Mope Your Way Into The Holidays With 'Christmas, Again'
By Joel Wicklund in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 18, 2015 10:00PM
Kentucker Audley in "Christmas, Again." (Photo courtesy of Factory 25.)
In the face of winter's relentless holiday cheer, a dose of melancholy can feel like a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately Christmas, Again equates melancholy with mopey and dull. 'Tis the season to be yawning.
This muted story of heartbreak and loneliness follows the aptly named Noel (Kentucker Audley), a nightshift worker at a 24-hour Christmas tree lot in Brooklyn. Noel is anything but jolly as he wallows in the blues of a past breakup. He tends the lot competently, but socially, he's almost totally withdrawn. Customers and co-workers annoy him. He's not sleeping well.
Nothing jolts Noel out of his rut until he finds a young woman (Hannah Gross) passed out on a bench, potentially in danger. He carries her back to the lot's trailer to let her sleep it off in comparative safety.
Their relationship grows in complicated fits and starts, providing a minimal plot that writer-director Charles Poekel underplays to a fault. The movie is so committed to workaday realism that it becomes, as a whole, as mundane as Noel's tree-hawking job.
Audley, a filmmaker himself, has become something of a star in the low- and micro-budget film world. He's appeared in films by Ti West (The Sacrament), Alex Ross Perry (Queen of Earth) and a couple for Chicago-based filmmaker Joe Swanberg, with whom he co-starred in The Sacrament. Audley has a welcome naturalism onscreen, but his character simply isn't developed well enough to be interesting.
Gross (also seen in the recently released Stinking Heaven) struggles with a similarly underwritten role. She and Audley have a few scenes of cautious flirtations that hint at a real chemistry Poekel fails to exploit.
It's been a great year for independent films, with dynamic, distinctive works made on budgets ranging from modest (The Stanford Prison Experiment) to truly meager (They Look Like People). But Christmas, Again belongs to a navel-gazing, visually drab and dramatically lethargic school of indies that has overstayed its welcome.
An overabundance of facial close-ups and casual-to-indifferent handheld camerawork tends to rule the day in these films (which often get a pass for their sloppiness because of their low budgets). The slack aesthetics are often mirrored in flat characters. In a way, this rote approach to DIY filmmaking is as formulaic as any generic CGI blockbuster showing on 4,000 multiplex screens.
This is Poekel's first feature, so here's hoping he can break away from this particular creative straitjacket and find a directorial voice that's all his own. Sadly, his debut elicits the feeling suggested by its title: it's one of those movies... again.
Christmas, Again. Written and directed by Charles Poekel. Starring Kentucker Audley and Hannah Gross. 80 mins. No MPAA rating.
Opens Friday, Dec. 18 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Director Charles Poekel and executive producer William Poekel will be at this Friday's screenings for a Q&A session. Joe Swanberg will conduct a Q&A with Charles Poekel at the screening this Saturday night.
Christmas, Again is also available as VOD through iTunes, Fandor, Vimeo, Amazon and Vudu.