(courtesy IMDb (c) Stan)
One of the great constants of many a Christmas celebration is spending time with family.
Many are joyful, quite a few not so much and a fair few others are fraught in one way or another with everyone forced together in a hothouse celebratory fashion that all but demands jollity when the people involved aren’t exactly in the mood for a ton of peace and goodwilling and decking of halls.
Jones Family Christmas sits firmly in that final family configuration, set in a country area near Sale, Victoria, Australia where overeager matriarch Heather Jones (Heather Mitchell) is busily awaiting the arrival of two of her three kids – youngest daughter Alex (Mary McKenna) is already in attendance, mourning the break up of her eight-month-old relationship with girlfriend Flick – who are due in from London and Melbourne respectively any moment now.
Any mother worth her salt would be excited to have all her children under the one roof for Christmas for the first time in years, but there seems an extra frenetic edge to Heather’s preparations as she hand fashions her own crackers out of toilet paper rolls and cooks up a storm.
She clearly wants this VERY BADLY, and so when daughter Christina (Ella Scott Lynch) arrives in from London with fearful-of-everything husband Mishan (Dushan Phillips) and uptight son Billy aka William (Anay Gadre) in clearly uncomfortable tow, she greets him like the second coming of you know who, her enthusiasm for their long-delayed presence feeling a little more loaded than even a normal Christmas would be.
We’re not privy to why she needs her kids around her so badly until much later in this mostly emotionally nuanced if uneven film – all she alludes to at one point is the difficult year she and husband Brian (Neil Melville) have had – but its primal, its urgent and it means that Christina, clearly weighed down by something deeply existential, feels even more weight upon her.
Heather greets son Danny (Nicholas Denton) with a similar fervour, her welcome amped up even more by the fact that he’s bringing The One home with him – he hasn’t said that his new girlfriend is that important but Heather assures Christina and Alex that a mother knows – someone called Felicity (Tahlee Fereday) whose arrival causes massive ructions for Alex when it turns out she’s the recently lost girlfriend.
Awkward! It screams narrative contrivance and doesn’t call into question the emotional awareness of the entire family but it turns out Flick never came home with Alex so no one but Alex knows that Flick and felicity are one and the same.
At this point, Jones Family Christmas could’ve flicked proceedings into high farce mode, and while it does rather hilariously stage every major intimate conversation in the toilet because it’s the only room with a lockable door, it holds its nerves and lets all the drama and humour, both beautifully intertwined and given breath with admirable restraint, play out slowly, carefully and with slowly burbling emotional impact.
It’s clear the family has issues aplenty going on with only Danny reasonably chilled and unfazed by the convergence of everyone in the one house for the big event of the year, but rather than rush things to some sort of head, Jones Family Christmas is content to let the various threads, and the reveals that accompany them play out in a measured fashion, the film a series of emotional vignettes stitched together into a reasonably engaging and thoughtfully unspooled storyline.
It’s all very relatable and moving but when encroaching bushfires necessitate evacuation to a somewhat nearby community hall – it’s chosen because it has a dam to shelter in should push come to fiery shove – Jones Family Christmas begins to lose its nerve, amping things up in a way that mostly is content to take its time but which begins to display signs that there will be a hurried rush to the finish line.
Which is, unfortunately what we get.
Suddenly the film that has shown such emotional rigour throughout, letting its characters breath and interact in a mostly authentic manner, is shoehorning happy endings and big reunions and happy reveals into an ending that feels saccharine overplayed and just plain silly at times.
What should be a dramatic rush to the dam to shelter from the fire that reaches seemingly out of nowhere becomes an excuse for everyone to have their deepseated problems solved in mere minutes, sitcom-like, which while undoubtedly heartwarming, does not sit easily with the narrative thoughtfulness and care displayed to that point.
It’s a pity because even in the festively overdone mania of the last quarter or so of Jones Family Christmas, there are some real moments of tenderness and true togetherness, of estranged people or simply those unable to fully express their emotions, finding a way back to each other.
Those moments sit beautifully with the measured storyline that’s gone before but jar with the happy-happy-happy silliness of a climax that feels the needs to go full redemptive Christmas in something approaching a narrative land speed record.
It doesn’t ruin the film, though it comes close, because so much care has been taken up to that point to frame these characters and tell their stories and explain why they are behaving like they are, but it does detract from the overall effect because rather than being given a happily-ever-after that feels very much in keeping with the emotional savviness of the earlier storytelling, you get a ticking of the heartwarming festive box which feels tacked on, trite and and made up on the spot to deliver the sort of ending the producers clearly think every Christmas move should have.
And yes, lots of feels and warmth and love and redemption are often the order of the festive movie day but Jones Family Christmas is heading there in its own beautifully laid out way and if it had just held its nerve, it could have delivered a thoughtful ending to a very thoughtful film.
Instead, it does not even remotely stick the landing, and it’s hard not to feel cheated by a film that offers so much rich observation of loving but fractiously flawed family life and which if it had allowed itself would have been able to hold its head high as a classic piece of moving and funny Australian Christmas moviemaking.