Nutcrackers, on Disney+: what is Ben Stiller’s return to comedy worth?

Signed by David Gordon Green, this portrait of a selfish uncle, who must take care of his four orphan nephews, walks the fine line between indie drama and feel-good farce.

“Christmas is in three weeks!”we hear in the course of a replica of Nutcrackers : a timing which undoubtedly pushed Disney+ to put the film online on November 29 – effectively three weeks before the holidays. Rather discreet, apart from that, the posting online: this new David Gordon Green with Ben Stiller was released to us without fanfare. It must be said that the media response received by the film during its presentation at the Toronto festival last September was rather measured. Nutcrackers had however been chosen as the opening film of the prestigious festival and marked at least two small events: the return of director David Gordon Green to drama indie after a detour to Blumhouse (where he signed three Halloween and a Exorcist in barely five years) but also the comeback of Ben Stiller as headlining a feature film, which had not happened to him since 2017 and the Meyerowitz Stories by Noah Baumbach – the laughter superstar of the 90s and 2000s who has mainly devoted himself in recent years to his activities as a series director,Escape at Donnerama has Severance.

The poster of Nutcrackers shows Stiller entangled in a Christmas garland, with four laughing kids behind him, who we understand to be the “nutcrackers” of the title. Don't expect an all-smiles family comedy, however. Night at the museum : the film rather walks a fine line between feel-good farce and indie drama. Stiller plays Michael Maxwell, a selfish real estate developer from Chicago, who drives his Porsche to a remote farm in Ohio to reluctantly take care of his four nephews, whose parents have just died in a car accident. .

Left to their own devices while waiting for a foster family to be found for them, the kids live in a sort of alternative Captain Fantastic educational experience gone wrong, a farming Neverland where rodents reign supreme and pigs squat the living room. Will Uncle Michael succeed in taking care of these unbearable unkempt kids? Will he let go of his Excel tables to show generosity? And will he regain a little of his lost humanity by getting his hands back on the toy box of his childhood?

We obviously know the answers to these questions, but we are grateful to Gordon Green and Stiller for not answering them with too much sentimentality. Super predictable in its unfolding, Nutcrackers takes great care to never veer too openly into sentimentality – Gordon Green says he was inspired by big-mouthed brat films from the early 80s. Six Pack Or Kidcowhere the young protagonists were more badass than in Amblin productions of the same period.

The four children in the film (who are also four brothers in real life, the sons of an old college friend of DGG) are indeed real ringworms, not at all adorable blond heads, who demand, for example, that Uncle Mike give a sex education lesson at breakfast, or test his courage by asking him to go slaughter a chicken in the barnyard. Where we find Gordon Green's taste for childhood snapshots taken in the open countryside, a small talent which had established him during his first attempts in the 2000s (George Washington, The Other Shore) hopeful of the US indie scene.

And Stiller, then? Despite the air of pre-retirement that has hung over his filmography in recent years, he still excels in the role of the falsely cool, really stressed urbanite, stupidly trying to prove his virility. He still knows, as in the heyday, to let a silence drag on a little too long, the better to give an air of deliciousness. nonsense nonsense to the banal phrase he has just uttered. We love him when he searches for network, his feet muddy in a field in Ohio, and ends up managing to reach a colleague in Chicago to ask her: “Can you come over to my house to feed my fish and water my fern?”

The psychology of the character is also very summarily sketched, the scenario seems to have been written in haste, but this apparent I-don't-give-a-fuck goes well with the scruffy staging of David Gordon Green, who prefers to dispatch the current storyline affairs to better give this kind of Peter Pan in the Midwest airs of a happy brothel, where narrative conventions are gently pirated. And this art of casualness ultimately marries quite well with the way in which this film, modest and touching, was trashed in the indifference of streaming platforms, and in which we discovered it, by chance, without expecting much. -thing. It's the best way to get attached to him.

Nutcrackersby David Gordon Green, with Ben Stiller, Linda Cardellini, Homer Janson… On Disney+