Hogfather (2007)

Terry Pratchett's Hogfather (2006) opens with a sentence that would make most Christmas screenwriters flee the room: "Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree." From that first line, directed at the audience by Death himself, you understand that this is not a Christmas movie trying to warm your heart. It is a Christmas movie trying to use your heart as evidence in a philosophical argument.

The Hogfather, Discworld's equivalent of Father Christmas, has been made to disappear on Hogswatch Eve. Someone has hired the Assassins' Guild to kill the embodiment of the holiday. Death, not content to let humanity lose one of its beloved fictions, dons the red suit, white beard, and oversized sack and goes out to deliver presents himself. His granddaughter Susan, a practical governess with a poker-straight spine and zero tolerance for whimsy, has to figure out what happened to the real Hogfather before dawn.

This is a three-hour British television film, broadcast on Sky1 in two parts in December 2006. By most commercial definitions, that makes it an implausible vehicle for anything ambitious. In practice, Vadim Jean's adaptation is one of the most intellectually honest Christmas stories put on screen.

Marc Warren's Mr. Teatime Is the Best Villain Christmas Deserves

The Assassins' Guild sends Mr. Teatime (pronounced, as he reminds everyone in earshot, "teh-ah-tim-eh") to do the job. Marc Warren plays him as a creature that is all performance and no soul, with pale eyes and the posture of someone who has never once felt safe. He is polite in the way that certain knives are polished. Warren's Teatime is genuinely unsettling in a children's pantomime context, which is exactly what Pratchett intended.

The character is Pratchett's deconstruction of the charming villain archetype, a man so divorced from normal human response that cruelty has become the only language he speaks fluently. Warren understood this and plays him without the usual wink at the audience.

Death Delivering Presents Is Funnier Than It Has Any Right to Be

Ian Richardson voices Death in the particular Pratchett manner: small capitals rendered in measured, courteous speech that somehow always carries the weight of eternity. Death does not understand why children get toys. He does not understand why a child asks for a puppy. He gives one child every puppy in the room.

David Jason plays Albert, Death's manservant, with pure Dickensian grumpiness. Albert has lived so long in Death's household that he has roughly a handful of years left on his allocated lifespan and refuses to spend them showing enthusiasm for anything. The pairing works precisely because Jason refuses to play Albert as comic relief. He is just a very old, very tired man humoring his employer.

The Hogfather's sleigh is pulled by four hogs. This detail alone justifies watching.

The Argument at the Center of This Film

Late in the film, Susan asks Death why it matters whether people believe in the Hogfather. Death's answer is the reason Hogfather has stuck around for nearly twenty years while better-funded Christmas films have been forgotten.

"Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."

Susan asks why it has to be the Hogfather. Death answers: because you have to start somewhere. You practice believing in small fantasies, the Hogfather, the Tooth Fairy, so that you can eventually manage the larger ones, justice, mercy, the idea that any of this matters.

This is not a comfortable position. Pratchett does not let it become comfortable. The film takes both sides of the argument seriously, which is rarer in holiday entertainment than you might expect.

Michelle Dockery's Susan Sto Helit

Dockery was 25 when this aired, four years before Downton Abbey turned her into a television household name. Susan is Death's granddaughter, which gives her the ability to make monsters disappear and the constitutional inability to believe in anything she hasn't personally verified. She is exactly the right protagonist for a story about belief. She doesn't want to be involved. She gets involved anyway.

Dockery also voiced the Death of Rats for the production, credited in the cast list under an anagram of her name: "Dorckey Hellmice." This is exactly the kind of decision a production makes when it knows what it's doing.

Production Notes Worth Knowing

The film was the first live-action adaptation of any Discworld novel, which meant the production company, The Mob, was working without a template. Moving Picture Company, based in Soho, handled the CGI. The work won the Best Visual Effects award at the 2007 BAFTA Television Craft Awards, which is a reasonable outcome for a television film that had to make a Death-shaped sleigh pulled by giant hogs look credible.

Terry Pratchett appears in the film himself as a toymaker, listed in the credits with the screenplay credit "Mucked About By." He took the cameo seriously enough that customs officers at an Australian airport reportedly stopped him afterward because he was still in costume.

Ian Richardson died in February 2007, two months after the film aired. The DVD release was dedicated to his memory. His voice as Death, specific and irreplaceable, is part of why the film holds together.