Nutcrackers review – Ben Stiller finds little joy in middling Christmas comedy

The strange and spotty career of writer-director David Gordon Green – from rural indies such as George Washington and Undertow to stoner comedies such as Pineapple Express and Your Highness to star-led Oscarbait such as Our Brand Is Crisis and Stronger to horror reboots such as the Halloween and Exorcist reworks – takes another new turn with this year’s Toronto film festival opener, the rather forced family comedy Nutcrackers. Green had said that the film is intended to evoke the sorts of universally appealing 80s comedies he grew up with, such as Overboard and Uncle Buck, and after following the commercially lucrative low-budget model for horror, he was keen to see if it could work for another, less recently proven, genre.

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Having also grown up with similar touchpoints while then also mourning the big screen comedy, it’s a plan I can get behind in theory but his charmless attempt, opening the festival with an embarrassing thud, does not deliver as promised. It doesn’t really deliver much of anything, another dead-ended left turn for a once-promising director and a waste of a star lured out of semi-retirement. Ben Stiller, who has been proving himself again behind the camera with Apple’s Severance, hasn’t taken on a lead role since 2017, a year where he was graced with scripts from Mike White and Noah Baumbach. His return here is rather baffling in comparison and a strange backwards step for an actor who had been focusing more on substance over slapstick.

The film was sparked by an idea from Green, who visited a friend of his and was so charmed by her four sons that he hired another friend, screenwriter Leland Douglas, to write a movie for them. Douglas, whose credits include the Dean Cain-led romcom Bed & Breakfast: Love Is a Happy Accident and Lifetime’s Mommy, I Didn’t Do It, has mined his TV movie background to write a screenplay that feels as if it were intended for Hallmark’s Christmas season yet Green has given it an utterly undeserving big screen treatment. Before the premiere he spoke about his desire to shoot on 35mm, and while it does make for a refreshing change, at this cursed moment, to see a comedy outside of the streaming netherworld that looks like a real movie, it would also be rather nice if it sounded like one as well.

Like many a festive TV movie, Nutcrackers zeroes in on the most easily loathed stereotype: the city-based workaholic. Stiller plays Michael, speeding through rural Ohio in his bright yellow Porsche while loudly using business buzzwords like deal and spreadsheet on his phone. He lands at a dilapidated farm owned by his estranged sister, who died in a car accident with her husband, leaving four sons (played by the real sons of Green’s friend, who do at least possess natural brotherly chemistry) behind. He’s looking after them for the weekend (but must get back to Chicago for that big presentation!) and reluctantly puts on his barely worn uncle cap to deal with them, barely able to hid his distaste (it’s not hard to grimace with him, the four terribly behaved homeschooled kids living in feral chaos with animals roaming a filthy house). But while Michael had banked on a foster family to appear, his time with the boys ends up going on for longer than he’d hoped and he soon finds himself seeing the appeal of country living as he helps them put on a special show for Christmas …

It’s the kind of hackneyed setup that would typically have attracted Christina Milian or Lacey Chabert and there is perhaps something more interesting, and less uneasily gendered, about a male lead turning his back on work-centric big city life for the comforts of the farmhouse. But it’s still reliant on the same rusty stereotypes about work (bad) and family (good) and Douglas’s script isn’t funny or affecting enough to distract us from the lazy formula of it. Green’s attempts to elevate it are briefly effective – it’s at times like a more commercial version of his earliest movies – but they only serve to confuse. What is it we’re watching here and who is it for? The more accomplished the film-making becomes, the more we then expect the script to level up too.

It’s do-it-in-your-sleep territory for Stiller and to his credit, he does more than just sleepwalk through it, but his character is hazy and underwritten (defined mostly by broad stroke city behaviour like drinking rosé wine at a dive bar and listening to LMFAO) and the script so utterly, shamefully devoid of humour that he’s reduced to regressive pratfalls (the only brief flash of a laugh comes courtesy of Edi Patterson, playing a local foster mother who can’t remember how many kids she has fostered).

As we head toward the big final show, as Green and Douglas inelegantly scramble to make us cry, the relentless string-pulling and the clumsy life lessons fail to move (the film’s view of grief is thin and unspecific) and only serve to remind us of the film’s hollowness. A sweet-natured Christmas comedy really shouldn’t be such a tough nut for them to crack.

• Nutcrackers is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution