Ray Pride

Christmas is coming, the pratfalls are getting fat.

"Christmas with the Kranks," a likeable, low-key family comedy, written by Chris Columbus from John Grisham's best-selling wafer, "Skipping Christmas," stars Tim Allen and Jamie Leigh Curtis as a suburban Chicago couple whose only daughter has finally left home. Allen decides to skip Christmas, to the chagrin of wife, co-workers and, especially, his neighbors on Hemlock Lane. No Frosty? No lights? Where's your spirit, bud? Especially in the towering, tyrannical form of Dan Aykroyd as the equivalent of a ward boss, insisting that nonconformity is not only a no-go, it's just not sporting. The first third of the movie has a black undertone that's bracing; slapstick and sentiment follow, but it's that opening act that impresses--funny, yet scary at the same time.

Knowing a little about his background, I ask director Joe Roth (also head of Revolution Studios, which produced) why he'd be attracted to such a subject. After being head of Fox and of Disney, he'd lost out to other filmmakers on making pictures like "High Fidelity" and "Hurricane," and is about to make "Freedomland," a cop story from Richard Price's novel.

"So, the pointed opening act," I venture, "a community enforcing lockstep behavior--"

"Yes--," Roth cuts in.

"Why this subversive social critique in the midst of a Tim Allen holiday movie?" He takes a breath. "Because I grew up on Long Island and I was a kid involved in the case that outlawed prayer in public schools, and so at a very early age, I got to see a community act in a fascistic way. So I wanted to make fun of it." (In 1958, New York State began enforcing a daily prayer; Roth and his 13-year-old brother were among the plaintiffs who sued to overturn it, and were shunned after the 1962 decision.)

It's a sneaky opening, entertaining and critical but not preachy or dogmatic or directly referencing Roth's personal experience. "It's kind of a hard balance," he says. "Actually, the beginning of the movie is my own feelings about empty-nest stories, that the reason that Tim Allen's character is so out of his mind is because he's basically an unhappy guy who's lived through the life of his daughter. And he only has this one child, and this child goes away to school. He spins off his axis a little bit. And then I went into my own childhood, what it's like to be ostracized in your own community for free thought. So the turn to me is not about the [turn of events in the plot about] Christmas, it's the feeling, which didn't happen in my life, of a community gathering together and sticking together regardless of the consequences. Christmas becomes a hot spot for all [kinds of] behavior."

Roth's own behavior is rigorous. Speaking of Revolution, he says, "I have trained myself to run a business as a way to protect myself as an artist. And that's really always been the case. I never directed with a studio. I would never direct with a studio. My interest is in taking a story and telling it and then bringing it to the audience and then having a dialogue with the audience about it. That's one of the luxuries of [Revolution] is that you can do it on your own schedule, you can do it on your own size. You can do it without concern of some bureaucratic or hierarchal problem."

He's involved with marketing, and learned from studio experience, especially in hiding some of the plot elements of "Kranks." "When you have a movie that's funny and something else, in this case, sentimental, you tend to try to sell what's funny. If something is perceived as too sentimental, it's not really perceived as a theatrical experience. I've worked as a studio head on movies like `Home Alone' over the years and always found that you were more successful getting people out of the house if they think it's funny rather than sentimental."

When he directs, Roth finds a way to do two jobs at once, but he compartmentalizes. "What I really do is I don't sleep a lot. But I never did. Since seventy percent of this movie was shot at night, I'd literally go down to Downey [Studios where an immense, permanent street set was constructed] and be there from 5 o'clock at night until 5 o'clock in the morning and then go home, get home at 6, sleep till 9, 9:30, and get up and go into work."

So you'd run a studio and make a movie at the same time? "Go into town to work, from 10 until 4, get done most of what I needed to get done and then be on the phone, drive down to Downey, enter the lot at Downey, turn off the phone, go into a trailer, change clothes and use that time to [shift] gears.

"I always left myself a walk from the trailer to the set of a couple of hundred yards and I got used to, like anything else, I got used to places on the walk, the planks on the walk, and that would remind me, I was about to walk into a situation in which I was the director."

"Christmas with the Kranks" is now playing.

(2004-11-22)

Also by Ray Pride

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Tip of the Week
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Coming distractions
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Within that darkness
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