In the busy 1989 Christmas movie season, Prancer was respectfully buried and then forgotten. For kids, the other selections promised more fun. The multiplexes offered Back to the Future Part II, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, The Wizard, and, if your parents really didn't give a fuck, Harlem Nights. A holiday movie about a little girl who befriends a reindeer seemed too wholesome when there were grander, more dangerous adventures to be had.
Watching Prancer now for the first time, it strikes me as a movie that takes risks and hits truths, and is about three times better than I'd expected it to be. I'd never thought of watching it before this project, but nobody suggested I might enjoy it, so I blame all of you.
If the film won't work for everyone, that's a probable attribute of its defiance of family-entertainment custom. Prancer's lead, eight-year old Jessica (Rebecca Harrell) is, like most eight-year olds, annoying. I like that her dialogue lacks adult polish. "Dad, I just saw a deer in the woods. It was interesting!" More than once, she wards off allies when she could really use them. And her stubbornness is the only line of defence for her self-interests. All this makes Jessica imperfect and human, rather than another pick off the Precocious Movie Kid Assembly Line.
The world she inhabits is defined by hardship, and is similarly recognizable. Prancer is not bursting with colour or cheer, capturing the season when nature has killed itself and we must make our own warmth. Only, Jessica sees her relationship with her gruff widowed father (Sam Elliott) as strained, while his financial struggles and fear of losing their apple farm have made him increasingly short-tempered.
Always a beacon of hope, Jessica nurses a wounded reindeer, hidden from her dad, in the corner of a barn. She's convinced the reindeer is the Prancer of "The Night Before Christmas" fame, and that he will be able to help fly Santa's sleigh in time. Director John D. Hancock shoots this in a matter-of-fact way that captures small town life without resorting to pity or glorification. Prancer doesn't take a turn to fantasy, not explicitly anyway, though I feared it might. Without reaching the tragic depths of One Magic Christmas, it is as averse to tacky yuletide varnish in establishing its universe, placing a sweet story of a young girl within a context of eternal night. The movie believes in Jessica's hopes, and it becomes moving enough in places that I'm surprised it hasn't become a perennial Christmas classic.
The Meaning of Christmas
Prancer is the first movie I've watched for this project that directly addresses the thread in these movies that believing in Santa Claus is believing in God. Jessica fights with an atheist schoolmate at one point, after she insists there is no Santa Claus. "You've never seen God either. Does that mean there's no God?," Jessica retorts. She overreacts, of course, and I can't take these theistic messages too literally or I'd have given up on Christmas movies by now.
The point is when you have to ask your dad if you'll be starving one day, and he's always yelling at you, and your mom is dead, and your choir teacher thinks you sing too loud, it's good to believe things will get better. Even if you have to heal a reindeer yourself.
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