Ben Stiller just got his comedy mojo back in the most unexpected of places.
Nutcrackers, the official opening-night film of the 2024 Toronto Film Festival, is not the kind of movie you expect to see at serious film festivals, which tend to go for darker or less obviously commercial fare. So it is a bit of a surprise to see TIFF launching with a purely entertaining and heartwarming family holiday movie that will make you laugh, cry and walk out feeling good. Nothing wrong with that.
This is the kind of movie Hollywood used to deliver all the time but has clearly forgotten how to make — until now. Among the inspirations for director David Gordon Green were The Bad News Bears, Six Pack, Uncle Buck and Overboard. You might expect John Hughes was back from the dead, along with this genre. I would go back even further to the ’50s and ’60s, when Cary Grant was making family fare with lots of kids in movies like Room For One More, Houseboat and the Oscar-winning Father Goose. The latter was about a cranky guy who finds himself, against his will, looking after a gaggle of adorable kids.
That basically is what Nutcrackers is, but with a key difference: The kid stars here are not actors at all, but a family Green discovered when visiting an old friend on her farm in rural Ohio. He was so taken with this unique quartet of boys that the inspiration for the movie was born to shoot with them on their farm, with all the pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, goats and chipmunks along for the ride. It might not have worked, but pairing them with Stiller at his most appealing, and you have a movie set during Christmas that works for any age from 8 to 80, a pure family film that’s not animated for a change. If you hear anyone asking, “Why don’t they make ’em anymore like they used to?” well they just did.
Stiller is a single Chicago businessman when tragedy hits and his sister and her husband die, leaving their four kids orphaned. Uncle Mike is now in charge and drives his yellow Porsche out to this mud-filled farm to figure out what to do with the kids who are played by Homer, 13; Ulysses, 10; and 8-year-olds Atlas and Arlo Janson. Naturals every single one of these long-haired, rambunctious boys are. Predictably, this city man is a fish out of water on this farm, stepping in chicken sh*t literally, walking into a disastrous kitchen with dirty dishes piled everywhere, opening a toilet lid to discover a King Cobra staring at him — well you get the picture. A scene where he is trying to explain the facts of life to the boys is worth the price of admission.
It is a situation he couldn’t have imagined, and now he has to deal with it. Before long, he decides to find a foster home, one all four could be in together, but those “auditions” do not go well to say the least, particularly for the town’s richest man, an empty nester who with his wife might be ripe to take in the boys, that is until a nightmare visit to a Christmas party at his mansion goes terribly wrong. Back to square one. There are several sequences that border on slapstick in the tradition of this kind of kid-centric comedy, but opposite Stiller’s sincere Uncle, and four ultimately charming and winning kids (no cloying child actors in sight), it all works.
Green, shooting on 35mm and coming off several horror franchises like Halloween and The Exorcist reboot, saw something in the simplicity of this family, their farm and their small-town charm that got him to dive into a new genre, and let’s hope he brings it back to box office success. They say never work with kids or animals, but Stiller does it with abandon and anchors the madcap madness in style. It is so nice to see him in this kind of role for a change. The performances from these non-pro kids are remarkable in every way, and they are the magic elixir that really makes this cook as well as it does. Linda Cardellini, Tim Heidecker and Toby Huss lend strong, if brief, support, and there is also a very fine turn from Evi Patterson as a townsperson who could be a possible answer for these kids. Or not.
The title refers to The Nutcracker ballet, something the boys’ mother performed as a ballerina and a big finale that finds them performing in the most unusual production ever.
Nutcrackers is looking for distribution. Producers are Rob Paris, Nate Witherill, Nate Meyer.
Title: Nutcrackers
Festival: Toronto (Gala Presentations)
Director: David Gordon Green
Screenplay: Leland Douglas
Cast: Ben Stiller, Linda Cardellini, Tim Heidecker, Edi Patterson, Toby Huss, Homer Janson, Ulysses Janson, Atlas Janson, Arlo Janson
Sales agent: UTA Independent Film Group
Running time: 1 hr 44 mins