There was a time when Ben Stiller might have starred in a movie like “Nutcrackers,” full of fart jokes and poop jokes and unruly kids. And there was a time when David Gordon Green might have directed a movie like this, back before he veered into three films in the rebooted “Halloween” franchise followed by “The Exorcist: Believer.”
But on opening night of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, that time came again for Stiller and Green in “Nutcrackers,” the movie that found both men in territory that had grown unfamiliar for them in recent years.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be radical if you made a movie without viciousness or cynicism?’” Green told the audience at the Princess of Wales Theatre for the first of two opening-night screenings on Thursday. To do so, he crafted a story that sounds like a gender-swapped, romance-deprived version of about 85% of all the Hallmark movies ever made: a driven businessperson from the big city goes to a small town and triumphs over misunderstandings to learn how to love.
It’s sappy as heck and maybe not as funny as you’d expect, but boy does it have heart — and when it overdoses on sentiment in the final reel (it’s shot on 35mm film, so “reel” is accurate), it’s hard not to accept that that might just be the recommended dosage.
Stiller, who stepped away from acting for eight years to produce and direct TV dramas like “Severance” and “Escape at Dannemora,” stars as a curmudgeonly real estate developer named Michael (not Mike!) who against his will becomes caretaker for four unruly kids after the death of his sister and her husband. And Green abandons his lucrative sideline as a resuscitator of horror franchises for a job wrangling kids, pigs, chickens and assorted other barnyard animals. The result is filled with muddy chaos, but here’s another way in which the Hallmark comparison is curiously apt: You just know that there’s a preordained conclusion waiting on the far side of assorted setbacks and misunderstandings.
Those begin with Michael’s arrival on the farm where his sister and her family lived, only to learn that he’s not there just to sign some documents and tie up loose ends in his sister’s estate. Instead, he’s the legal guardian of four feral children — at least until the social worker played by Linda Cardellini finds foster parents for them.
The kids greet Stiller by throwing stuff at him, not saying a word to him for the first day — including not warning him about the snake in the toilet — and doing donuts in the field using his expensive sports car. The kids — played by four sons of one of Green’s friends, none with acting experience — are totally out of control, but have a strangely ceremonial bent. They build a pyre in the middle of the night and dance around it, throwing their parents’ ashes into the flames, and it turns out that they’ve all studied ballet at the studio their mother owned.
Their anarchy is played for laughs, but the loss at the center of their lives is too fresh to avoid, so the movie pulls back on the hijinks rather quickly. The kids begin to show vulnerability and Michael begins to soften as well, with his harebrained schemes to attract potential foster parents playing more as delaying tactics than realistic strategies.
It’s amusing enough, but the real heart of the movie lies in the question that the oldest son, Justice, asks Michael every night: “When I wake up tomorrow, are you still going to be here?”
The key, of course, is in the execution, which is where it helps to have kids who don’t feel like seasoned child actors and a leading man capable of being both Derek Zoolander and a string of serious guys in Noah Baumbach films. You could say that “Nutcrackers” — the title refers to ballet, not testicles, though Green and Stiller are probably OK if you think of those, too — is a light and breezy tearjerker, certainly generic but agreeable.
Before the screening, Green told the audience that his inspirations for “Nutcrackers” included one verifiable late-‘70s classic, “Breaking Away,” as well as some less-lauded films like the 1983 Kenny Rogers vehicle “Six Pack.”
And who knows? Maybe 41 years from now, some rising young director will take the stage at a film festival to present a sweet movie with kids that he’ll say was inspired by “Nutcrackers.”
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