‘Nutcrackers’ Movie Review: Feel-Good Dramedy Is Safe But Ultimately Sweet
Photo from Hulu
From Jeremy Kibler
In Nutcrackers, filmmaker David Gordon Green gets back to his more naturalistic indie roots with a familiar formula: the workaholic suit gets his heart warmed by rowdy kids. Yes, that old chestnut. The one piece of novelty here is that Green builds his entire movie around four real-life brothers, Atlas, Arlo, Ulysses, and Homer Janson (ages 8 to 13), the sons of a former film school classmate. Nutcrackers could’ve used a little more edge to really transcend the safe tropes, but one would have to be a real Christmas scrooge to not be a little won over by this shaggier variation on The Bad News Bears.
In his first lead role since 2017’s wonderful Brad Status, Ben Stiller is well-cast as Michael, a job-focused commercial real-estate developer from Chicago. After the deaths of his sister and her husband in a car accident, Michael drives his yellow Porsche five hours to Ohio to see his newly orphaned nephews who have become (or have always been) unruly and feral. Family services agent Gretchen (Linda Cardellini) meets Michael at his sister’s farm, only to put him in charge as the boys’ guardian until she can find them a suitable foster family. The Kicklighter boys, Justice (Homer Janson), Junior (Ulysses Janson), and twins Simon (Arlo Janson) and Samuel (Atlas Janson), were homeschooled but apparently not house-trained. The house is a mess, a literal pigsty with pigs freely roaming indoors and dishes piled high in the sink. When they aren’t hot-wiring a carnival ride and accidentally destroying it, they try giving their pet peacock a bath. All of this is to say that Uncle Michael, though not ready to take on four boys, will naturally warm up to the little moppets, and they will to him, too.
Ben Stiller is working within his sweet spot as Michael, making an initially unlikable workaholic more tolerable. The lovely Linda Cardellini is always a pleasure, managing to lift up her idealistic family-services character with her radiant disposition; the kindling relationship between Gretchen and Michael is also thankfully underplayed. Although the Kicklighter boys would probably fit right in as Haddonfield hellions in Green’s own Halloween trilogy, there is actual affection for these little weirdos. Being unprofessional actors, the kids feel like real kids and real siblings, undisciplined but spirited as they are. Of the brothers, Homer Janson stands out the most as the eldest, Justice, receiving the more defined arc in grappling with the loss of his parents and creating an actual relationship with Stiller’s Michael.
The script by Leland Douglas has to start somewhere, and the early scenes of the self-involved Michael are annoying and not entirely promising. The boys somehow convince their uncle that he can get cell service in the middle of a swamp. Then nothing goes right at the holiday party held by the town’s Rockefeller (Toby Huss), whom Michael intends to make nice with and hopefully persuade he and his wife to adopt his nephews.
Why the film is titled Nutcrackers coincides with the boys’ oddball rewrite of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, complete with a samurai. Their mom used to run a dance studio, and Justice loved ballet, so the film culminates with their own production just in time for Christmas. The film certainly gets better as it goes long, even when collapsing into clichés, practically in the same scene. Luckily, it recovers for a conventional Big Show finale that’s made unconventional by its setting. It shouldn’t work, not dramatically, technically, or geographically, but the earnest feel-goodery wins out, even if you try to fight it.
Thankfully not overly mushy to feel false, Nutcrackers is sometimes amusing and ultimately sweet. It’s just too slight to make a greater impact, but you won’t be angry that you got to meet the Janson brothers.
Rating: 2.5/5
Nutcrackers hits Hulu on November 29, 2024.
