So I think a comparison between A Christmas Tale and this year's Rachel Getting Married works really well. Both deal with seemingly elegant, but also quite conventional bourgeois families, that, as we get to know better, have faults and skeletons which preoccupy them to the very core of their relationships and structure. Where Rachel Getting Married deals with three or four central characters and one or two of these issues, A Christmas Tale remarkably develops a good dozen or so characters with even more of these secrets. Yes, you can attribute some of its success in so-well acquainting us with the expanses of a family to its two and a half hour runtime, but most of it comes from a fantastic script, ensemble cast and a director who really knows his actors (Desplechin, I think, works with a familiar cast of players much like how Almodovar used to, I suppose).
The film is even less willing to fill the audience in on the details and circumstances, even some which might seem essential to the film's main "conflict," but then we quickly realize that the movie is not at all about the small plot line which ties it all together, but an observation of the cynical, quarreling, but ultimately good-natured Vuillard family.

Unlike Rachel Getting Married, this is certainly not a "Dogme"/handheld film; Desplechin uses a handful of camera tricks, elegant scoring (although it does embrace a mix of musical genres, like Rachel), and even a delightful fourth wall break by the super-sexy (even with cancer!) Catherine Deneuve, which is probably one of my favorite moments in cinema this year. Still, however, most of the 150 minutes never break from close range, enclosed settings, fully immersing the audience in the reunion taking place but also occasionally reminding us that we're really just peeping Toms (more camera tricks), and we're suddenly dismayed that we won't get to truly know what happened when, in which relationships, and just spend more time with these problematic yet charismatic characters that we grow to genuinely love, despite their faults and quirks.

Also, it skips any such familial cloaking device like the multiculturalism that Rachel's family wore which implies a failure of inner-functionality, and we never get a sense of how an "outsider" would view the family (even though some certainly come in), which is quite amazing in retrospect. The Vuillard clan is so authentically demonstrated that they need not be defined by any counterpoint.

Anyways, it's a dark one, deals largely with death, estrangement and failures in understanding motive versus action. Don't expect lots of laughs, although they are there, but if you go into this film completely willing to enter its world, you'll leave with a sort of comical, yet melancholy understanding that you share with, but not of, its characters, the sort of relationship rarely given to the audience. It's not the most entertaining picture I've seen this year, but it was completely rewarding.

Ehh...and forgive the saccharine hyperbole of this review please, I don't know why I'm writing like this. It must be to combat the masses of bitterness (which I've underplayed) which largely possess this Vuillard family I now love so dearly. Oh my god how I want Deneuve to be my matriarch!

Snack, could you assign it a grade or something? I don't want to read spoilers, but would like to know a summed-up opinion, heh.

It's A

Err...yeah, something like that.

please hurry and see this guys. it's not very much a christmas movie at all, so don't worry about it being after christmas.

It'll never open here. : (

hmph. well for anyone who has comcast on-demand, its available for another month or so (in regular and HD).

it's weird that I'm the only one who saw the best movie of 2008.

I would really like to see it. A 150 minute sprawling epic on a dysfunctional family? Count me in.

this year, move away from 'best place to live in the world for movie releases' and to 'any of the shitty towns the rest of us live in' and you will find company.

not with this film, but like, yknow, in general. bring yrself down to our level, yknow.

or you could move here.
I didn't even see this in new york though....saw it on pay-per-view like a porno. so even in trashland, you have no excuse.

This seems terrific! Unfortunately, it never opened in a local theatre. And I don't have Comcast. I'll rent it on DVD ASAP.

I have this on PC for a very long time..

waiting for some English subtitles

It's kinda like the French Fanny and Alexander; it even has a mystical Jew! The whole thing is rich and full and mature and modern. And terrific.