Christmas: 8-Bit Christmas (2021)

Do you like A Christmas Story? Then you might like Michael Dowse’s 8-Bit Christmas, which hit HBO Max (Crave in Canada) this month and plays like a 1980s-set version of Bob Clark’s classic about a boy who wants a Red Ryder air rifle for Christmas. Written by Kevin Jakubowski, and based on his own novel, 8-Bit Christmas is also about a boy (Winslow Fegley’s Jake Doyle) begging to get one specific toy for Christmas: in this case, a Nintendo Entertainment System. 

The film is set in 1988 instead of the 1940s and replaces A Christmas Story’s references to radio programs, hand-knit sweaters, and Ovaltine with references to Cabbage Patch Kids, tooth retainers, and the Nintendo Power Glove. It’s narrated by Neil Patrick Harris as an adult Jake, just like A Christmas Story is narrated by Jean Shepherd as an adult Ralphie Parker. It offers a nostalgic view of the past, as well as self-reflective commentary on the strengths and deficiencies of the main character’s family members. In short, both are nostalgic works that try to activate that particular blend of nostalgia and sardonic sentimentality that’s so common in pop-culture over the past 40 years. 

Your embrace of the material will likely depend on two things. One is how nostalgic you are for the time period (the 1980s). And two is whether you like Christmas stories without any religious or spiritual dimension. As for me, I’ve never thought A Christmas Story is a great film, so 8-Bit Christmas was amusing, but rather forgettable. Films of this sort embody the consumerism of Christmas to a degree I find unsavoury; they basically play as the antithesis of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which sees the original Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke as the antidote to Charlie Brown’s consumer Christmas blues. That being said, I understand the nostalgic appeal of both A Christmas Story and 8-Bit Christmas. If you grew up in the same time periods as Ralphie Parker or Jake Doyle, you’ll likely see a bit of your own childhood in the depictions.

Dowse’s film isn’t visually spectacular. For a film set in the 1980s, you wish it had more colour and depth to its compositions. Everything is a little washed out and flat. It’s also not nearly as coarse and vulgar as his best works, such as the hockey comedy, Goon, starring Sean William Scott, or his Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan romcom, The F Word (released as What If? in the US), which plays like a millennial version of When Harry Met Sally…. Without the kind of vulgar zeal and rich characterizations of either of those films, Dowse and Jakubowski are left only with jokes about childhood indignities and pop-culture references to the time period.

There’s a running bit about the richest kid in the neighbourhood (played by an amusingly obnoxious Chandler Dean), who is the only one to have a NES in the community and lords access to the console over his classmates, which pays dividends during the various early sequences in the film. There’s a bit involving his dog that made me gasp and cackle. Another good bit involves Jake and his dad (Steve Zahn) undergoing a blackmarket search for a Cabbage Patch Kid that culminates in a shadowy meeting under a bridge with a dealer, played by David Cross, who’s memorably fun. These moments are broad, funny, and accessible to both kids and adults.

Other moments are more grating, such as the constant presence of Cyrus Arnold as an oversized school bully in Jake’s class. Arnold looks a full 10 years older than everyone else in the class (in actuality, he’s about six years older than his co-stars). His incongruity with the rest of the kids is the point of the joke, but it never lands quite like the filmmakers intend, seeming both too obvious and strangely absurdist for a film that plays most things straight.

Late moments in the film are more pat in their lessons about family and belonging—the film zeroes in on Jake’s relationship to his dad—which border on Hallmark tropes, without fully embracing the goopy sentimentality and nonsensical logic of those films. (Although, to be clear, the very concept of the film—that there was only one kid in the whole of Chicago that had a NES in the winter of 1988—requires some suspension of disbelief, when the console was already popular in America at the time.) That being said, the straightforward sentimentality of the ending almost won me over.

Much of the modest success of the end is a result of Steve Zahn. The film’s ending in particular showcases his affable ordinariness; he’s become a sure hand at playing dopey characters who are nevertheless well-meaning and loveable. As Jake’s dad, he’s the most dependable performer in the film, never mugging, never forcing his jokes, but making his a-little-too-tired yet easygoing dad credible in every scene. But the ending also manages to say something almost profound in its direct embrace of sentimentality and nostalgia: that everytime you look into the past, you recognize all the things (and people) that didn’t make it to the present, making their absence more deeply felt. It’s a cliché observation, but it’s still true and effective in Christmas movies of this sort.

By reverting to a rose-coloured vision of the past and emphasizing the importance of time spent with family by the film’s end, 8-Bit Christmas also resembles A Christmas Story. Both films are sardonic about the characters and their scenarios, but ultimately succumb to the sentiment of the season, which encourages us to cling close to family, no matter how cloying they may be. Both are unspectacular films that only engage with Christmas in the most conventional cultural sense, but they don’t come across as false or absurd. They’re simply hollow, which makes them more indicative of our culture and Christmas season than perhaps intended.

5 out of 10

8-Bit Christmas (2021, USA)

Directed by Michael Dowse; written by Kevin Jakubowski, based on his novel; starring Neil Patrick Harris, Winslow Fegley, Sophia Reid-Gatnzert, June Diane Raphael, Steve Zahn, Bellaluna Resnick, Che Tafari, Santino Barnard, Max Malas, Brielle Rankins, Cyrus Arnold, Braelyn Rankins, Chandler Dean, Katia Smith, Tom Rooney, David Cross.

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