Review of One Magic Christmas (1985) by Abel D — 08 Dec 2013

A "Christmas Carol" update for mid '80s middle America. It's nice (and rather surprising) to see the ordeals really mattering, and refreshing to see a live-action Disney Christmas movie dealing with real economical and familiar hardship ("It's a Wonderful Life" is obviously another source of inspiration and it does a lot of the same things very well).

Things are handled with a lovely kind of restraint--even the trip to the North Pole, while magical, is all fairly ordinary: An old, bearded Italian saint and his wife in their cottage, elves working in the factory.

Ultimately, however, the story brings up some thorny problem-of-evil stuff that it's rather short-sighted Santa theologizing is under-equipped to deal with, and, while "One Magic Christmas" really works quite well in each of its individual components (the family relationship is tenderly, convincingly, and pretty unsentimentally drawn, the small kindnesses for others are moving, the environment of the town and community are all nicely, quietly rendered), the machine as a whole has some engineering problems, though it certainly surpasses the expectations (and then some) of its unfortunate title.