven't been providing a great deal of connective tissue. The reason for that omission is there isn't much to provide: the movie doesn't have a straightforward central plot, but is rather comprised of numerous loosely connected subplots surrounding Sully and his relationships with those around him. Structurally, it's sort of like A Christmas Story, if A Christmas Story was actually heartfelt and funny.

That's a dangerous approach to making a movie. There's a reason films tend to be more succinct than TV or novels (it's worth noting Nobody's Fool is based on a book by Richard Russo). There's no law that says you need to build a movie around a simple underlying story arc that serves as a backbone to the plot, but if you deviate from that formula you're sacrificing a great deal of leeway. If the tone of this hadn't worked, if the jokes hadn't been funny, if the performances were less than perfect... any of those elements would likely have sunk the project.

But as I've already made clear, damn near everything here is great, so the movie winds up feeling satisfying. It also winds up feeling a lot like, well, CHRISTMAS, so we should probably get to the subject this blog was created to cover.

I implied earlier that the Christmas stuff was a bit more muted than you'd expect from this kind of thing. The holidays frame the movie in a very conventional way, with Thanksgiving at the start and culminating with New Year's, but Sully barely acknowledges these. Still, the holidays seems to touch him in unexpected ways. For example, when he drops by his ex-wife's house for Thanksgiving at his son's suggestion, things take a turn quickly and he disappears after about a minute... only to later find one of his grandsons has stowed away in his truck, opening the door to him eventually embracing his role as a grandfather. Likewise, his decision not to run away with Toby, along with his reconciliation with his son (and his son's reconciliation with his own wife, at Sully's prompting) occur on New Year's Eve. But again, because Sully is so distant and uninterested in the holidays, the movie spares us the usual fixation on the magic of the holidays, leaving it buried deeper in subtext than usual.

The portrayal of an aging man simultaneously facing his mortality and reevaluating his relationships at Christmas is reminiscent of The Lion in Winter. As good as Nobody's Fool is, I wouldn't place this in the same tier as that film, but that's true of all but a handful of holiday classics. And this one's quite good. It's a weird, funny, and touching holiday movie that manages to communicate a different sort of Christmas experience than those we're typically inundated with by Hollywood. This is absolutely worth watching.