Jingle All The Way

"A woman came up to me after a screening in Baltimore, and said: ‘I used to hate Christmas, but now I think I like it’,” smiles Clark. “And that’s it, man: if I can touch just one person with this movie, it’s all been worth it!”

The writer-director of the seasonal tragicomedy White Reindeer is joking, but not entirely. Clark confesses to loving not only Christmas, but something even more dire. “I love Christmas movies! All That Heaven Allows, which is only about Christmas for 15 minutes, is an incredibly potent Christmas movie, in its own way. Those films from my childhood that I loved and still watch: Scrooged, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It’s A Wonderful Life, as much as a cliché as it’s become, is actually a deeply, deeply depressing movie for the first hour and 45.”

Speaking of deeply-depressing movies chronicling awful things: White Reindeer no sooner introduces us to chipper suburban real-estate agent Anna Margaret Hollyman than her husband suddenly dies; her regular Joyeux Noël turned dark, droll downward spiral. “You get a really interesting back-and-forth with audiences; there can be this tension between the people who find certain things funny, and those who don’t. It’s fascinating to see an audience work out what they are allowed to laugh at, or what they’ll allow themselves to laugh at.”

As with his 2010 film, Vacation!, Clark was out to lace an established, National Lampoon­-branded genre with incongruous darkness. “Just as if I sat down to make a horror-movie, I treated this like I was making a genre film. I wrote myself a set of rules, and number one was: this movie can never not be about Christmas; every single scene has to be about Christmas in some way. And the second rule was: no matter how dark I made it, it had to be a comedy.”

The film’s most comic moments come when Hollyman is befriended by a pair of neighbours, played by Joe Swanberg and Lydia Hyslop, who turn out to be swingers. Not coincidentally, after acting in White Reindeer, Swanberg was inspired to make his own seasonal movie, Happy Christmas; which Clark just watched in Swanberg’s house, where it was filmed (“there are a couple of scenes that are literally shot from the perspective of where the TV that I was watching [the movie on] is,” he says, “it looked like some surreal, warped mirror, where instead of me sitting there with Joe, it was Anna Kendrick”).

And though Clark claims there’s no rivalry between the two low-budget-indie-comedy auteurs, both White Reindeer and Happy Christmas have the same goal: to end up on that annual seasonal playlist. “I know I watch the same handful of Christmas movies every year,” Clark says. “So, for me, my ultimate goal was: if someone else made this movie, would it end up in that lexicon through the years? Would this be a movie that people would pop on in ten years, when Christmas-time comes around? Will some cinema show it, every year around this time? That’s the dream, obviously.”