Merry Xmas (2015)

Seven minutes. That's all "Merry Xmas" asks of you. Seven minutes, four legendary actors, and a punchline so old it probably arrived by telegraph. Director Boman Modine shot the whole thing in three days, and the result premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival to an audience that almost certainly did not expect to find Dick Van Dyke, age 89, doing a little soft-shoe in a living room.

The premise is a classic gag: a mischievous father calls his very busy adult children to announce that after 55 years of marriage, he and their mother are getting divorced. The kids panic. They scramble to fly home. They arrive to save the marriage. Then the father reveals there is no divorce. He just wanted them home for Christmas.

You've heard this joke before. So had Boman Modine, who read the script his father Matthew wrote and initially thought it was just a punchline in search of a movie. He was right. And then he cast it.

What Dick Van Dyke at 89 Can Still Do

Van Dyke turned 90 in December 2015, the same month the film hit iTunes. He celebrated his birthday with a flash mob at The Grove in Los Angeles, where fans in Mary Poppins costumes sang "Step in Time" around him while he danced along. That energy is exactly what he brings to "Merry Xmas." The man is physically effortless on screen, and the film leans into it.

What makes Van Dyke's performance work is the gap between how comfortable he looks and how monstrous his character's plan actually is. He's not playing a doddering old man — he's playing someone who is sharp, strategic, and completely unrepentant. The joke lands harder because he seems genuinely pleased with himself.

Matthew Modine cast him via Twitter. He spotted that Van Dyke was active on the platform, sent him a tweet, and Van Dyke responded. They had lunch. Van Dyke agreed. This is not how most people imagine A-list casting works, but then "Merry Xmas" is not most films.

The Cast That Makes an Old Joke Feel New

Valerie Harper plays the mother, and the film gives her what is arguably the most important role. She's the pivot point — the person who either knows about the scheme or doesn't, who either enables the lie or is its most innocent victim. Harper brings a warmth that makes you want to believe the marriage is real, which is precisely why the reveal stings and delights in equal measure.

Harper filmed her scenes while living with a diagnosis of leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare condition she'd received in 2013 when doctors told her she had months to live. She kept working. She appeared in television guest spots, on stage, and here, opposite Van Dyke, in a seven-minute film that ends with a joke. She died in August 2019. The fact that "Merry Xmas" catches her still fully present, still funny, still capable of making you feel the weight of a long marriage in a single look, is not a small thing.

Glenne Headly and Matthew Modine play the panicking children. Headly, known for "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988) and Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" (1990), died in June 2017 during filming of the Hulu series "Future Man." Modine wrote the script from an old joke his own father used to tell, originally set at Thanksgiving. He moved it to Christmas because Christmas carries more weight — it's the holiday that actually gets adult children on planes.

Is This a Christmas Movie?

It's not a movie that uses Christmas as window dressing. The father's con only works because of Christmas. Another holiday wouldn't do it. Easter won't get your kids to buy same-day flights across the country. His entire leverage is the expectation that Christmas is sacred, that you go home, that family comes first on December 25.

The film is really about what the holiday means to older parents. Not the decorations or the gifts or the traditions — just the presence of their children. The scheme is absurd, and the father knows it's absurd, and he doesn't care, because he knows it will work. That's a dark little truth wrapped inside a light seven-minute comedy, and the film is better for it.

A Short Film That Outran Its Format

On December 11, 2015, "Merry Xmas" struck a distribution deal with Shorts International, the parent company of ShortsHD, and landed on iTunes Movies, Google Play, Amazon Video, and Verizon. During Christmas week, it charted in the top ten on the iTunes short films sales chart — the only live-action film in the top ten, and the only one not produced by Disney or DreamWorks.

It had won the Best "Pilot" Award at the 2015 New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles six months earlier. The prize is a bit odd for a seven-minute comedy with no sequel planned, but the film's trajectory in the marketplace made the label feel less absurd. People wanted more. You can see why.

Boman Modine grew up between film sets — his father has been working in Hollywood since "Birdy" in 1984 — and graduated from Goucher College before founding Strangeway Productions. "Merry Xmas" was his feature as a director, built from borrowed legend, a Twitter DM, and three days of shooting. As debuts go, landing Dick Van Dyke in a Tribeca-selected film that charts on iTunes is a decent one.