A Christmas Tale is not your standard dysfunctional family drama. There's not only a lot more to it than the predictable cliches that the genre usually delivers - don't expect a heartwarming ending - but also it's never once intended to be about a "traditional holiday experience.” Yes, you will probably see something of yourself or your siblings in the incredibly twisted and damaged clan of the Vuillards, but Arnaud Desplechin's film is a character study of a different sort. It's a comedy, a drama, and a tragedy wrapped around the supposed warmth of the Christmas season. While mainstream audiences spend their cash on Four Christmases and Nothing Like the Holidays, art house lovers will find much to adore about A Christmas Tale, a good film with great performances that's only held back a bit by its extreme length and the pacing and pretentiousness that goes with it.

The lovely and incredible Catherine Deneuve stars as the matriarch of A Christmas Tale, Junon Vuillard, who is married to the older Abel (Jean-Paul Roussilon). Before the movie even gets going, we learn of the tragic background of this family. (An American writer would have saved the prologue for a ridiculous bloodletting over Christmas goose.) Junon and Abel's oldest child, Joseph, is diagnosed with a rare disease, and no one in the family has the right blood type to save him. So, the pair has a third child, Henri, just to use him to save their favorite son. But Joseph dies anyway. The couple has another child, Ivan, and everyone moves on with all wounds healed (or at least repressed) until a grown Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) makes the stunning move to essentially banish her younger brother from her life. She never wants to see Henri (Mathieu Amalric) again.

Elizabeth goes on with her life and tries to deal with her emotionally and mentally unstable son while Henri goes further into self-loathing and regret born from the fact that he shouldn’t even really exist. The divided family is forced to reunite six years later when Junon is diagnosed with the same cancer that killed her son and only Henri might be able to save her. Over the days preceding Christmas, Henri, Ivan, Elizabeth, and their significant others and children return to the house they grew up in and deal with the damaged histories that life has given them.

The entire cast of A Christmas Tale is excellent, but Deneuve and Amalric steal the show. The latter gave one of the best performances of last year in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and continues to impress with another riveting turn here. The millions who have seen him in Quantum of Solace should catch up with his superior recent work. There's not a flaw in the ensemble, but I can't quite say the same thing about the direction or the screenplay. Clearly, A Christmas Tale is a densely woven story. As soon as I thought I had it "figured out" on a thematic level, Desplechin threw me for a loop, and that's the greatest kind of screenwriting. A Christmas Tale switches tones and styles dramatically. The story first feels like one about grief over a dead son, another who shouldn't even exist, and a mother who will very likely pass away herself. But that's just the tip of this Christmas tree. There are elements of madness, sibling rivalry, lost love, and family tragedy interwoven with a script that's, believe it or not, very funny at times. But when does a film go from "deep" to "unfocused"? When do the layers in Desplechin's complex film not add up to the sum of their parts? At 150 minutes, A Christmas Tale definitely lost my attention more than once, and I wondered if there wasn't a more effective film that produced the same result without quite as many transition shots or characters staring longingly into the distance. If your threshold for talky French movies is not very, very high than this probably isn’t the movie for you. A Christmas Tale is completely worth seeing, but it's not as straightforward as it could have or arguably should have been at a shorter, more audience-friendly length - kind of like the holiday season itself.

Rating: THREE BONES

 Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: November 21st, 2008

Rating: NR

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Jean-Paul Rousillon, Melvil Poupad, Hippolyte Giarardot, Emmanuelle Devos, and Chiara Mastroianni

Director: Arnaud Desplechin

Writers: Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu

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