[3.0/10] Maybe you have to have grown up in the 1940s. Maybe you have to be nostalgic for a time that we barely have any point of reference for in 2019. Maybe you have to have watched this movie on TBS’s constant loop to where it became part of the cinematic wallpaper of your yuletide celebration.

Whatever it is, you need a certain something to be able to appreciate *A Christmas Story*, and I just don’t have it. I don’t get this movie, and worse yet, I do not understand how anyone above the age of eight could like it. It is broad, hacky, annoying, and toothless, with scant few moments of cleverness or warmth to make it anything more than festive nails on a chalkboard for ninety minutes.

The film tells the story of Ralphie, a young boy in 1940s Indiana who wants a B.B. gun for Xmas. Based on Jean Shepherd’s fictionalized recollections of childhood, director Bob Clark depicts Ralphie’s trials and tribulations as he tried to ensure he receives his desired holiday gift and otherwise navigates the peaks and valleys of childhood. Those misadventures largely encompass the cornball dysfunction of his family: a know-nothing patriarch, a caring traditional mom, and an inert little brother who’s mostly a prop.

Shepherd’s provides voiceover narration for these vignettes, representing an adult Ralphie looking back on this time, and it’s hardly a feature. While I’m sure there’s a touch of sardonic wit that’s lost in translation, the prose is clunky when vocalized. There’s an overwritten quality to it that occasionally draws a touch of humor from using grandiose terms for the mundane bumps and bruises of childhood, but mostly it comes off like Shepherd and Clark gilding the lily.

It’s a larger problem with the film as a whole. There’s a disconnect to a film steeped in nostalgia for a time decades before most modern viewers were born, but to the extent there’s anything universally relatable about the film, it’s the way little things like what present you’re going to receive on the big day, or how you might do on the big assignment, feel like world-shattering events in a child’s mind. But *A Christmas Story* plays these events to the cheap seats, between its cartoony central characters and goofy tone, that it drains almost any human connection from the film.

It’s also just damn annoying to sit through for an hour and a half. There is an awful lot of screaming and screeching in this movie, often for no particular reason. Every character besides the mom is at least kind of an asshole. And the observational humor is so tame, so utterly, stultifyingly bland, that you can’t help but wonder if the next gag will be some cutting dig against substandard shoe polish.

It doesn't help that, as inevitably befalls most movies made nearly forty years ago, there’s some uncomfortable bits of culturally insensitive comedy that take you out of the film. Ralphie comparing his dad to an “Arab trader” in voiceover almost made me choke on my drink. And the fact that the closing bit of humor centers on Chinese food waiters being unable to pronounce “R” sounds when trying to sing Xmas carols is utterly cringe-worthy. As always, some allowances have to be made for art from a different time, but bits like these make it hard for the film’s already placid, bad sitcom-level comedy to land.

About the only thing that works in the film are its visuals. Make no mistake, Bob Clark and cinematographer Reginald H. Morris can’t match Chris Colombus and Julio Macat of *Home Alone* in terms of finding striking images and dynamic shots within a mostly low-stakes domestic story. But few scenes in the film convey the funhouse mirror scariness of life as a kid than when Morris goes with a point-of-view shot for Ralphie’s interaction with a gruff mall Santa and his grumpy elves, earning a boot in the face for his troubles.

In fact, the only warmth in the film comes in its visual moments on Xmas morning. The tactile close-ups of everyone’s hands, busy at work unwrapping presents, or the slow pan across a lawn covered in icicle-dressed trees, or Ralphie’s parents gazing out at the evening snowfall while their tree provides a light in the dark creates a mood of joy and cheer that the rest of the film’s nonsense doesn't even graze.

*A Christmas Story*’s imagine spots are shockingly lacking in imagination. I don’t know what this film’s budget was, but it’s basically an excuse to throw people in some cheap Halloween costumes and speed up the playback scenes. What should be the most fun sequences in the movie are lifeless, laughless diversions with nothing to show for them.

The same goes for the family’s interactions. There’s a generic sitcom dynamic at play here, with what feels like a weird cross between a 1940s setting and a 1980s sensibility. Nearly all of the characters are such over the top archetypes that nothing they do is real enough to be funny or funny enough to be real. Only the mom has any true admirable qualities, and the quotidian disputes over now-iconic leg lamps and bunny suits lack any sign or insights.

Taken most charitably, *A Christmas Story* can be commended for telling the story of a lower-middle class family, one that doesn't really fit the mold of the Cleavers. It’s a creditable feature that the kids in the film are not innocent angels but jerky and human and even weird at times.

But Clark and Shepherd can’t turn those admirable aims into a film actually worth watching. The comedy on display is suitable for kids Ralphie’s age, and embarrassingly bad for anybody older. There’s no real story or plot to speak of beyond Ralphie’s quest for a B.B. gun, and each of the vignettes that simply roll into one another has little too offer beyond a tepid take on domestic life. If this is what passed for wry insight or venerable laughs in 1983, then count me as glad that whatever sensibility is needed to appreciate this pile of snowflaked crud is thankfully in short supply so many holiday seasons later.

**Without no doubt, a good film, where things work very well in a very simple way.**

When we talk about Christmas-themed films, the choice is so huge that the difficult part has been showing things that are substantially different or original. What this film does is simply tell us a good story… and it works like that! It's not a film that enchants us, and I, personally, hardly see myself seeing it again. But the fact is that it manages to be much better than a lot of the rubbish that appears around Christmas.

The script is simple and so direct that it can be summed up in one sentence: it is a description of a child's Christmas and the way in which he, through various means, tries to get the gift he most wants to receive, and which his parents seem disinclined to give. give him: an air pressure gun. And this leads me to talk about the first point that really surprised me about this film: the fact that a child is offered a gun.

I'm not from the USA, I'm Portuguese, and when I was a child I had toy shotguns and pistols, but they didn't shoot, they were made of plastic. An air rifle, in my understanding, is still a weapon. Therefore, I was shocked by the idea of seeing an air gun for sale as a toy, among other toys. However, it is well known that we, in Europe, do not have the almost emotional relationship with weapons that North Americans have, and the laws that regulate them here are much tougher than the laws in the USA. Therefore, I know that my strangeness is due to cultural differences, but I still felt it with great intensity in this film.

Aside from this, I honestly don't have any major criticisms to point out: the dialogues are good, and the situations created are quite believable, even those that seem more crazy (such as the dogs that eat the turkey). There are many beautiful moments that move us, whether because of the affectionate relationship of that family, or because of the evocation of the best memories of each person's childhood: when watching the film, we remember our own past with a tear in our eyes, the people who no longer live close to us or are no longer present in this world. I felt old watching this film, I thought a lot about what I experienced, about the speed at which life takes turns and about the dreams I had at that boy's age (many of them I fulfilled and many were left behind)... But I'm not here to talk about me!

The film seems simple, it even seems cheap to make, if we consider the simplicity of the effects, the effectiveness and modesty of the sets, the very unpretentious way in which everything is presented to us, from the costumes to the cinematography itself, which is nothing special, but which works. efficiently. I would particularly highlight the exquisite way in which the production managed to recreate the family atmosphere experienced at the end of the 1940s, right in the aftermath of the Second World War. The cast also doesn't have big names, at least for me: young Peter Billingsley does an excellent job and is elegantly supported by Darren McGavin and Melinda Dilon. I dare say that this was the best of each of these actors.

Okay, I know this isn’t a perfect movie, perhaps not close to it. We just watched it again and I teasingly pointed out small plot or action gaffes here or there. But for me it is my all time favorite Christmas movie.

Partly I suppose because it feeds into my memories of growing up in a snowy, cold small town, though this predates my childhood by several years. And rarely do I feel like an ensemble cast made up of both adult and child actors do so well together. The Parkers, husband and wife, have their duel over the “major award,” and at times their sensibilities reside on different planets: his love of sports and her submersion into the details of raising children, but they are a unit and comically in love.

And I even think part of the charm for me is the voice of the narrator. Adult Ralphie is of course Jean Shepherd, one of the screenwriters and the author of the source book “In God we Trust; All Others Pay Cash, a book I once owned in paperback. For years I listened to his radio show, late at night, my ears glued to a small transistor radio. He spoke in a hushed, dramatic voice about his childhood and other stories. I remember once he intoned about a magic place called “Maine,” where his father hunted or wanted to hunt. Of course I lived in Maine so it was a sort of revelation to hear it was a special place. (And it is.)

So A Christmas Story ticks all of the boxes for me in nostalgia and humor and covers the major elements of Christmas for kids, all achieved without the Christmas miracle a lot of holiday films trot out at the end.