Disney Plus-Or-Minus: One Magic Christmas
Disneyland may well be the happiest place on Earth but you wouldn’t have known it based on the movies Walt Disney Pictures released in 1985. By the end of the year, we’d seen Dorothy Gale narrowly escape electroshock treatment in Return To Oz and some kind of little fuzzy whatsit commit suicide to defeat an Army of the Dead in The Black Cauldron. The studio’s most uplifting release, The Journey Of Natty Gann, was about a young woman’s arduous cross-country trek at the height of the Great Depression. But surely the studio would put on a happy face for their big holiday release. After all, the movie is called One Magic Christmas. How bad can it be? Well, I hope you’re sitting down and stocked up on anti-depressants.
(And yes, I’m aware that it is currently the end of July and most of us have been suffering through an unreasonably hot summer. One of the perils of undertaking a chronological project like this one, I’m afraid. If you want to stick a pin in this and come back later in the year, I won’t be offended.)
One Magic Christmas was not originally intended to be a Disney release. The movie was the brainchild of Canadian filmmaker Phillip Borsos, who had a sleeper hit in 1982 with The Grey Fox, widely regarded today as one of the best Canadian films of all time. Borsos cracked his Christmas story with Barry Healey, a co-producer on The Grey Fox, and screenwriter/playwright Thomas Meehan. Meehan won his first Tony Award for writing the book of the musical Annie. He’d go on to win two more, for The Producers and Hairspray. He was also a frequent collaborator of Mel Brooks. In addition to the Broadway musicals The Producers and Young Frankenstein, he’d been a writer on Brooks’ short-lived 1975 sitcom When Things Were Rotten and cowrote the screenplays for To Be Or Not To Be and Spaceballs.
Borsos was able to secure partial funding through Telefilm Canada but the film’s budget necessitated finding an American partner. Meehan’s screenplay made the usual Hollywood rounds and found no takers until it landed on the desk of producer Fred Roos. Roos had produced most of Francis Ford Coppola’s films, as well as the American Zoetrope-produced The Black Stallion (funny how all roads seem to lead back to that picture around this time). Roos was able to set One Magic Christmas up at Orion Pictures and production was scheduled to begin in late 1983.
The project also secured the participation of some major talent. Mary Steenburgen, the Oscar-winning star of Melvin And Howard, committed to playing the part of Ginnie Grainger, the put-upon wife and mother who has lost her Christmas spirit. Richard Farnsworth, the elder statesman star of The Grey Fox, agreed to play Gideon, the Christmas angel.
Before shooting could begin, Orion put the project in turnaround over budgetary concerns. The studio eventually dropped out entirely and the delays caused Farnsworth to leave, as well. Roos soon found a new partner in Disney, presumably still eager to take a meeting with anyone who’d had any connection to The Black Stallion. Farnsworth would be replaced by Harry Dean Stanton, whose work in such cult classics as Repo Man and Paris, Texas certainly qualifies him as one of the least-likely Disney stars. (Richard Farnsworth will eventually turn up in this column alongside Stanton in an even more unusual Disney picture.)
The movie takes place in the less-than-idyllic small town of Medford (not to be confused with Bedford Falls, although I’ll eat a wreath if the similarity wasn’t intentional) where the Grainger family is suffering through a pretty lousy holiday season. Husband Jack (Gary Basaraba) was laid off six months ago and the family has until the end of the month to vacate their company-owned home. They’re barely scraping by on the money Ginnie earns working at the local supermarket. The kids, Cal (Robbie Magwood) and Abbie (Elisabeth Harnois, who would later star as Alice on the Disney Channel series Adventures In Wonderland), have all but resigned themselves to the likelihood that Santa won’t be coming down their chimney this year.
Despite their hardships, Jack remains an optimistic dreamer, building a bike in the basement as a Christmas surprise for a less fortunate neighbor girl (a very young Sarah Polley makes her film debut as Molly Monaghan, several years before starring in the Disney-adjacent Road To Avonlea). He hopes to one day open his own bicycle shop, a goal that Ginnie dismisses as unrealistic, selfish and foolhardy. She expects him to get a real job with a regular salary and seems to be barely holding it together during this supposedly festive season.
Enter Gideon, a craggy but kind-eyed angel assigned to helping Ginnie rediscover the spirit of Christmas. Stanton looks like he arrived in Canada expecting to appear in The Journey Of Natty Gann but wound up in this instead. When Abbie sneaks out of the house late one night to mail a letter to Santa, Gideon magically retrieves it from the mailbox and instructs her to ask Ginnie to mail it for her. Predictably, Ginnie tosses the letter in a drawer and leaves it behind when she goes out to mail a stack of bills.
Meanwhile, Ginnie’s relentless pessimism has begun to weigh heavily on Jack. He goes out for a walk to clear his head. Ginnie’s way of cheering him up involves singing a few bars of “Lost In The Stars”, one of the most existentially depressing songs ever composed by Kurt Weill, the German master of existential depression. Jack understandably finds his wife’s choice of Christmas music off-putting and continues around the block, leaving Ginnie alone as every Christmas light in the neighborhood goes dark.
The next day is Christmas Eve and Jack plans on helping light the town tree with the assistance of his neighbor, Eddie (Elias Koteas makes his film debut here too and continues the parade of now very recognizable Canadian character actors). Ginnie is stuck working a double shift at the supermarket, so Jack decides to go against her wishes and pull some money out of their meager savings to get the kids better presents than the Etch-a-Sketch and cheap tea set she’d picked up.
Unfortunately, Jack goes to the bank at the exact same moment as Harry Dickens (Wayne Robson). Harry is a down-on-his-luck single father (seriously, every single person in Medford is being crushed under the weight of some economic calamity). Unable to sell his junker car or even his camp stove, a desperate Harry decides to rob the bank. Jack tries to defuse the situation and is shot and killed for his trouble.
Making matters worse, Harry escapes in Jack’s car with Cal and Abbie still in the backseat. Ginnie tries to chase them in Harry’s car but the heap dies at the first formidable hill. Picked up by the police, Ginnie arrives at the roadblock just in time to see Harry crash over a bridge and plummet into the icy river below. In less than an hour, she has seemingly lost her entire family. Merry Christmas, Ginnie!
Perhaps realizing that it’ll be a little hard for Ginnie to have a holly jolly Christmas with her husband in the morgue AND her kids at the bottom of a river, Gideon rescues Cal and Abbie, depositing them on the side of the road to be returned home by the police. Ginnie tries explaining things to the kids but Abbie is certain that Gideon can help bring her dad back to life. Turns out that even Christmas angels have some limitations. Gideon can’t do it but he thinks he knows someone who may be able to help. He whisks Abbie away to the North Pole for an audience with the man himself, Santa Claus (Czech actor and opera singer Jan Rubes, who’d had a small Disney role years earlier in The Incredible Journey).
Santa gives Abbie a tour of his workshop, which is manned not by elves but ordinary dead folk from all eras of history. He can’t bring Jack back to life either but he gives Abbie the means to allow her mother to do it: a letter Ginnie had written to Santa as a girl when she was still Ginnie Hanks, living a lonely life in a Ramada Inn with her motel manager dad.
Gideon brings Abbie home, where she delivers the old letter to an awestruck Ginnie. Now convinced that Santa must be real, she finally digs Abbie’s letter out of the drawer and heads out to the mailbox. Once she drops the letter in, the neighborhood Christmas lights magically switch back on and Jack comes strolling down the street, rounding the corner from his trip around the block.
There’s a little bit more to the picture, the usual Christmas Carol postscript where we see how our Scrooge character has changed for the better, but you get the general idea. This is a weird, dark, downbeat movie. And when I say dark, I don’t just mean tonally. This is one of the most muted, colorless Christmas movies you’ll ever see. Director of photography Frank Tidy doesn’t shoot glistening, pure white snow and twinkling lights. The snow is piled everywhere and it’s the dirty, slushy kind you see when you’re ready for winter to be over. In exterior scenes, the actors’ visible breath envelops them in a chilly fog. This is a cold, lonely, hardscrabble winter without much Christmas cheer. Even the lights on the trees seem faded and dingy.
The story’s obvious inspiration is Frank Capra’s immortal classic It’s A Wonderful Life, with a sprinkling of Miracle On 34th Street and its belief in the magical powers of writing letters to Santa. But One Magic Christmas is a whole lot more muddled than Capra’s perennial favorite. In It’s A Wonderful Life, Clarence is the low-angel on the totem pole, sent to Earth by his superiors up in the cosmos in response to a whole town’s worth of prayers. Gideon takes his orders from Saint Nicholas, who seems to be in charge of everything. No one seems all that concerned about Ginnie and it doesn’t appear that her aversion to Christmas stems from anything in particular apart from the soul-crushing realities of living in an economically depressed small town. Jolly old Saint Nick just wants to remind her that he’s around.
Additionally, Clarence did not help George Bailey by bringing him to the North Pole to see Santa Claus. This narrative detour for a visit with Saint Nicholas is jarring, to say the least. It might land a little better if Ginnie’s childhood letter had revealed some deep emotional truth about why she is the way she is. But it’s just a standard kid’s letter asking for a bunch of toys that we don’t even know if she received or not. It might be cathartic for Ginnie to get the letter back but it doesn’t mean much to the rest of us.
All that being said, it’s not as though One Magic Christmas is a poorly made film. The cast (which also includes Arthur Hill, the narrator of Something Wicked This Way Comes, as Cal and Abbie’s grandfather) is uniformly excellent. Steenburgen occasionally seems as though she wished she had a little bit more to play with and is being held back by the dictates of a G-rated holiday movie but she still creates a compelling, well-rounded character.
Casting Harry Dean Stanton was an interesting gamble. Believe it or not, this was not the first Disney credit on his resume (nor will it be the last). He’d made an uncredited appearance in an episode of the Elfego Baca serial on Disneyland all the way back in 1959. But in the years since, he had not exactly become synonymous with family-friendly programming. If you can’t get beyond the baggage he carries with him as an actor, this casting isn’t going to work for you. But Stanton’s soft eyes and gentle voice make him a surprisingly effective guardian angel. I wouldn’t be upset if he appeared in a tree outside my place one cold winter’s night, although I’d probably invite him in to get warm by splitting a bottle of bourbon.
One Magic Christmas opened on November 22, 1985, the week before Thanksgiving, which is usually a little too early for moviegoers to get into the Yuletide spirit. The next week, it was joined in theatres by producer Ilya Salkind’s megabudget Santa Claus: The Movie. Forced to choose between Santa Claus: The Movie and Disney’s Seasonal Affective Disorder: The Movie, most audiences chose the former, although not by much. Most of America opted for neither and spent the 1985 holidays with Rocky IV.
Still, Santa Claus had cost a small fortune to make and went on to become a notorious flop. One Magic Christmas, on the other hand, was made for a relatively low budget and did well enough to earn a small profit but is now kind of forgotten. History likes to remember the winners and the spectacular losers but doesn’t have a lot of room for everybody in between.
One Magic Christmas was the second film directed by Phillip Borsos to hit theatres in 1985. In February of that year, Orion had released his serial killer drama The Mean Season, starring once-and-future Disney star Kurt Russell. Unfortunately, these two were also among Borsos’ last. Borsos spent the next several years working on the epic biopic Bethune: The Making Of A Hero with Donald Sutherland, which finally came out in 1990. In January 1995, his family adventure Far From Home: The Adventures Of Yellow Dog was released. It would be his final film. Phillip Borsos passed away from leukemia on February 2, 1995, at the far too young age of 41.
Traditional movie and television viewing spikes around the holidays, with millions of fans penciling in time to watch their favorites every year. One Magic Christmas has never quite reached the upper echelons of such Christmas perennials as It’s A Wonderful Life, Home Alone, A Charlie Brown Christmas or even Die Hard. It’s the sort of movie you watch once when you’re in the mood for something other than the same-old same old, are kind of puzzled by, then forget about until somebody tries to remember the name of that movie where the guy from Alien plays a Christmas angel.
VERDICT: I want to like it more than I do but, in the end, it’s a lump of Disney Coal…I mean, Minus.
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