greencap’s review published on Letterboxd:
Naive camp + uncanny valley + new sincerity + the holidays = not only a rip in the space-time continuum, but a fascinating movie and easily one of the best Christmas films.
This movie has become notorious for being surreal and everyone rags on it for that. Look at the weird animation! It’s so old! It’s so surreal! Creepy old man Tom Hanks? Wait Tom Hanks is everyone? Did those guys on the train stand on invisible tables? Huh? Below that surface, though, after wading through the populist muck, this is a genius, subversive, and illuminating work.
Considering the storybook origins of this film, it’s an extremely effective film atmospherically. It’s incongruent and mystifying, and the shoddy rendering only contributes to that mood. The warm lighting, Tom Hanks Everybody, the bizarre animation, the fuckin vacant delirious toy factory that feels like it exists inside Purgatory...it all just works. The world always feels so fake, but it’s happening in front of our eyes so how surely can we distrust it? The constant blurring of reality works so well with emulating childlike wonder and mysticism surrounding Santa Claus, the North Pole, the whole magic of it all. Maybe without meaning to, it taps right into the well of sheer terror that the myth of Santa Clause holds within it but so much popular media is too timid to evoke. It is one of the only Christmas movies that genuinely investigates the feelings and thoughts that exist inside of children around Christmastime, because it is entirely magical and completely beyond comprehension. Even at the end, when the kid hears the bell, it’s hard for the audience to trust. It’s unreal. The score is so gutwrenching and honest that it breaks into complete naivety, so genuine that it becomes heartbreaking because it doesn’t know any better (or maybe it does?)
I haven’t necessarily transcended to Zemeckis auteurism/sincerity yet, but this is the best case that I’ve encountered so far and easily the greatest sell. It’s sharply mechanical and deeply human, a skipping record of your favorite Christmas standards. One of the only films based on a storybook that genuinely commits to those tonal origins.. Certainly the only brutalist Christmas family film. An earnest lone wolf in the Christmas movie hellscape. A genuinely spiritual experience. Marvelous stuff.
(All the elves singing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town and then Santa coming out made me tear up because I miss concerts so bad. I miss concerts so bad. Also Know-It-All did nothing wrong)