David Gordon Green’s career is one of the most unpredictable in Hollywood. Since his masterful and celebrated debut George Washington, he’s not been shy about planting a flag in a wide variety of films––dramedies, gritty thrillers, franchise horror reboots, political satires, and stoner comedies among them. It’s been more than a decade since he has made a film that resembles anything like Nutcrackers. 2013’s Prince Avalanche was a peculiar, convention-straying work built on a loose screenplay that tended to meander and flow in various different directions, even touching Malickian territory in its poetic aims. It might not have wholly worked, but it did aim to buck conventions of a male-bonding film. Nutcrackers, on the other hand, follows them to the T, such that its unfolding feels ludicrously prescribed.
From the get-go, you know exactly where the ripely comedic premise will go. Mike (Ben Stiller), a stuck-up corporate workaholic and self-involved uncle, is caring for his deceased sister’s four rowdy sons until they can find a foster family. If you can predict Mike will take a liking to the kids and open himself up to them, maybe even deciding to adopt them himself, you are spot-on. The boys play tricks on Mike at first, steal his Porsche, and make him row himself out to the middle of a lake because that’s apparently the only place where there’s good cell reception. Unfortunately, none of the feel-good hijinks end up being all too funny. There’s perhaps one good joke in the entire endeavor, uttered by Tim Heidecker’s state-trooper character who points at Mike’s Porsche and says, “Love the yellow Ferrari.” When Stiller, uncommonly stiff and tired here, is playing an irritable guy we normally get whippy line delivery or some smart-crack sarcasm. In Nutcrackers there’s the sense he’s sleepwalking through chaos around him.
Despite being introduced as a high-strung mechanical corporate-managerial type (one of the boys says that their mom describes Mike as “incapable of love”), Stiller’s limp-puppet character inexplicably becomes malleable. There’s almost no sense of definition about him, succumbing to the whims of the irrational script––ditching the Porsche to drive the four kids in his brother-in-law’s beat up ice-cream truck, homeschooling them about sex, helping them catch and butcher a chicken for dinner. His personality strangely shifts between sternness and compassion with no gradient between the two.
While so many things occur on a whim, everything has the energy of a deflating balloon. Green is obsessed with showing his characters frolicking in slow motion at any given opportunity, undercutting both moments of comedy and sentimentality with curious impulses. Green’s direction has a general sense of purpose for the movie at hand, and his famed pseudo-Malickian poetic style with sun-dipped shots of nature are at play here, bearing neither the impact nor artistry of earlier work. Despite being pleasantly captured on 35mm by Michael Simmonds, there’s hardly a shot that retains in memory. The film’s ideas of romance and family bulldoze into saccharine territory quite easily, where everything gets a dramatic insert but no satiety.
The oldest son asks Mike several times, “When I wake up, are you going to still be here?” The line is used in such a tawdry manner that one will infer it’s going to be part of a climactic event and––sure enough––it is. This kind of Screenwriting 101 is what makes Nutcrackers frustrating, ordinary, and above all, contrived. Green throws his characters together: rather than giving them depth, they come across as ciphers for a predictable journey that hits all-too-familiar notes. If the director was looking for a return-to-roots comeback vehicle after his recent Hollywood horror journey, this is not it.
Nutcrackers premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.