Natale a New York (2006)

It is Christmas, and Italy has dispatched three carloads of its citizens to Manhattan. A penniless pianist clings to a fortune by way of a prenuptial agreement he is already violating. A surgeon endures the routine torment of a department head who treats cruelty as a management style. A college student of spectacular indolence is mistaken for a scholar. The machinery of the cinepanettone grinds forward, and the jokes land where they always land: on infidelity, on the female body, on the humiliation of a subordinate. None of it is presented as a problem. All of it is presented as Tuesday.

The film arrived in 2006, before the culture began keeping score. It offers no argument about representation, no reconsideration of gender, no interest in race or climate or the moral standing of the rich. Wealth is envied, not indicted. The harassed surgeon is a punchline, not a plaintiff. There is a cheerleader, a small white dog, a rare antique parchment, and a great deal of running through hotel corridors. The film wants a laugh, and it pursues that want with the single-mindedness of a machine built for a narrow purpose.

To watch it now is to regard a fossil in amber, preserved in the exact posture of its moment. It lectures nobody. It improves nobody. It sells tickets to people who wish to forget the year, and by every commercial measure available it succeeded. Classification requires us to record the absence of any modern instruction, and that absence is total. Nothing here asks to be graded. There is only a man in a Santa hat falling into a fountain, and somewhere a distributor counting the receipts.