Director David Gordon Green takes a cliched screenplay and makes it a little more real.
Ben Stiller returns from relative dormancy (he hasn’t starred in a movie in seven years!) to headline Nutcrackers (now streaming on Hulu), a holiday comedy in which he’s absolutely upstaged by four young boys. This is not a bad thing! Director David Gordon Green was inspired to make the film after visiting a friend in rural Wilmington, Ohio with four young sons who studied ballet. And that’s who you see in the movie – Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo Janson, real-life brothers playing fictional versions of themselves, with the film shot in their actual home, to boot. This making-of story is probably better than the actual story in the screenplay, but still, your heart may be chalky-cold like coal if the movie doesn’t move you at least a little bit.
The Gist: Four ragamuffins bust into an amusement park after hours, fire up the tilt-a-whirl, and let rip for a free ride until the machinery fritzes and they run away from a snoozy security guard. Whoever has to watch over these boys is doomed. DOOOOOOMED! Cut to: Michael Maxwell (Stiller) zooming down rural two-laners in his banana-yellow Porsche. Is he on his phone talking about mergers and assessments and spreadsheets and other important-guy work shit? You bet he is. He promises this trip from big, busy Chicago to the oh-so-beige environs of Nowhere, Ohio will be brief – he just has to sign some papers, he thinks, and then he can get right back to synergizing the optimizationalism of the big presentation or whatever. Now, if you believe that the plot will actually allow Michael to accomplish any of this, that’s amazing, since you must have been recently born – this world can be awful and it also can be pretty great, so welcome to it! – and enjoying your first movie ever.
Michael’s destination is a farmhouse with pigs in the kitchen, a snake in the toilet and a guinea pig in his bed, all of which he discovers incrementally, as he attempts to use said things. The place is also populated with four monkeys: 12-year-old Justice (Homer Janson), his younger brother Junior (Ulysses Janson) and the youngest, twins Samuel (Atlas Janson) and Simon (Arlo Janson). They’re Michael’s nephews. He doesn’t seem to know them very well; something unspoken but very much implied tells us he wasn’t invited to birthdays and Xmases and such, evident when one of the boys reveals that their mom said Uncle Mike “is incapable of love.
