MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Richard Attenborough, Elizabeth Perkins, Dylan McDermott, Mara Wilson. Screenplay: John Hughes and George Seaton. Director: Les Mayfield.
Let's leave aside for a moment the question of whether it was really *necessary* to make an updated version of the 1947 classic MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET. It's the question that plagues every remake, often unfairly. While it may be rare to find a film done *better* the second time around, that doesn't necessarily mean that the remake might not be perfectly enjoyable on its own merits. And I believe that this is true in the case of this gentle fantasy. While it is nothing spectacular, it's genuinely touching, and feeds off a surprisingly strong current of spirituality.
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET opens in New York on Thanksgiving day, where the Cole's Department Store Thanksgiving Parade is about to kick off the Christmas shopping season. When the parade's Santa makes a drunken spectacle of himself, parade organizer Dorey Walker (Elizabeth Perkins) plucks a replacement right off the street. He is Kriss Kringle (Richard Attenborough), and he becomes a sensation as a department store Santa filled with the holiday spirit. He even begins to make a believer out of Dorey's cynical-before-her-time daughter Susan (Mara Wilson). But Kriss Kringle's success means trouble for a rival discount store, whose owner (Energizer Bunny nemesis Joss Ackland) orchestrates a scandal which will force the people of New York to decide whether or not they believe in Santa Claus.
John (HOME ALONE) Huges was the producer and co-scripter of this film, and it may work primarily because it operates against everything you might most fear from a Hughes project. With the exception of some pratfall shenanigans at the parade early in the film, Huges and director Les Mayfield avoid excess, keeping the story low-key and character based. The characters are not uniformly interesting, mind you. The love story between perkins and a too-good-to-be-true attorney (Dylan McDermott) is not well-developed, largely because Perkins doesn't do too much with her role to show why such a perfect guy is interested in such a depressing woman. The villains are also pretty boring, and Jane Leeves (Daphne from TV's "Frasier") in particular has nothing to do and even less to say as one of the rival store's operatives.
However, it is the casting of actor/director Richard Attenborough as Kriss Kringle which helps the MIRACLE happen. Sure, he's no Edmund Gwenn, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal in the original, but Attenborough is a warm and lively presence who is perfectly believable as an embodiment of human kindness without being *too* saintly. A scene in which he "speaks" to a deaf girl in sign language really put a lump in my throat, and there is a lot of genuine emotion in the film. Also impressive is Mara Wilson, the youngest daughter from MRS. DOUBTFIRE, who avoids overly-precocious traps while handling some tricky dialogue for a young actress. She too pulls off a touching scene in which the young Susan, torn over whether or not to believe in Santa Claus, asks her mother whether she could believe if she wanted to, without disapproval.
That conversation is part of a challenging theme in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, and it brings us back to the question we started with: why remake this movie? The answer can be found in the ways (and occasionally none-too-subtle ones, it should be fairly noted) that Huges and Mayfield use belief in Santa Claus as a metaphor for contemporary views on religious faith. The film asks whether the world is a better place for the erosion of faith, not because of some effect on "values," but because of an effect on the human spirit; it asks whether it is really a good thing to raise a child without faith. Many viewers might not appreciate being confronted with these questions, but so few films ever dare to deal with the subject of faith that MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET should be commended for trying. If it's not entirely successful, it's partly because Robert Prosky, as the judge presiding over the Kriss Kringle case, fumbles the speech which should emphasize this theme by making it far too animated when it should be pitched lower. The film's denouement is also somewhat too long, and doesn't maintain the spirit of the scenes with Attenborough. But the important thing is that MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET is a good family entertainment that takes a chance on being about something. And it made a believer out of me.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 miracles: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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