BAH!

Christmastime by definition is ripe for sentimental humbuggery.

The sentimental mood evoked during this most maudlin of times is abetted by midwinter depression, fueled by fuzzy memories of cozy childhood wishes. It is no coincidence that commerce unburies this treasure every year - with sales pitches and movies that pander to an audience so needy for psychic warmth that the inevitability of bitter hangover will be ignored.

Millions of families religiously flock to their TV screens to watch movies that reinforce their mythology about the season - that happiness resides in familial love, fellowship, and generosity.

Of all the hymns that are part of the ceremony, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” embodies the story arc that comes closest to the heart of the season. It stands as the template for an idea that is so compelling - yet so ephemeral because of the harsh reality of life - that it needs infinite repetition and variation. It is a clever sermon, a parable comparable to Biblical stories in its universal appeal. It presents us with an ugly picture of life as it exists and replaces it with life as it could — and preaches — should be.

In 1946, Frank Capra - the poor man’s De Mille - made the “Christmas Carol” variant, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which later - due to TV exposure - joined and even surpassed the English classic in American hearts. Others have tried to re-mix the formula since and I want to point up two recent ones, “The Family Man” (2000) and “Click” (2006), to see whether it still can work. The comparison reveals some about whether our values and choices have changed over 50 years.

Right after the tragedy of World War II, Capra and James Stewart combined the sentimental and dark sides of their personalities for a troubling image of American life as we both wish and fear it to be — a sad memory of the possibilities of our nation’s and our individual innocence.

Watching it again at my advanced age, I now feel more deeply George Bailey’s plaint of painful forced abandoning of his youthful dreams of world conquering for the obligations imposed by love, family, and community, a theme which was probably not intended in the film’s final form and which is certainly not what makes it a sentimental family flick.

As with many Hollywood morality tales, the dark middle before the sentimental ending rings more true to life as we know it, but the feel-good ending is tolerable because so shamelessly and classily contrived and performed. The moral, that no man is a failure who has friends, is ridiculous on its face; but the true moral is the religious one: the benefits of generosity and goodness.

Fifty years later, “The Family Man” tried to revive the theme.

Nicolas Cage has made a career exploiting his eyebrows. He has made a series of films in which his “acting” consists mostly of looking sensitive the way a basset hound looks sad: by a quirk of his appearance. Nic is the kind of man/puppy certain women seem to like. He looks to be in pain, thus in need of cuddling, but not so much that he requires too much attention. His voice is whiney, but not as much as if he was Jewish, and he has a better physique than the Woody Allen / Ben Stiller type of urban kvetch.

“The Family Man” plays as another of the chick flick formulas that are meant to prove that man is incomplete without The Right Woman. The situation thus contrived assumes that financier Jack Campbell (Cage) has everything a man’s man thinks he wants: power, wealth, involvementless sex, Ferrari, hot penthouse apartment, racks of clothes, gorgeous models to wake up with; and at work, toadies who follow his orders and cower. Gee, how can men be so shallow?! (Actually, this is also what every “Sex In The City” woman wants — sub in Manolo for Ferrari - but more on that later.)

After the intro of Jack as lone wolf, he gets a phone message from an old girlfriend, whose memory he has submerged, a girl who he almost married 13 years ago but abandoned. Now he will be transported to the life he would have had if he had not chosen this lonely perfect life.

The fantasy replaces that vacuous man’s life with a woman’s supposed dream life — marriage, home, children, friends, domestic routine - the life George Bailey regrets in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

The tension in George’s dilemma is that he thinks he has wasted his life — because he had dreams of travel, conquest, greatness — all purportedly dreams of men. Mary is the one who has gotten her wish: she got her good responsible family man, her home, children, friends, domestic bliss. In the end, through the nightmare of Clarence’s images of what might have been if George had not existed, he is persuaded that the life Mary chose for him was not so bad after all.

But the trick is that George is never shown what would have happened had he – at any one of the several turning points in his life – been able to seek his own dream.

Should it be assumed that his innate goodness would have been perverted by this track? Mightn’t the world have been a better place if this good and decent man had become an architect, become wealthy, achieved power? If he had traveled, gone to college, chased his muse, and then come back to marry Mary, wouldn’t he have been a happier man?

“The Family Man” upends the fantasy. Jack was leaving his college girlfriend, Kate (Tèa Leoni), for an internship in London to study finance. Kate was going to law school to be a pro bono lawyer. At the airport, she tried to persuade him to stay, fearing that if he went, he would never return. He vowed his love, and left. Thirteen years later, we see that she had been right. Jack is now a “Gordon Gecko,” lonely at the top but blithely unaware of his loss.

It is Christmas Eve and Jack is about to enter the “Twilight Zone.” He meets his Clarence, this time played by Don Cheadle as a seemingly scary psycho robber who Jack tries naively to help out. Jack makes the mistake of saying he has everything he wants and needs; Cheadle will now show him a glimpse of the alternate life, the one he would have had with Kate.

Jack awakes in bed with Kate in their little home in Teaneck, New Jersey. His two kids hop in bed for Christmas morning. Jack manages his father-in-law’s tire store, bowls with friends, daydreams an affair with a friend’s blowsy wife, and is mired in a numbing routine of home, suburban chores — driving kids to school, walking the dog, scrimping, enduring the bitter winter.

Of course, Jack comes to appreciate the life, and especially Kate / Tèa, who steals the film. She really is sexy, desirable, smart, fun.

But when Jack sees the chance to have both, he tries to convince Kate they can have the wealth and the family. She clucks— he just doesn’t get it! He does have it all. Her dream is to live in their home and grow old together while she gardens and he repairs the deck.

Later, she relents— okay, she will make the big sacrifice: drag the kids away from their schools and friends and move back to The City (and even enrol them in posh private schools, if absolutely necessary) if it will make Jack happy. “I choose us,” she reminds him.

Jack, now hopelessly the warm and cuddly Nic, wants to stay with Tèa and his family, but he wakes in his bachelor bed, his Gecko life now too transparently shallow. Then he remembers the phone message his old girlfriend, Kate had left. He looks her up, finds her now a self-assured partner in a law firm about to move to Paris.

Interesting, because deprived of his love, she too has abandoned altruism for greed! This is the modern woman’s answer to what happened to Mary Bailey in George’s 1946 nightmare — remember, without George she became a spinster librarian.

Kate has found a box of Jack’s’s stuff which she needs to get rid of. Why she has saved this box but never talked to him in all these years until now is never explored – the scenes are played as if she has moved on and has no regrets about the turn their lives took; only Nic is in pain (as shown by his eyebrows) and conscious of what might have been.

Jack leaves her, then thinks better of it. More to supply a heart racing ending than for any other logical purpose, he drives frantically to the airport, finds her in a crowd, is rejected by her, turns away, then tries again, by reciting to her the fantasy alternate life they “had” in Teaneck.

The scene is painful in its illogic, since she has no memory of the “other life” but Nic’s speech assumes that she has. One suspects that in an abandoned and forgotten script draft, we learn that she has had the same “fantasy.”

Instead, she listens to his argument: ... I left you and regretted it; now please don’t leave me. “I choose us,” he whines. That catchphrase must have been one the writer fantasized would be whispered by tearful couples leaving the theater after watching the film on date night, but it is not exactly, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

It ends with a silhouette of the couple drinking airport coffee under the credits. The ending is satisfying in a twerpy way: now Jack and Kate are both independently rich and have explored their career dreams; they can wed and live happily ever after together. Hopefully not in Teaneck.

“Click” is the most recent entry in the “Wonderful Life” line of pictures. Adam Sandler is Mike Newman, a harried husband, father, and aspiring architect, unable to balance his family’s demands with his ambition to be rich.

Mike’s Clarence is named Morty (a funnier name, I admit) played by Christopher Walken. Adam’s wife (named Donna, in homage) is played by Kate Beckinsale, who is given less to do and therefore makes less impact than Donna Reed or Tèa Leoni, at least until a couple of scenes late in the picture.

Adam must learn the lesson of family values through a modern fantasy, a “universal” remote that makes his life a DVD he can fast forward through chapters, stop action, and rewind. The metaphor is a decent one for a high concept picture sell: a man who fast forwards through the awkward but meaningful moments of his family life, thinking only of his work, is a fool.

“Click” relies on some fancy special effects to show the video type menus of the remote and fat suits, prosthetics, make-up, and facial masks that the cast must have had fun with.

Sandler could not resist the kind of jokes that clicked with his audience in all his movies: farts, fat, kicks in the groin, old people — the usual things pre-adolescents find irresistible. There are a few amusing gags and situations that effectively explore the possibilities of the remote idea, but overall, the picture literally falls flat due to its own heaviness. The life lesson endures way too long, carrying Sandler into a nightmarish old age and death before finally returning us to the present and giving him the obligatory second chance.

As in the previous incarnations, I must admit that the version of life meant to be seen as the wrong path seems more real to me. People are as venal and selfish as in the day before George Bailey’s plunge into fantasy and his nightmare town is more like our cities have become. Jack Campbell was better off rich and alone than struggling in regretful mediocrity and Mike’s unversal remote seems like a pretty good idea.

Also, I find it notable that in all three of these films, made over a span of fifty years, the roles of the wives remain the same: they are the keepers of the family flame. One wonders what feminists make of these films. They are clearly pre- and post-feminist works, with assumptions that women want domestic bliss rather than their own careers to achieve self-fulfillment. How about a remake of “Wonderful Life” with a woman at its center?