Holiday-themed movies have become as intrinsic a part of the season as getting drunk on eggnog and passing out under the mistletoe while relatives sneak awkwardly out the door.

But does a film necessarily have to include persecuted Santas and suicide-preventing angels to be a true "Christmas classic?" Before you slip in your well-worn copy of A Christmas Story or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, consider some titles from The Pink Smoke's alternative list of movies that touch on the most wonderful time of the year (to varying degrees.)

~ by john benjamin cribbs ~

As the above so merrily chimes, the point of this holiday-themed series is to write about films with only an ancillary association to Santa Claus, jingle bells, gold, mur, frankincense and the latest video games. In other words, movies that may have "Christmas" in the title or take place in the latter half of December but aren't specifically designed to draw on themes analogous to the holiday season. By those standards, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt should really be disqualified from inclusion in the series: it's a Christmas movie! There's snow, decorations, eggnog, carolers, ugly sweaters and even redemption on Christmas Eve. Recast it with Corin Nemec and Crystal Bernard and you've got a Hallmark Channel Original movie.

Of course, your average Christmas movie doesn't come anywhere near the subjects of child molestation, false accusation, public indictment, persecution, alienation, animal cruelty, physical assault and attempted murder. At the 2010 Toronto Film Festival, I refused to see Rodrigo Cortés' Buried for the simple reason that I knew I wouldn't be able to sit still through a film where the lead character is trapped with no hope of escape and finds himself slowly suffocating throughout the film's interminably torturous running time. At the festival two years later, I regretfully skipped out on The Hunt, the reason this time was that it played against Amour, my must-see film (and greatest disappointment) of the year. But my absence from that screening could very well have been the same excuse I made for missing Buried: the walls close on Mads Mikkelsen so abruptly and inexorably, he may as well be pinned inside a coffin like the unfortunate Ryan Reynolds. Formerly a respected private citizen, Mads' kindergarten teacher Lucas is subjected to all manner of animosity, from social ostracization to full-blown harassment, after one of his young students plants the suspicion of sexual abuse into the minds of the townspeople. Forget the Building & Loan: even Jimmy Stewart's wingless guardian angel wouldn't have been able to talk him off the bridge if he had these kind of problems.

I admit, I was kind of saddened that we lost Vinterberg the Fabulist after the critical thrashing of It's All About Love and roundly indifferent reception of Dear Wendy, followed by the reliable social realism the director receded into with his last film, Submarino. I miss his flying Ugandans and firearms that fall in love with their owners, so I was glad to see that for all its brutal drama the second half of The Hunt is able to siffon off some of that reliable Christmas magic. He's tapped into it before: It's All About Love ends with the most serenely beautiful of killer snow storms, and the events of Dear Wendy are sparked when Jamie Bell buys the title weapon as a Christmas gift (ok so it's a birthday present, same difference). While there's no specific instance of The Hunt falling back on pure fantasy elements, except of course the scene featuring a ghost dog, * Lucas' ultimate deliverance is just a Ghost of Christmas Present shy of being a bonefide holiday miracle on par with Ralphie getting his BB gun or Charles Bronson learning that yes, there is a Santa Claus (weirdly, it seems like those two endings should be reversed).

Not that the road to redemption is an easy one - as the Grinch or King Moonracer can attest, the Christmas season is generally intolerant towards anyone deemed a misfit. Despite having several friends in the community and coming from a family that's been prominent in the area for years, Lucas is sort of unjustly profiled by those who know him as an introverted recluse, which isn't a desirable label when you're already a single (divorced) 35-year-old male kindergarten teacher (it's mentioned he only took the job after the high school where he was teaching older students closed down). But the truth is, Lucas IS withdrawn by the nature of his own personality, and keeping to himself doesn't help him at all when the seeds of allegation begin to germinate around him. At first the school director handles things correctly, informing Lucas of the accusation and letting him know that authorities will have to be notified, then contacting a friend she introduces as having child care specialist qualifications (but who the fuck knows) to get a better picture of the accusation's validity. But listening to the man's suggestive interrogation as he coerces answers from the student based on his own assumptions about what might have happened, the school director is suddenly disgusted. From there she does everything wrong, not only informing parents that Lucas is strongly suspected of sexual abuse but rationalizing out loud that other children have possibily been victimized as well. She contacts Lucas' ex-wife, whose teenage son is in no way involved with the school, and informs her of what's going on. Before long, the director and everyone she's talked to regard conjecture as solid fact.

This becomes the erratic scheme of "the hunt" against Lucas: one even further fabricated accusation follows another, evidence of no wrong-doing is stifled while the implication of guilt becomes a malignancy that spreads among the town. But again, it's hard to blame the school director, who rationalizes her actions based on an accusation by a subject beyond suspicion: an adorable little blonde-haired girl who nobody believes would harbor resentment towards an adult. Lucas' student Klara, also the daughter of his best friend, is a tricky character: since it's her romantic advances towards Lucas that are appropriately rejected, the plot could have come off as a lazy role-reversal gimmick in the tradition of Barry Levinson's Disclosure, with Klara as a sort of pre-school femme fatale. Vinterberg manages to pull it off by treating Klara as an ambiguous victim herself, manipulated to concur with an unfounded testimony by the alleged specialist and made to believe her retraction is just denial. It's heart-breaking to hear her refer to the "dumb thing I said" as the situation becomes increasingly volatile - the adults are so set on protecting her, they don't realize just how grown up she actually is, and the real threat is their reaction to what is basically bid for attention.** Klara is brilliantly played by Annika Wedderkopp as quietly sensitive with just a hint of Bad Seediness: the scene where she comes to Lucas' house to inquire about walking his dog, seemingly oblivious to what she's done or how her presence at his home is further condemning him, made me think of the eerie story of notorious 11-year-old murderer Mary Bell showing up at the house of her victim's mother and innocently asking to see her son's corpse. How much of what she's doing is calculated malevolence and how much is her mixing up words because she's a little kid who doesn't know that they're absolute poison?

Vinterberg utilizes an expert balance: on the one hand, you feel angry and frustrated along with Lucas, who Vinterberg very clearly portrays as innocent; on the other, it's easy to see why people react the way they do. Mikkelsen plays Lucas as a man not obsessively concerned with how other folks see him. He thinks nothing of occasionally walking Klara to and from school, just the two of them (it's his best friend's daughter after all), or of grappling with the kids on the playground (although Mads makes him appear exhausted by the effort, which I personally appreciate). Therefore he has no defense against the suggestion that his conduct might be considered inappropriate, due to a lack of self-consciousness commendable in an age of excessive vigilance but also destructively ignorant. I can still remember the day my own cognizance towards other people's circumspection of my behavior was awoken: right before my oldest daughter was born, I started looking for books I would one day read to her, figuring she could only take so much subjection to the work of Windsor McCay and Roadrunner cartoons. So for the first time I wandered into the children's section of the local library I'd frequented for years, a place that always felt comfortable and familiar. After about five minutes of browsing the more obscure Maurice Sendaks and Tomi Ungerers, *** I suddenly began to feel acutely self-aware. Here I was, an unkempt 30-year-old-man in the middle of the day by myself, loitering among shelves half my size in an area of the library populated entirely by children and their moms. Was I even allowed to be here? Was I breaking some rule? Did that mom just give me a look and direct her child to the exit? I realized this was the first time, as an adult, that I had contact with kids not directly related to me or my friends and my instinct was to be apologetic and explain myself: I don't want to kidnap your kids! I walked here, I don't even own a van! Please believe that my intentions extend no further than locating a copy of Animalia with the first few pages not ripped out and indelicately taped back in!

But everybody knows this is ridiculous: why feel sympathy for a grown man with appearance issues who's worried that people won't want him around their children? **** That's like reverse racism or something. But Vinterberg makes a strong case that, while not common, instances of blind acceptance following a hint of allegation can turn a harmless adult into a victim. In the years following my hasty exit from the children's section of the library, I've become that same worried parent I suspected of irrationally hating me: I find myself scrutinizing strangers while pushing my daughter on the swings at the playground, occasionally log in to Family Watchdog to see if any registered sex offenders have moved into our neighborhood (just checked: all clear) and have a tendency to tap my kid on the shoulder to hasten her away from even the most harmless of strangers. And the sad thing is that these concerns aren't without credence: just this year, a person close to my family was arrested for soliciting a minor, a devastating event that's only fueled my rampant mistrust of every person on the planet. So despite Lucas' clear innocence, I can't bring myself to blame his co-workers, the parents of the children and his friends for turning against him at the slightest hint that he may be guilty. It is a hard world for little things, and the instinct to protect children and keep them away from even an only hinted-at horrible person, though it has the potential to come off as paranoid as a fear of parents who accuse you of pedophilia with their eyes, is hardly unreasonable. In light of these very gray areas of trust, the common resolve is to simply place oneself as far away from suspicion of depravity as possible.

Which is why Lucas isn't doing himself any favors by neglecting to properly defend himself, as you imagine an innocent party would. Although he very professionally repulses Klara's advances, the severity of the situation after he's accused doesn't set in fast enough. He incorrectly assumes that, since he's innocent, things will just naturally play out and he'll be vindicated. That's why, despite Lucas headbutting the bullying grocery store clerk being calculated as a cheery-worthy moment and the "no basement" revelation as a relief of the rising tension, Vinterberg doesn't fall into the hole of trying to gain audience sympathy for a man accused of sexual abuse. Lucas is so absolutely pure in his intentions that the idea of harming a child would never cross his mind. Neither Lucas or Vinterberg believe that this kind of decency needs to be defended, that the real tragedy is that modern society has become so overly suspicious that intimacy between an adult and a child can no longer be considered emphatically virtuous. The penultimate scene where Lucas picks up Klara to carry her over the tiled kitchen floor is so sadly beautiful: what Vinterberg laments is the casual, tender contact between an adult male and a female child that's innocent as the newly fallen snow.

Unfortunately Christmas miracles aren't real: the snow thaws and reality returns in the wake of The Hunt's false happy ending. Lucas finally is vindicated, but what he doesn't understand is that this kind of thing doesn't just go away. Once allegations like these are on the table, no matter how thoroughly cleared the accused ends up being, they simply don't disappear in the public eye (just try to find Paula Poundstone on TV these days). Hence the haunting final scene of the film, when after everything seems to have been cleared up and, but for a few irreparably strained relationships, his life has gone back to what it was before the accusation, a stray bullet in woods just barely misses Lucas' head as he's hunting in the woods. *** ** He's been fully exonerated but it doesn't matter - there will always be more than one person who can't let go of their convictions.

The Hunt works as a companion film to Vinterberg's first feature Festen, a movie which also deals with sexual abuse but in which the accused is the unimpeachable one everybody chooses to believe. Like Lucas, Festen's Christian refuses to give up when nobody will listen to him and he's summarily beaten and thrown out onto the street by those offended at his presence. The most notable connection between the two films is Thomas Bo Larsen, Festen's boorish Michael, who reacts the most violently to Christian's claims against their father. In The Hunt he plays Theo, Klara's father and Lucas' best friend, who can't help but pin Lucas against the wall and throttle him when he comes to the house trying to work things out; like Michael, he later realizes he was wrong and treats the vindicated party to a meal to make up for his ill-treatment of him. Interestingly, the origin of Festen's sexual abuse plot is itself sketchy. Vinterberg came up with the idea for the film after hearing a young man call into a radio show to tell his own story of sexual abuse as a child. Vinterberg was moved to base his film on a man who experienced the same thing. Later, it was revealed to have been a hoax: the guy who called into the radio show was a mental patient.

Festen and The Hunt are also compatible in their reliance on Vinterberg's favorite film, Ingmar Bergman's epic family drama Fanny and Alexander. The director used the extended Christmas party that makes up the first hour of Bergman's film (theatrical version, anyway) as a model for the feature-long shindig in Festen, which shared the earlier film's theme of liberation from/revenge against an abusive father. Bergman makes sure to show the Ekdahl's lavish Christmas celebration as very specifically non-religious (you may or may not have noticed this, but Bergman had some god issues that might have been peppered into a few of his narratives). He portrays the extended Ekdahl family and friends, all rich artists - actors, puppeteers, photographers - as morally free-spirited and liberated to the point that they're open with each other about their various marital philanderings (even the matriarch's rabbi pal became best friends with her late husband only after being caught in bed with her). The family's life is categorically contrasted to that of Bishop Vergérus' strictly Calvinist household: gray, cheerless and free of the lavish decor, beautiful music and bevy of personal possessions the children are used to. In the Ekdahl household, nobody bats an eye when Uncle Carl leads the children down to the basement and takes off his pants (all in service of some pretty spectacular scatological entertainment); in Vergérus' house, you can't even politely decline a meal without being accused of a mortal sin. For Bergman, the luster of Christmastime and family unity is a bright and creative thing that has nothing to do with pious postering: it's all about luxurious dinner parties, pillow fights and farting the flame out on candle wicks.

Vinterberg similarly rebuffs the divine aspect of Christmas in favor of the magical. A bruised Lucas turns up at mass on Christmas Eve but finds no reparation for being beaten up and having his dog killed: although the sanctity of the setting allows Theo to see the innocence in his friend's eyes for the first time, the scene culminates in a clumsy fight similar to the one in the super market. Instead, the miracle comes away from all the fancy church as Klara is visited by the spirit of Lucas' dog, a scene undoubtedly inspired by the ghost of Alexander's father appearing to him and sister Fanny (which is, of course, the name of Lucas' murdered dog).

Upon hearing Klara's confession to the canine specter, Theo gathers a plate of turkey dinner and Lucas gets his own bearded visitor in his lonely apartment on Christmas. But like Bergman, the introduction of "Christmas magic" takes a sinister turn in the final scene when a vague shape of a human being, perhaps even an apparition, takes the shot at Lucas. It has the same ominous feel as Bishop Vergérus' vengeful spirit appearing to push Alexander to the ground, a reminder that no matter how complete a return to normalcy (back at his family's giant home with his stepfather's house burned to the ground) he'll never really get over the psychological trauma of life with the abusive bishop. *** *** Lucas receives the same reminder: everything seems hunky dory, but there will always be someone who still thinks the worst of him and wants to do him harm.

Because the horrible misunderstandings of The Hunt generate from the positive desire to do right by our kids, I just have to bring up the myth of Santa Claus for a second. I fully acknowledge that, to protect our kids, it's sometimes necessary to have to lie to them, but Santa Claus feels to me like a true Lie: there's just nothing about pushing the existence of that jolly elf that sits right with me. If you're going to treat the idea of Santa the same way you treat Spongebob and Sesame Street then fine, but actively trying to convince your child that her shiny new slinky was manufactured at the North Pole in an elf-run assembly line and hand delivered by an obese home invader with an unkempt beard like a derelict is inherently dishonest. I get it, I know: it's fun. But it feels like a deception. The Hunt made me think about the parenting ratio of how much you need to shield your child out of protection and how wrong it is to abuse their growing intelligence. So all apologies to Charles Bronson, but I don't think Santa is the key to conjuring the sort of Christmas spirit evoked by The Hunt, a movie merry right down to Mads Mikkelsen's rosy dimples.