A NEW CHRISTMAS: A Little Christmas Surprise, Just For Us

A New Christmas, directed by Daniel Tenenabum and Written by Travis Hodgkins, declares its intent with the title. Kabir (Prashantt Guptha) has multiple reasons to not celebrate Christmas. A year ago his Christmas loving mother suddenly passed away. Secondarily, he’s just somewhat put off by the commercialization of it all. He’s not particularly religious, in any way, and so finds the spiritual element of the holiday hollow and unaffecting. It’s just not his bag, so to speak. All that, and he’s still in a depressive hole because of his later mother. 

Offering Something Worth Celebrating

So, A New Christmas is both intertextually and extratextually meant to establish a bedrock of Christmas tradition and meaning for a younger, mutliethnic generation who may not feel a sense of ownership over the holiday. There are probably plenty of people like Kabir who feel little to know ownership over the biggest holiday in North America. A New Christmas is an open door, an invitation for them to put their own stamp on the holiday. Kabir’s journey is about finding what Christmas means to him. The movie wants everyone else to do that too. 

At the start of the film Kabir is deeply depressed, living in his late mother’s house, dishes are piled up, last year’s Christmas decorations still hang. His wife Shivaani (Preeti Gupta) is trying and failing to reach him and instill a new sense of holiday cheer. Kabir responds to her outreach with nothing but disregard and bitterness: she offers to help clean up his house, he tells her to shut up and go away.

What eventually does start to reach him is the memory of his mother. He’s characteristically rude to Kioni (Grace Wacuka) when she snaps a photo of him talking with a homeless woman. But upon hearing his mother’s voice that this time of year means you should be nice, he tracks her down, apologizes, and offers to show her around the city. 

Steal from the Best

The friendship formed between Kabir and Kioni makes up the bulk of this film’s lean runtime. Their relationship has shades of Richard Linklater’s iconic Before trilogy; each film following two characters espousing profundities galore, often bumping up against the limitations of their own stage in life. Kabir and Kioni often reach for profundities, but often feel like a shovel scraping an already cleared surface: it often scrapes up something that justifies itself, but it lacks a super satisfying heft. A New Christmas is a last-scrape to Linklater’s effortless shovelful.

The dynamic eventually established here isn’t particularly bittersweet or dramatic. More of a therapy session than anything else, Kabir finds Kioni’s earnestness makes her easy to talk with, Kabir often finding himself sharing more than he intended to with her. It’s soothing to watch, often feeling like a particularly cathartic, if draining, conversation with a friend. Both Wacuka and Guptha do a fine enough job. But there are occasionally unconvincing line readings, especially from Wacuka.

Fortunately, their dynamic is solid enough, save a few moments, that watching them is fun. Like great high-school actors: the performances are never going to be perfect, but they can be surprisingly affecting at parts.

More consistently surprising is the solid supporting cast. It simply be that they didn’t have enough screen time to really mess anything up, but every one of them, Catherine (Aurora Heimbach), Gupta’s Shivani, and Paddy (Carl Garrison) are engaging and believably emotive. 

In many ways, A New Christmas is also a New York movie. Kioni often expresses an affection for the skyline, and the two debate the emotional importance of the buildings they meander past. It lacks the stubborn fixation on the city that many New York centering films, like Brooklyn, may often demonstrate. 

Conclusion: Finding A Reason for the Season

Instead, it offers a frequently materialist fixation on Christmas decorations: Kioni and Kabir find themselves seeing all the best Christmas lights, posing amongst the elaborate decorations in city parks. Eventually, this fixation with the material symbols of Christmas have a very real collision with the emotional heart of the film, and it comes out with a genuinely sentimental and kind opinion on Christmas, decorations and all. 

It’s all wrapped with the aesthetic and texture of a hallmark christmas flick, made for TV. The visuals are often unremarkable, but functional. The budget constraints show: the interiors feel very set-like, unreal. It’s a bit of everything; the lighting, the set decoration, it all just feels a bit cheap. But that’s not a huge issue. Neither are the frequent audio issues. It’s small stuff; the dialogue having character’s speak at noticeably different levels, background noises changing between lines. One scene has all of Kioni’s lines muffled, as if a wind sock was on too tight. None of these are huge issues, the budget was obviously limited and these never really distract for too long.

A New Christmas is more than the sum of its parts, nothing is perfect. The acting is never perfect, the visuals aren’t impressive, there are frequent audio blips, and the pacing is a bit uneven. The central dynamic works, however, and the affection for the material is evident. It’s a good watch, if you want something soothing and light to keep you warm during the holidays. It may not be the best thing to find under your tree, but it’s still a nice treat.

Do you have any holiday favorites that you know aren’t amazing, but you love anyway?  Let me know! My family loves Christmas Vacation.

A New Christmas came out December 6th in the US.