By Brandon Nolta
Ah, Christmas. The most wonderful—and heartburn-inducing—holiday of the year, there is a whole panoply of fine cinematic treasures about the Yuletide season. I’m not talking about heartwarming films like IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE or WHITE CHRISTMAS, either; no, we’re talking GREMLINS or NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION or, hee hee, BAD SANTA. But, the one that warms the most cockles in this reviewer’s heart is the 1994 gem THE REF, one of the best examples of a family sort of uniting in the face of incompetent adversity ever put to celluloid.
It’s Christmas in Connecticut, and most of the respectable citizenry is either on vacation somewhere warm or snuggled up inside, celebrating the season. This august company, however, doesn’t include long-married couple Lloyd (Kevin Spacey) and Caroline Chasseur (Judy Davis), who are working on a decade or more of bitter and resentful (but funny) sparring. After burning through yet another marriage counselor, they stop at a grocery store to get ready for Christmas dinner, where Caroline meets up with Gus (Denis Leary), who is having his own brand of hell this Christmas Eve. Gus is a thief, a not-too-shabby one, who nonetheless has run afoul of a bizarre security setup that has left him limping from a dog bite, smelling like cat piss and separated from his dumb-ass partner Murray (Richard Bright), who panicked at the first sight of … well, anyone. Gus has the loot, but no ride out of town, and with the police blocking all the roads, what’s a self-respecting thief to do? If you said take Lloyd and Caroline hostage, you’ve probably seen the film.
The high-octane bickering between Lloyd and Caroline is bad enough for Gus’ nerves (begging the question of why the hell doesn’t he shoot them, since he is packing heat), but when the rest of Lloyd’s family shows up for Christmas, including Lloyd’s satanic mother Rose (Glynis Johns), the violence can’t come soon enough. Meanwhile, the only cop in town with any brains, the local police chief (Raymond J. Barry), has to deal with idiot cops and idiot city council people, which leads to several embarrassing situations, but also one of the funniest lines of the film. And, complicating the mix, Lloyd and Caroline’s wayward son (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.), who’s merrily blackmailing the headmaster of his military school, is on his way home, threatening to further pooch Gus’ already fragile self-control.
Part of what makes THE REF work so nicely is the acidic script by Marie Weiss and Richard LaGravenese (the scribe who gave the world THE FISHER KING), which squeezes 364 days of cynicism into one. But, the magic in the film comes from its three central actors. You don’t normally think of comedy genius when somebody says Kevin Spacey or Judy Davis, two very accomplished dramatic thespians, but hot damn, are they funny together. Leary was already known as a comedian (his NO CURE FOR CANCER show was still getting a lot of play), but he hadn’t developed a reputation as a dramatic actor yet, so watching these actors complement each other’s strengths was, and is, a laugh-filled surprise. Throw in comedic vets like Christine Baranski with character vets like Raymond J. Barry, and it’s a mess of black-hearted fun. Any film that includes the line, “You know what I'm going to get you next Christmas, Mom? A big wooden cross, so that every time you feel unappreciated for your sacrifices, you can climb on up and nail yourself to it,” is the kind of film that deserves heavy holiday play. Keep your Crosby and your Stewart; me and mine look forward to two hours of Leary, Davis and Spacey every year.
