SEVEN HEADS ALERT! SEVEN HEADS ALERT! I REPEAT, THE MOUSE KING SHOWS UP IN 1993'S THE NUTCRACKER, AND HE HAS THE FULL, PROPER SEVEN HEADS. THREE MOLDED COPIES OF THE CENTRAL HEADPIECE JUTTING OUT FROM BOTH SIDES, YOU COUNT 'EM UP, YOU'VE GOT ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN FULL HEADS! HE AIN'T IN IT MUCH, BUT HE MATCHES THE PROPER COUNT, AND HE'S GOT THE SAME DELIGHTFULLY ROUNDED, BAGGY BODY SUIT AS THE REST OF THE MOUSE SOLDIERS. FIVE OUTTA FIVE. TEN OUTTA TEN. BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR ALL YEARS.
Ahem.
So, this take on The Nutcracker is a bit of an odd beast. Despite an alternate title naming it after George Balanchine's famous, life-giving and fame-bringing 1954 version of the ballet and despite drawing extensively from Peter Martin's then-present rendition, the film's overall construction gives one the impression it only exists because Kit Culkin couldn't negotiate satisfactory terms for payments on Home Alone 3, and rushed a film version of a Christmastime ballet into production so his son would have a starring role in a holiday film for the winter '93 season. Macaulay Culkin is quite a bit more prominent than other Nutcrackers and their princely counterparts, entering the story alongside Drosselmeyer and getting teased as a potential romantic interest for Marie during the children's dancing scenes at the Christmas party. He's got a substantial number of close-ups compared to the other major players, which reveal how Kit evidently instructed Macaulay to not move a single solitary facial muscle during the entire production, and consequently makes it seem weird the child actor so well known for his expressiveness in the Home Alone movies is playing it so dead-eyed. Some of that might come from how Kit very obviously didn't drop a single cent on ballet lessons for Macaulay, who is asked to perform the Nutcracker Prince's dancing recap of his battle against the Mouse King (notably deleted from The Motion Picture), and does so by awkwardly shuffling in place, occasionally flourishing his arms a tiny bit, and overall looking like he does not want to be here. Much as Tchaikovsky's ballet has the leads' absence throughout the second act baked into its traditional form, Culkin's presence makes the issue all the more head-scratching, for the constant focus on his person throughout the first act gives way to he and Clara simply sitting on the sidelines watching the cultural and candy dances with very few close-ups, and not even performing the play's final dance. Y'all paid for The Kid What Did Home Alone In This Other Christmas Thing, now thrill as he embodies none of the traits you liked from that movie, and then gets benched so the real dancers can dance.
Course, the real dancers here aren't quite equal to those from the Bolshoi Company or the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Lacking in technical knowhow about ballet and dance in general though I am, exposure to their filmed productions tells me there's something oddly simple about the performances here. The group pieces are all fairly fine to my eye, big crowds in motion always having some positive effect on me regardless of technical execution, and their costumes are pretty and eye-catching all-round, so a large group in matching outfits of this type is going to work for me. Problems arise with the solo or paired dancers, whose movements seem rather slow and restricted - the ballerina playing the Sugarplum Fairy seems especially simple and sluggish during her highlight numbers by comparison. I have to wonder how much of these underwhelming dances are the result of my spoiling by viewing world-class performers and no one else immediately prior to this viewing, how much comes from a lack of vim and vigor during this particular production, and how much blame one can lay upon director Emile Ardolino. I've not seen Dirty Dancing, but its reputation as one of the great dance movies led me to expect better staging and camerawork. Where the Bolshoi production has the excuse of being a filmed live performance, and The Motion Picture works a few tricks to ease into its theatrical staging, Ardolino presents the film as 80% head-on filming of obvious stagebound sets, and renders his rare close-ups or alternate angles disappointing in effect thanks to a lack of acting from anyone onstage. I singled out Culkin for his lifelessness due to his prominent treatment, but pretty much everyone here lacks an awareness that the camera might find them interesting at a distance any closer than fifty feet. Such simple performances might work when viewed as live theater (not ever Nutcracker staging needs to bring the house down and strain the performers past their limits) or even filmed theater, but with the bare-minimum effort at treating this film like a movie in hand, the unimpressive footwork and static camera should make it a bit of a slog to watch.
Connie thought so, and I see where she's coming from... yet I found myself far more engaged by this production than the Bolshoi version or The Motion Picture. I cannot call this film better than either, as despite some pretty backdrops and outfits (and those INCREDIBLE mice, ho boy!), its production design doesn't quite match the former's creativity or the latter's richness, and both contain what seem to me far better dancing. Kevin Kline's perfunctory narration should seem insulting, and does little to help once one realizes how well the same information is communicated without words even here, and there's just simply not much here I might call exemplary. Charming to an extent, visually pleasant, containing a mouse king with the proper seven heads as God intended, yes, but not great. And again, here I am with a film I think lesser compared to The Motion Picture that kept me alive and awake far better. I'm inclined to say some of it comes down to growing familiarity with both the general form and this particular show, and having multiple different points of comparison against which to actively go, "It's interesting how they're handling the cultural dances this time, and the different placement on the Sugarplum Fairy's dance has an odd effect on the flow, and what are the limited cinematic flourishes doing for the film compared to the others when they'll sometimes take the form of a slow flashback to events we saw five minutes ago, and and and?" It's probably not so much this film having anything particularly special to stimulate my brain, as it is me having poisoned my brain with so much Nutcracker content in the past few weeks as to find the act of comparing and contrasting different versions more rewarding than I did when watching The Motion Picture a week back. Call it engagement by way of being a fucking nerd.
Harshness aside, this staging of The Nutcracker probably simply made an ill-fit for the cinematic form. Drawing on Connie's after-film musings again, I'd agree many of the flaws I've highlighted wouldn't stand out so prominently on the stage, considering the lack of a camera to underline the lack of emotive acting and its own inability to dance in time would remove the pressure to live up as a piece filmmaking, and the longer-standing tradition of live ballet productions compared to versioned film as film would remove the impulse to compare it to productions more specifically geared to take advantage of the medium. In this particular mode, however? S'fine. Fun to poke fun at how wooden Culkin's dad made the thing by shoe-horning his famous son in, enjoyable to watch when the bodies are in motion, and happily free from the pedophilic subtext present in the ballet - or, for that matter, the textual text present in The Motion Picture. This last really helps me find a positive spin on the film at the end of the day. Drosselmeyer may become a bit of a dead-end character if he's not constantly present throughout the dream sequences, but if the alternative is a consciously creepy rendition orchestrating the dances in the Land of Sweets as a means of stealing young Clara's hand away from her ideal fantasy boyfriend, then LET'S play schmaltzy, cutesy child romance with no godfather in sight. Please.
3/5
10/5 for the Mouse King
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