(courtesy First Showing)
Decorating for Christmas is supposed to be one of life’s sparkly, pretty quiet joys.
Throw some lights onto your house and thread them through the trees and bushes of your front garden, put up a few figures or two of Santa and his sleigh or some elves holding presents and a sign or two wishing everyone a “Merry Christmas” and tinsel boom! You have Christmassed your home and the world’s a happy, blinking, colourful place.
That’s in theory but in our increasingly bigger, brighter, more is more is MORE world where nuance is a dirty word and quiet contentment a near unknown concept, resisting the impulse to go epically industrial, thermonuclear big with your decorating is all but impossible.
Still, in Candy Cane Lane, dad Chris Carver (Eddie Murphy in superlatively good form) does his best to hand carve his own decorations, taking the time to carefully and lovingly paint a wooden candy cane with just the right shade of red and content to enjoy a front yard filled with wooden wonders and seasonally crafted one-of-a-kinds.
Does his neighbour’s pursuit of bold garish lighting and inflatable everything rankle him, especially when he wins the Candy Cane Lane decorating comp year after blindingly bright year?
Sure it does but even so, he and wife Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross) still go across to the neighbour in questions place for cheap boxed wine and festive bonhomie because that’s what you do; he may not be the winner but he can take quiet pride in the way his yard is decorated in a way that reflects who he is and what he values.
So lovely and Christmassy; until, that is, hilariously loud TV anchor Kit (Danielle Pinnock) and her scornfully embarrassed cohost Emerson (Timothy Simons) announce there’s a $100,000 prize for the winner this year and all hell breaks loose.
Costco’s decorations aisle is cleaned out – there’s a fun little bit of observational humour here where Chris and youngest daughter Holly (Madison Thomas) walk through the devastated emptiness straight into a Valentine’s Day display to “Already?!” cries of disbelief – and suddenly what was a fun neighbourhood bit of arms race-level decorating becomes an all-out pursuit of anything that will bring in that big prize, which is especially needed when Chris’s work situation ends up being less than optimal.
Chris is not in a good place but rather than dialling it down and looking with his inner woodcarving self for satisfaction and happiness, he signs a deal at a weird shop FULL of Christmas decorations and wonder under a freeway overpass with the creepily upbeat Pepper (Gillian Bell doing her best merry and manic performance) for the decorations that will nab him neighbourhood decorating glory.
Too good to be true? You bet it is, and Candy Cane Lane explodes, pretty much literally, into a full-blown farce of racing-against-the-clock hilarity as Chris, and his family which also includes Joy (Genneya Walton) and Nick (Thaddeus J. Mixson) – yes, all the names are festive, something that Nick finally cottons on to Joy’s “How did you not notice that?” comedically-laced shock and surprise – do their best to rescue Christmas, and their lives, from the festive spirit gone frenetically and more than a little dangeriously over-the-top.
Is Candy Cane Lane a witty commentary on Christmas capitalism gone wrong? Maybe. Is it a look into a family who love each other but who are struggling to reconcile their own domestic contentment with the demands of the outside world? Possibly. Or is it simply a lot of geese and greed and French hens aiming for ridiculous farce that kind of takes off but not quite to Christmas classic viewing level? That too.
Honestly, while the idea of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” coming alive in chaotically disruptive fashion and a man signing his life, Faust-style, to a demented elf who has, like Satan taking on God, decide to imprison people in a palace of endless Christmasness if they don’t meet the terms of the deal they sign up to – Chris faces becoming a “weird Happy Meal toy” like Pip (Nick Offerman), Lamplighter Gary (Chris Redd) and Cordelia (Robin Thede) if he doesn’t get five gold rings by 8 pm Christmas Eve; yeah, should have read the fine print dude – got some weird af storytelling possibilities, which it partially realises, it doesn’t quite make the most of its wackily festive premise.
Murphy is in fine form, oneliner-quipping form and Ross does a brilliant job of being the bemused spouse doing her best to deal with her partner’s strange behaviour, and Bell is a treat as an angry elf spurned by Santa – honestly if you know anything about the story of Lucifer/Satan falling from heaven you’ll at least marvel at the way a bright, fizzy movie of Christmas silliness manages to go all deep and theological in the midst of vengeful lords-a-leaping and Weeping Angels-creepy gold turtledoves – but Candy Cane Lane never quite fires.
It’s batsh*t crazy premise leads to a fairly conventional save Christmas, and yourself plot, which while fun in spits and spurts, doesn’t really leave you feeling all happily festive at the end.
Yes, there’s a happy ending – not a spoiler; this is a wide appeal Christmas film or at least, it’s supposed to be, and not going out with an effervescently uplifting bang would be a crime against seasonally narrative convention – but it arrives at the end of such chaos and mania that you almost feel nothing but relief that the film has run its course.
Candy Cane Lane is far from being a tinsel strewn and bauble-smashed sleigh-wreck and it has some genuinely fun and silly moments and inspired lines of dialogue, and honestly weird though the premise is, it’s entertainingly original if nothing else, but it never quite reaches either the comedically strange heights of warmhearted wonder its clearly gunning for, and so while it’s fun to watch, its unlikely to become the kind of film that becomes a Christmas go-to in years to come.