Somehow, the last time David Gordon Green directed a comedy was not in 2011 with The Sitter. While one could make a reasonable case that the Jonah Hill-led raunch fest about a college student who gets roped into a wild night of babysitting is an insult to the genre, it still fits the bill, if only because it doesn’t fit any other. No, in fact, Green’s most recent non-television foray into laugh-heavy filmmaking was actually in 2013, when he directed Prince Avalanche, an indie flop starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hersch as two highway road workers who find themselves in a great many shenanigans; it grossed just north of $400,000 at the box office, and seemed to send Green down a dark cinematic path littered with Halloween requels – each of which had different levels of varying returns – and 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer. The less said about the latter project, the better.
When it comes to Ben Stiller, the question isn’t so much about when he last made a comedy, but when he last had a starring role at all. The answer? 2017’s Brad’s Status, a father-son drama in which Stiller’s character takes his son (Austin Abrams) on a tour of various East Coast colleges when an encounter with an old friend makes him feel inferior about his life choices. Ironically, the next few years saw the erstwhile star of hits like Meet the Parents, Zoolander, and the Night at the Museum series taking supporting roles in Hubie Halloween, Locked Down, and something called Bleecker. I don’t think I had even realized how long it had been since the Along Came Polly, There’s Something About Mary, and Tropic Thunder frontman actually led a project, as in had his name first on its poster. Of course, careers evolve over time, and Stiller has spent the last few years directing a lot of television (including the magnificent Apple TV+ series, Severance), but for an actor who once had a career not all that dissimilar from the likes of Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell, it was odd to see him disappear into roles that were barely roles at all.
Perhaps Green and Stiller needed one another, then. With their new comedy, Nutcrackers – which held its world premiere as the opening night selection at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival – the filmmaker and multihyphenate, respectively, return to their roots in a family comedy that is heavy on laughs and heart, even if neither land with the sort of punch they both used to dispense in their sleep. Stiller stars as Michael – not Mike – a workaholic real-estate developer in Chicago who must travel to Ohio to take care of his four unruly nephews after their parents, Michael’s sister being one, recently died in what seems to have been a car accident but is never strictly defined. The boys, who inspired the film and are played by a real quartet of brothers (Atlas, Arlo, Ulysses, and Homer Janson, the children of a friend of Green’s), are tyrants who have turned their farmhouse into a farmhome for pigs, dogs, and birds, and make themselves meals like Cheese Balls a la Ketchup.
Upon Michael’s arrival, the kids put him through a ringer Parent Trap-esque trials of patience, like doing donuts in his bumblebee-yellow Porsche before (nearly) attempting to drive it up a makeshift ramp and over their blow-up pool. From there – well, actually, from the second the movie begins – Nutcrackers does its best impression of what it would be like if Cheaper by the Dozen and Life as We Know It were put in the machine from David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Michael doesn’t want to deal with this “burden,” which the local family services rep (Linda Cardellini) can’t get him to see is actually a blessing; the boys secretly want a loving parental presence, but aren’t convinced their uncle is the man for the job; oh, and Michael has a huge presentation back in Chicago on Monday, one that he’s convinced he’s going to make and is willing to obtain the world’s largest headache trying. Much of the film focuses on his efforts to find his nephews a family, foster or adoptive, resulting in a slew of detours that all manage to feel more disheartening than the one before. Think Instant Family or Angels in the Outfield if the adults in those films couldn’t ditch the kids fast enough.
If this feels like an aggressive over-abundance of references to other movies, that would be due to the fact that Nutcrackers contains not one original idea. From its attempts at mining emotion out of a kid overhearing an adult say something hurtful that wasn’t meant for their ears to the textbook, the drawn-out flirtation between the starring male and the co-starring female, both of whom want what’s best for the kids, it’s nothing if not familiar, though recycled is a more appropriate word. Its many, many montages – including one during the end credits that is exactly what you’d expect from a film with this setup – feel like shot-for-shot recreations of something you’ve seen before; the lonely man who wants no one in his life yet experiences the defrosting of his heart is an archetype that every movie like this is more than happy to beat to death in hopes that once the last bit of ice has melted, you’ll shed a tear.
It’s also incredibly repetitive, banging the same unfunny drum to the point where it borders on feeling longer than The Brutalist despite having a runtime half as long. One of its recurred refrains is at least endearing: the eldest boy, Justice (Homer Janson), asks Michael if he’ll still be with them when he wakes up the next morning, providing what may be the only moment of emotional resonance in a film that otherwise knows nothing of what it takes to pull off a good ol’ heartstring tug. The rest of its beats, from Michael’s presentation to the late parents being Ohioan hippies, are tugged in their own form, but it’s like watching a kid remove a piece of gum from his mouth to stretch it as far as it can go before it snaps. All you’re left with is a sticky, stringy mess. If anything about Nutcrackers stuck, this might make for a better simile.
That Stiller makes a valiant attempt at resurrecting his parts of yore is worth the price of admission, as this version of his formerly-standard “white male faces an obstacle he must embrace or overcome” persona has much more dad energy than he even managed to muster when the kids were actually his character’s offspring, like in Little Fockers. It’s a slight detour, but a detour nonetheless, one that Stiller seems to have aged into gracefully. Additionally, the Janson boys are naturals in their own right, a quartet of uber-talented youths who go beyond just being cute by showcasing their stellar dance moves in the finale, as they put on a production of “The Nutcracker” for their small town.
This is simultaneously the funniest and only funny thing about Nutcrackers: The aforementioned performance, from which the film obviously gets its title, is described by Junior (Ulysses Janson) as a reimagining of the famed musical, one that doesn’t strictly follow the original and allows the children involved to express their artistry in a unique-to-them fashion. How could Green and his writer, Leland Douglas, not clock the irony there? Despite this plot detail being a relatively minor one, everything they’ve given their actors to work with provides very little room to create anything new, all within a movie that comments directly on the beauty of originality in its key set piece. Perhaps Green and Douglas did see it and just didn’t care because of how “cute” and “family-friendly” it all is. Either way, no matter their ability to allure audiences with recognizable faces and ideas, the most infuriating films are always those that fail to find anything fresh to say, let alone show. And if the contents of Nutcrackers aren’t outright stolen from other, arguably better works, they are certainly hand-me-downs that don’t fit. A refund would be appreciated.
Nutcrackers held its World Premiere as part of the Gala Presentations section at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
Director: David Gordon Green
Writer: Leland Douglas
Rated: NR
Runtime: 104m
Even Ben Stiller cannot save David Gordon Green's return to comedy.
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GVN Rating 3.5
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Will Bjarnar is a writer, critic, and video editor based in New York City. Originally from Upstate New York, and thus a member of the Greater Western New York Film Critics Association and a long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan, Will first became interested in movies when he discovered IMDb at a young age; with its help, he became a voracious list maker, poster lover, and trailer consumer. He has since turned that passion into a professional pursuit, writing for the film and entertainment sites Next Best Picture, InSession Film, Big Picture Big Sound, Film Inquiry, and, of course, Geek Vibes Nation. He spends the later months of each year editing an annual video countdown of the year’s 25 best films. You can find more of his musings on Letterboxd (willbjarnar) and on X (@bywillbjarnar).