Noel: Miracles are Closer than You Think
If Thanksgiving in the movies is about lethal families, Christmas movies tend to be about loners who most keenly feel their aloneness as they engage in that quintessential activity of the Lonely Person, watching a yule log on TV. The thing is, we’re obsessed with the conviction that we’re supposed to feel happy at Christmastime.
In Chazz Palminteri’s new film, the most miserable character is probably Rose (Susan Sarandon), a divorced, middle-age book editor whose mother has disappeared into Alzheimer’s. At one point she stands on the banks of a river, looking longingly at the icy water, but she’s talked back from the edge by Charlie (Robin Williams), who she met in her mother’s nursing home, where he was sitting in the corner in the dark in a room with an unmoving body on the bed — a body that Rose, in her desperation, one night told, “I love you!”
Well, she needs somebody to love. “You need sex. Good sex,” advises Rose’s secretary, who seems to speak from experience. Rose gets fixed up with the office stud, but at the point of decision she finds that it’s all just too sad and sordid.
Meanwhile, we meet Nina (Penelope Cruz), who is engaged to a cop named Mike (Paul Walker), who is consumed by such anger and jealousy that she threatens to postpone their wedding.
Mike has his own problems: Artie (Alan Arkin), a waiter in a restaurant, follows him around with lovesick eyes, not because he is gay, but because it only took him one look at Mike to realize he is the reincarnation of his dead wife. He could see it in the eyes. Even people who believe in reincarnation would probably not want to meet Artie.
