Christmas for downbeats: Why the best holiday movies are rarely happy

I’m not immune to the sentimental charms of a movie like Love, Actually, 2003’s rom-com gone Altman starring Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, and Keira Knightley among many. I get the visceral appeal of a dashing prime minister making out with his chubby secretary or the class sweetheart singing All I Want for Christmas to her drummer at the school program.

But the parts of that movie that really resonated with me were Liam Neeson’s single dad trying to explain love and loss to his kid, a devoted sister finding a tiny bit of bliss while making out with the office hunk, and Emma Thompson’s cheated-on mother finding clarity in a Joni Mitchell song. I like my holiday viewing to have its joy go hand in hand with some reality. I appreciated the movie’s touches of gravity. Christmas, after all, is about wistfulness as much as it is about joy.

I have my own holiday-viewing favorites. From Diner to Hannah and Her Sisters, it’s a missed bag, often with the holidays merely used as context, instead of the message. But what ties all of them together, for me, is a generosity of spirit, a sense of community, and a feeling that, in the end, it can all work out.

It might seem strange to include a movie that has one of its main characters attempting suicide halfway through as “essential holiday-viewing,” but Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment is a testament to the flip side of the season — it amplifies what you don’t have, as much as it does what you do have.

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is a corporate drone who makes a play for higher office by playing ball game with his bosses. In this case, “ball game” means lending out his tiny apartment for his philandering superiors’ illicit trysts. It all goes well for “buddy boy” until the winsome pixie he has eyes for (Fran Kubelick, played by Shirley MacLaine) accidentally reveals the cause of her deep depression—she’s the callous boss’s girlfriend, and the latest in a long line of them.

The guy’s lonely because good guys finish last and never get the girl. The girl’s lonely because she’s saddled with guilt and the confidence-destroying realization that she’s just her lover’s hobby. In this movie, everybody’s got an emptiness they’re trying to fill, whether with love or office success. It feels strange to consider this a comedy (#20 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years… 100 Laughs…) and a holiday classic, but a kind touch and a gentle humor gives The Apartment its buoyancy.

The Apartment is as much a cautionary tale about business and ethics, as it is a love story about lonely people. Baxter and Kubelick have been played by the system — unwittingly or otherwise — and at the end of the movie, they lose it all. But that’s the beauty of this movie, it has a happy ending firmly rooted in reality. Good guys rarely finish first, it admits, but that’s okay. At the end of the movie, on New Year’s Eve, the two find happiness in the simplest thing — witty banter, a drink, and a game of cards in a tiny apartment. “Shut up and deal.”

Twenty-two years earlier, George Cukor was hitting the same notes in 1938 Holiday, another dark rom-com set around the holiday season. No one attempts to kill themselves in this one. But Katharine Hepburn plays a powerful family’s black sheep daughter (Linda) like a spirit in the dark, a well-meaning free spirit with lust for life and an odd way about her feelings. Linda’s brother Ned is a formerly prodigious musician whose disgust for their social strata have rendered him a neutered alcoholic who just barely tolerates going to his job at the family office.

Love comes to town when Linda’s glamorous Stepford sister Julia brings home Johnny, a rags-to-riches success story who seems be on the up and up. Played by Cary Grant, Johnny has bright eyes and luminosity, a canny businessman whose only desire is to take a holiday after closing a lucrative deal so he can find what he really wants to do, so he can find meaning in life. The plot is predictable (Johnny leaves Julia, goes off on a boat with Linda) but the sparkle and tone are unforgettable.

In the wee small hours of the night before the New Year, a deflated Johnny and Linda find each other in a slow dance in the dark. “There’s a conspiracy against you and me child,” he whispers to her. “They won’t let you have any fun and they won’t give me time to think.” In Holiday, as well as The Apartment, the characters’ main desire stems from the fact that they don’t want to be used by the system. They want to find meaning and decency in life and have realized that worldly treasures (a promotion, an inheritance, an empire) will never satisfy them. It’s a strangely millennial message from two forward-thinking rom-coms made during the studio era. But as any good piece of art proves, time can be transcended.

And in the able hands of George Cukor and Billy Wilder, cautionary dark comedies set around the holidays, become the best, most authentic “holiday movies.” Because it’s not always a wonderful life. Because “home alone” doesn’t always mean your family will magically appear at the last minute. Because it’s never a white Christmas in Manila.

More often than not, the holidays are trying, as much as they are wonderful. There’s a generosity of spirit, but also melancholy and regret. But it’s good to be reminded that while life can be acrid and unforgiving, the things that matter most are often always in our midst — decency, simplicity, humor, a sense of adventure, love. And in the blue TV screen light, it can sound like the most optimistic Christmas message of all.