Hulu’s Nutcrackers Aims for Holiday Anarchy But Is Too Well Behaved to Earn It

Having apparently come to the conclusion that he had butchered enough iconic horror franchises in the last decade to potentially tarnish his directorial brand, David Gordon Green looks to recalculate with a considerably lower-risk project in the form of Hulu’s new holiday dramedy Nutcrackers. This is a movie that smacks of a filmmaker simply trying to get back onto solid, even footing after some of the baffling decisions made in filmic disasters like Halloween Ends and The Exorcist: Believer. It perhaps unsurprisingly borrows a few units of coarse humor from the director’s stoner comedies of yore, but mostly takes on a more gentle dimension of heartwarming holiday apathy. Rather than pushing for anything genuinely prickly, challenging or truly heartfelt, Green and his collaborators–primarily screenwriter Leland Douglas and star Ben Stiller–are perfectly willing to punch the clock and fall back on the most well-worn and reheated Christmas movie pablum. Not that we should be particularly surprised.

Stiller, returned after a hiatus in lead acting roles since 2017’s Brad’s Status, steps into a role with obvious Uncle Buck allusions as Mike, a bigshot Chicago real estate agent who is roped into looking after his recently deceased sister’s four sons on a rural farmstead in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It effectively reverses the Uncle Buck dynamic, in fact: Whereas Buck was a blue collar grifter unaccustomed to the cushy confines and niceties of upper middle class suburbia, Mike is a polished urbanite (complete with Ferrari) who is immediately a fish out of water among the feral rural kids who have grown up in a world outside of cell reception and internet access. The miscalculation (the first of many) in the Uncle Buck comparison the film would so dearly like you to make, on the other hand, is that Buck was stepping in for what was supposed to be a last-minute pinch hitting assignment while the kids’ parents were away. Nutcrackers instead kills off both Mom and Dad, people that we never meet, which simultaneously limits the depth of the audience’s empathy and loads the entire cast with an aura of inescapable grief that it then has little interest in addressing and processing. The entire story is framed around this tragedy, but actually engaging with it meaningfully would be too much of a bummer, so the film instead just decides to half-ass it.

Although Mike is undoubtedly the film’s main protagonist, suddenly saddled with not only his sister’s children but also her debts and various other liabilities, it’s the kids who are the film’s real stars, which is a strength at times and a weakness at others. The “Kicklighter boys” are played by real-life siblings Atlas, Arlo, Ulysses and Homer Janson–sounds like their parents enjoy the Greek classics–and make their debut here as a quartet of unknowns, reportedly the children of a family friend of David Gordon Green’s. The film’s inspiration, in fact, seemingly came from Green seeing the boys in their natural element on the farm, resulting in Nutcrackers being written for them–the story of this gaggle of 8 to 13-year-old adolescents who have lost their parents, angling for the proverbial Christmas miracle. The screenplay positions them as supposed hellions, rambunctious troublemakers who can’t help but draw immediate comparison to the Herdman children of the recently adapted The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. The first time we see them in the film’s opening moments, they’re sneaking into an amusement park and inadvertently cause its tilt-a-whirl to self-destruct, like some oblique reference to the disastrous carousel in the closing moments of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. This bad behavior is meant to justify why it will supposedly be difficult for Mike to place the Kicklighter boys into a well-fitting foster home (particularly as a unit), but the problem is that they’re really never memorably crass, intentionally destructive or misbehaved enough to earn anyone’s ire as little hellraisers. You just can’t accept the idea that these sympathetic kids are supposedly undesirables in their rural town, where surely half the other local kids are ATV-driving, semiautomatic rifle-wielding punks of similar caliber.

Nevertheless, the kids (and their actors) really are charmingly strange in their own way–the relative inexperience of the performers comes across with a sort of wide-eyed and aloof naturalism, although the unfortunate trade-off is that half the time the kids aren’t always particularly intelligible. Both Mike and the audience don’t have much of an idea of what they’re going on about half of the time, and the two youngest brothers (twins?) are so undercharacterized that you’re unlikely to even recall their names. At the same time, though, there’s something intriguing about just watching those kids go about their business–they have the innocence and self-interested capriciousness of real children, tiny people who almost don’t seem to know they’re being filmed. Ben Stiller will be in the middle of trying to deliver a pep talk in the foreground of a scene, and you find yourself ignoring him to instead watch two of the kids randomly cavorting or fiddling with some object in the background. They’re entertaining to watch in exactly the same way that it’s entertaining to watch young boys on the playground who are totally absorbed in their own little worlds, blissfully shielded from the mounting responsibilities of plot or narrative. Who cares about Ben Stiller’s collapsing business deal back in Chicago; look at this cool stick I found!

This is the essence of the lack of conflict that ultimately turns Nutcrackers into a trite holiday exercise: You wait for the film to develop some kind of compelling, localized conflict among the boys or in the town itself, but there is none beyond “Who will adopt these kids?” The only real attempt at conflict is Mike’s job back in Chicago demanding that he leave the boys to return, raising the question: Will Mike choose to care for this gaggle of nephews, or will he abandon them to the foster care system and wash his hands of the whole matter and that dead sister of his? I don’t know, viewer: Have you ever seen … a movie, before? How many heartwarming, would-be Christmas classics, in your experience, tend to involve the protagonist dumping his nephews at an orphanage so he can get back to the comfort of his big-city penthouse bachelor pad and real estate deals? This is a case of the outcome being so clearly not in doubt that we can’t possibly take it seriously as a legitimate source of conflict for the narrative. Anyone who’s familiar with the barest outline of motion pictures will inherently know exactly where this is all going, the moment the premise is first established. And Green never makes any attempt to have you believe otherwise; his only interest is in grubbing for your warm-and-fuzzies.

Nor does Nutcrackers even work for more than a few minutes at a time as a comedy–it either finds itself repeating variations on the same poop joke, like some kind of smelly leitmotif, or it takes a turn for the dour, but then stops short of any of the kids ever really confronting the rending grief they would be experiencing after losing, might I remind you, both parents simultaneously. I’m not sure there’s even a scene in the entire film where they talk about their Dad for more than 10 seconds? We know the following about him: He had an ice cream truck. That’s about it.

This approach creates such an odd reticence to embrace either of its sides that Nutcrackers remains perched on a wall between comedy and dramedy, leaving the audience unsure of what vibe to expect in any moment. It’s so uncommitted to full-on comedy, in fact, that when Stiller ends up doing a pratfall down a flight of stairs in the third act, it comes so completely out of nowhere that you’re actually concerned for a moment that he’ll be seriously hurt. This is 100% not the intended reaction, but because the film has been establishing itself by that point as more of a grounded dramedy, rather than the kind of movie where people fall down stairwells and then just bound back to their feet, Looney Tunes-style, we don’t even realize it’s supposed to be a punchline in the moment. That’s what happens, when you’re talking about dead parents five minutes before, and then doing comically exaggerated pratfalls immediately afterward. If Green wanted the audience to point and howl at Stiller’s tumble like something from Home Alone, then he should have established more of a tone of physical comedy in the 80 minutes of material leading up to it. As is, it feels like the guy should end up in the ICU. You could have a shot of him waking up in the hospital next to Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil, who suffered the indignity of having her eyes stabbed out in Green’s unbelievably misguided Exorcist: Believer, for all the director’s superfans in the house. Imagine! Nutcrackers and The Exorcist in the same cinematic universe! Think of the money to be made, folks.

As is, Nutcrackers is entirely too tame to effectively register as a form-breaking (or even bending) holiday black comedy, typified by the decidedly tame hijinks of the kids, set to the strains of whatever public domain music was available. Even its Christmas theming is just barely there. On the plus side: The Janson brothers are often intriguing to watch as naturalistic young actors, and it’s easy enough to be drawn into the wholesome vibes of its “let’s put on a show” second half. It’s directed and edited in totally competent fashion. But none of that justifies taking the time to watch an often tedious reworking of a story you’ve already seen so many times before. Nutcrackers would be elated to land on the naughty list. Instead, it’s more likely beneath Santa’s notice altogether.

Director: David Gordon Green
Writer: Leland Douglas
Stars: Ben Stiller, Linda Cardellini, Edi Patterson, Toby Huss, Homer Janson, Ulysses Janson, Atlas Janson, Arlo Janson
Release date: Nov. 29, 2024 (Hulu)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.