Noel (2004)

The 2004 film Noel has a premise that sounds like it was scrawled on a cocktail napkin at a pitch meeting: five lonely New Yorkers, one Christmas Eve, all somehow connected by the end of the night. It was directed by Chazz Palminteri, better known as a character actor, in his feature directorial debut. The screenplay is by David Hubbard. The score is by Alan Menken, who wrote the music for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. The cast is, on paper, remarkable. The result is somewhere between a missed opportunity and a genuinely affecting drama, depending on which story you happen to be watching.

What Noel Is Actually About

The film runs five storylines simultaneously, set against the snowy streets of Manhattan on December 24. Rose Collins (Susan Sarandon) is a book editor spending Christmas Eve visiting her mother in a care facility, the mother no longer able to recognize her daughter. Mike Riley (Paul Walker) is a police officer engaged to Nina (Penelope Cruz), whose jealousy over her friendships with other men is slowly poisoning the relationship. Artie Venizelos (Alan Arkin) is an elderly coffee shop owner who roams the streets every Christmas looking for his late wife's reincarnation. Jules Calvert (Marcus Thomas) is a depressed young man who checks himself into the hospital every December to recreate the one happy Christmas he ever had, as a sick teenager on a ward full of strangers who became temporary family.

The fifth storyline is the one the film hides as a surprise: a former priest named Charlie Boyd, played uncredited by Robin Williams. Charlie appears late in the film as a figure of unexpected grace in Rose's night. Palminteri deliberately kept Williams off the promotional materials to preserve the effect. It works, at least in the moment.

Where the Film Earns Its Keep

Sarandon is the reason to watch Noel. She plays a woman performing emotional composure so relentlessly that the composure itself has become a form of suffering. Her scenes at the care facility, speaking to a mother who smiles without recognition, are done with a restraint that costs more than the film deserves. There is a specific kind of grief she is playing here, not bereavement but anticipatory loss, and she plays it without a false note.

Alan Arkin's Artie is the film's strangest and most memorable invention. His conviction that Mike is his dead wife reborn in a new body is played with an earnestness that tips the story toward something genuinely unusual. Arkin does not play it for pathos or for laughs. He plays it as simple fact. The scenes between Arkin and Walker have an odd tenderness that neither actor seems to fully understand, which is possibly the point.

The Jules storyline is the emotional core the film keeps returning to. His plan, paying a criminal to break his hand so he can get admitted to a hospital ward and relive Christmas 1985, is both absurd and completely coherent as a portrait of arrested grief. Marcus Thomas is not a recognizable name, but his performance is unguarded in a way the more famous cast members cannot always match.

Where It Falls Apart

The Mike and Nina storyline is the film's weakest hour. Paul Walker was a movie star, not a character actor, and a role requiring him to play domestic jealousy and emotional instability asks for more tools than he had in 2004. Penelope Cruz is underused, a reactive presence in her own storyline. Roger Ebert gave the film two stars and noted that the plot "crosses an invisible line, becoming so preposterous that it's no longer moving." He was right about the third act, which introduces a supernatural twist that the film's grounded first half does not earn.

The pacing does not help. Noel runs 96 minutes but feels longer in the middle third, where the individual threads are developed at uneven depth. Some characters get genuine scenes. Others get gestures at scenes.

The Release Nobody Remembers

Noel's theatrical run was a commercial disaster, and the reason is genuinely strange. The film was acquired by Convex Group, a company that owned a technology called Flexplay: DVDs designed to become unplayable 48 hours after being opened, marketed as a rentals-without-returns system. Convex released Noel as a "trimultaneous" rollout, simultaneously in cinemas, on Flexplay disks, and on the TNT cable network. Most cinema chains refused to show it, objecting to the lack of an exclusive theatrical window. The film premiered at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival in September and was in almost no theaters by December. A film about New York at Christmas, with a cast that included Williams, Cruz, Sarandon, and Arkin, was effectively buried by its own distributor's technology experiment.

Alan Menken's score is considerably better than the film around it. The track "Winter Light," with lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and performed by Adam Pascal, is the kind of original Christmas song that should have had a longer life.

The Christmas Credentials

Noel is set entirely on Christmas Eve. The holiday is not a backdrop or an aesthetic choice. The entire premise relies on what Christmas Eve does to lonely people in cities, the way a single night concentrates longing, memory, and the awareness of what is missing. The Jules storyline could not exist on any other night. Artie's annual search is Christmas-specific. Even Rose's vigil at the care facility has a weight that the date amplifies. This is a Christmas film in the same way a fever is a symptom: the season is not decorative, it is diagnostic.

The film is worth watching once, on a December evening, with low expectations and patience for Sarandon's scenes. Don't watch it for plot. Watch it for the moments when the grief in its characters briefly becomes visible and specific. Those moments justify the uneven parts around them.