The Christmas season is about generosity, of course. But it’s become impossible to separate giving from receiving, and as far as that goes, even the best of us is tempted to get greedy with Santa. The holiday drama Teddy’s Christmas, directed by Andrea Eckerbom, offers an old-world vision of giving and receiving that will be mostly familiar to those who celebrate in the United States. But this Norwegian import, dubbed sometimes indifferently, has some cultural peculiarities — after all, one of its stuffed characters is a popular Nordic toy. And you have to get around the fact that the lead girl is a brat. For all that, the film is eventually heartwarming, though one doesn’t expect to add it to a regular December rotation.
The film opens in an unspecified mid-century era in a small unnamed Norwegian town at Christmastime. Eight year-old Mariann (Marte Klerck-Nilssen) is trimming the tree with her little brother (Vegard Strand Eide). As is her wont, Mariann imagines she sees a creature peering out from behind the branches. She fetches a bowl of nuts to offer the stray, but drops them all over the floor, just in time for their mustachioed father Apen (Gunn Tove Grønsberg) to walk in. Naturally, he stumbles over the nuts, leading to a whirling melee that completely undoes what had been a full-decorated Christmas tree.
That’s the level of discourse we’re dealing with here — but it gets better. The story is really set in motion when Mariann goes to the Winter carnival and sees a prize that she thinks would be the most wonderful present: a teddy bear that she swears is alive — and, at least for those of us who believe, he even talks — in the voice of John F. Brungot, in a nebbish tone that if you squint you can imagine is a continuation of Paul Giamatti’s curmudgeonly role in The Holdovers, which is naturally the better holiday movie.
This sets off a parallel narrative of selfishness in both the human and toy world, and the first transgression comes from Teddy: when Mariann pays her hard-earned one crown fee for a chance to spin the wheel and win her prize, the numbers line up in her favor. But Teddy, who dreams of being taken in by some rich man and not by some kid who doesn’t have their own money, jostles the wheel so it looks like she lost.
Naughty teddy! A mysterious stranger (or is he?) wins the bear, and Mariann goes so far as to try to steal it; Teddy, on the other hand, wakes up in an attic where the only other soul is Bolla (Lene Kongsvik Johansen), a lonely hedgehog who is so smitten with Teddy that she resorts to some kind of mating dance, much to the bear’s chagrin.
Believe it or not, the Teddy/Bolla dynamic is more palatable than the human intrigue. The hedgehog essentially teaches the bear how to get down. “Have you never really cuddled?” she asks the bear, in shock. She demonstrates, chastely, to which Teddy replies, “So this is what you mean by cuddling?”
It may not seem like much, but it’s the best scene in Teddy’s Christmas. The CGI plush animal design is good enough for jazz — ‘70s jazz, anyway. Mariann does not go unpunished, and right wins out in the end, sort of, more or less.
Nordisk Film, one of the companies behind this children’s drama, has been around since 1906, entertaining Norwegian audiences going back to the silent era. Teddy’s Christmas is not the most sophisticated plume in their august hat, but it will do. And if it spurs you to buy a cuddle teddy bear or hedgehog for a child, or yourself, then it’s more than done its job.
Photo courtesy of Capelight Pictures / Blue Fox Entertainment
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