TulaneLSU's Christmas Pilgrimage XIII: Top 10 Christmas Films

My dear and faithful friends,

The first Christmas story ever put on film was A Christmas Carol in 1908. There was no sound -- just people moving around doing their best to bring to life a timeless tale of redemption through action. Over the next 40 years, only fourteen Christmas films were made, and half of them used Charles Dickens’ classic as their afflatus.

Since that time, approximately 300 Christmas movies have been made, and over half of those in the last two decades. Christmas movies are the dernier cri of the film world. The American populace moves farther away from traditional Christian faith, which is the very foundation of Western civilization and the basis for our virtue and traditions. The people are turning instead to entertainment, be it film or sport. The entertainment monolith attempts to shore our culture with “epic” films and “legendary” sports figures and achievements.

Hallmark has been on the vanguard of this movement. Lifetime hasn’t been far behind. Today’s Christmas movies, sadly, even with their superficial religious language, have moved away from Christmas and toward pagan understandings of romance and American commercialistic propaganda. Even cheapo films produced with the backing of a Christian group often have similar themes that do not connect with the spirit of Christmas. I have spent countless hours watching over 150 Christmas films, from the traditional Miracle on 34th and It’s A Wonderful Life to the tacky Christmas Vacation and Elf. I’ve seen more Hallmark and Lifetime movies than is safe for one’s sanity. I’ve done this so you won’t. Trust me when I say that the vast majority of those films are trash. There are a few gems, however.

My jeremiad against most modern Christmas movies is finished. Let us celebrate the greatness of Christmas films now. I’m sure most of you can quickly ring off your favorite films. As always, I invite you to list them here or make a new thread if you believe your writing noteworthy. I add one note: if you’ve never seen Rick Steves’ European Christmas, you must. It isn’t a film, perse, but its soundtrack and filmography are essential to those who love the trappings and beauty of the traditional Christmas season.

TulaneLSU's Top 10 Christmas Films

10. Hugo

The 19th century was perhaps the worst century for Christian theology in the Church's history. Where Kierkegaard was one of a few very bright lights, his light was not appreciated until Europe emerged from the ashes of a fallen civilization after the Great War. What led Europe to its own destruction? Natural theology. More precisely, the theology of both William Paley and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Paley believed that all we need to prove God's existence is order in the world. He therefore starts with his observation, his reason, and works his way backward, an Enlightenment's God of the gaps, if you will. In his monumentally poor Natural Theology he writes, "Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given -- that, for anything I know, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone?...For this reason, and for no other when we come to inspect the watch we perceive that its several parts are famed put together for a purpose...This mechanism being observed... the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker....who comprehended its construction, and designed its use."

Hugo is a delightful tale written by a person who likely does not realize he has adopted Paley's theology, but beneath the theological undertones of this movie is a distinctly Christian message. We are broken on the inside. Someone needs to fix us. This in itself is a good and natural realization. We do not need a revelation of any supernatural means to learn how broken we are. Just look at the world around us. If we were not broken, the structures of this world would not be so hopelessly broken and corrupt. Does anyone need to look further than the media, especially at ESPN, who campaign for Alabama's inclusion in the 2012 national championship game despite only playing four teams with a winning record and hanging its entire season on a loss at home? A just world would not allow such nonsense. A just world is filled with whole and healthy people. But the world is not just. It is broken, just as its inhabitants. The film does not have the courage to delve into the Watchmaker, but Scorsese has the sense, perhaps because he has the limited theological insight, to plant the story in the land of the temporal alone. While the movie is about the one who fixes others, even at the cost of his own safety, that character, so full of mystery is left as nothing more than a flat messiah. We learn so much about the dynamic character, the old man, and it is good. But the character I wanted to learn is left as little more than a tool. What makes his clock tick? Martin, tell me.

One thing slightly perturbing I see as I get older is the feeling among American directors that characters who are not American need to have British accents. The movie is set in Paris, but every single character has a British accent. Why? Apart from that annoyance that extends not just from this movie but nearly every Disney movie ever made to the council scenes in Star Wars, I liked the visuals of this movie. Set in the Gare Montparnasse, the famous Parisian train station, known in photographs for the train that could not stop and ended up shooting through the station's main window, the cinematography is beautifully done, making the viewer appreciate the cold. It's easy for your film to be beautiful when the setting is Paris, but even so, Hugo has something magical about it. One of its magic tricks is the use of cold. Cold can be a character of death and misery, but in this movie, the cold is used to show beauty and to bring us to a wonderland of mirth. It is, in that way, a quintessentially Christmasy movie.

The acting is rather ordinary, with no magical performances given. There is, however, one shockingly foreign performance. It took me a couple of scenes until I realized who played one of the characters. So unusual and divergent from his normal roles was this one. Hugo is one of those very warm family movies that will make a chummy memory in the minds of children. But for me, I felt like so much more was left on the table that could have been developed.

9. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)

Kierkegaard writes, “Imagination is what providence uses to take men captive in actuality, in existence, in order to get them far enough out, or within, or down into existence. And when imagination has helped them get as far out as they should be - then actuality genuinely begins.” Those whose imagination is limited and stunted rely on intoxicating substances to open to them a false world. Those who believe in the beauty of the design beneath this physical world, however, can imagine things far greater than the dipsomaniac. Such people are writers and artists. Their gift to us is a new way to see reality.

Charles Dickens was such a man, a rare one indeed. This film fancifully tells the story of his imagination’s birthing of Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Cratchit, and others. The Scrooge story is second only to the Gospel birth narrative in forming our beliefs about Christmas. That, I can say for both Christian and atheist.