Mark Reviews Movies: A CHRISTMAS STORY CHRISTMAS

A Christmas Story Christmas, Warner Bros. Pictures/HBO Max

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 17, 2022

Little Ralphie is all grown up and determined to have the perfect holiday celebration in A Christmas Story Christmas. This belated sequel, set 33 years after the original film and being released just shy of 40 years after it, is as much a nostalgic trip as the 1983 original. The distinction is that the first film was nostalgic for a specific time and, more importantly, the view a kid has of the world. Meanwhile, co-writer/director Clay Kaytis' follow-up becomes primarily nostalgic for the original film.

To a certain degree, that's fine enough, of course. After all, director Bob Clark's A Christmas Story, based on the fictionalized reminiscences of humorist Jean Shepherd, is a bona fide classic. It's a film that has endured for decades, become a staple of holiday viewing, and takes on new layers of depth as you grow and age alongside its home-spun insights, preserved like a snow globe in a box for most of the time and revealed with sentimental joy once a year. There was little chance that Kaytis and co-screenwriter Nick Schenk could re-capture the spirit and humor and self-contained wisdom of that film, but the filmmakers' effort is sincere enough to keep it from potential disaster and to occasionally remind us how great its predecessor is.

As for being its own entity, the movie lives on our good feelings for that other one. The casting, for example, gives us Peter Billingsley, the original Ralphie, as a 40-something Ralph. It's 1973, and he is living in Chicago, married with two kids, and determined to become a published author.

The actor hasn't disappeared from show business over the past four decades, but Billingsley's performance here feels like a pleasant re-introduction to or reunion with an old friend. That's all he has to do, which is to say he just has to exist in this movie. In taking over the narration from the late Shepherd and imbuing Ralph with a kind of aw-shucks desperation, though, it is very nice to see Billingsley back in the role.

There's a bit more structure to this sequel, which follows three main threads. The first is Ralph's dream of becoming a writer. Ralph has made a deal with his wife Sandy (Erinn Hayes) that, if he's not published by the end of the year, he'll go back to working some nine-to-five. Ralph is still a dreamer, beyond his career aspirations, imagining how embarrassed a rejecting publisher will be when Ralph wins a big literature prize, televised for the world to see.

The second thread has Ralph dealing with the sudden death of his father, the beloved "Old Man," who dies only a few days before he and Ralph's mother (Julie Hagerty takes over that role from the retired Melinda Dillon) were supposed to celebrate Christmas in Chicago with their family. Ralph, Sandy, and their two kids—Mark (River Drosche) and Julie (Julianna Layne)—decide to be there for mom and take a trip to Ralph's hometown of Hohman, Indiana. Some of the movie's more affectingly nostalgic moments have Ralph finding the Old Man's hat, staring at the empty space of the father's favorite chair, and witnessing a fuse blow just as his mother insists that her husband is still with them in some way.

The third part, which makes up the thin but decidedly structured plot, involves Ralph's attempts to orchestrate a perfect Christmas celebration in honor of his father, to provide his mother with some solace, and to make his family as happy as he used to be this time of year. It's a generally sweet tale, bolstered primarily by prodding at our memories of the original film.

Billingsley is back, but so, too, are some of Ralph's old friends, played by the same actors who played them decades ago. Flick (Scott Schwartz), who famously got his tongue stuck to a frozen pole, now owns the bar his father used to run, and Schwartz (RD Robb), the guy who triple-dog-dared his buddy to put his tongue on the pole, has run up a sizeable tab at that establishment. One of the more random—and, hence, more amusingly authentic to the source material—episodes has Flick daring his buddy for some comeuppance on a more nightmarish frozen structure.

In trying to perfect the holiday celebration, Ralph messes things up, of course, while the narration flips all of the worries and concerns and dreads of Christmas, as well as life in general, from a Midwestern kid's perspective to this Midwestern adult's point of view. The family decorates, just as Ralph's family did so many times (A gag with a "bargain" of a Christmas tree is quite funny and filled with truth). The kids have to deal with some bullies, just as their father did—and has to again, after trying to obtain a tree-topper in an illegal/neighborly way, depending on one's perspective/justification. A trip to visit Santa at the local department store is familiar, too.

At a certain point, the movie's insistence on giving us so many recognizable scenarios, so many memorable props and items of set decoration, and so many other callbacks to the original film starts to feel almost as desperate as Ralph's quest for a perfect Christmas. For better and for worse, that's really the only mode in which A Christmas Story Christmas could operate.

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