Days 21 and 22. A John Hughes X-Mas: Home Alone 2 and Miracle on 34th Street (1994)

John Hughes never directed a Christmas movie, though he wrote at least four of them. Things get confusing when he started using a pseudonym, and though I planned to cover Home Alone 3 for this blog, there's too much conflict about whether it should even be considered a Christmas movie. Its genre classification is the most frequent topic of debate on CNN, after gun control and the Duck Dynasty guy.  

Of the Hughes Christmas films that I'm sure of, the original Home Alone has held up as funnier and more interesting than Christmas Vacation. Both movies take their characters' class privilege for granted, but where Christmas Vacation means nothing when you're not currently a parent or child of a household, or when your defining emotional arcs don't involve expectation of a Christmas bonus big enough to install a swimming pool, Home Alone carries its extravagancies with charm. Eight-year old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) must protect his family's mansion and fortune from a duo of dimwitted down-on-their-luck crooks (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), thereby saving Christmas. It's class warfare made literal. Home Alone is "clean entertainment" that's actually a little troubling, making it of some substance.

Hughes wouldn't again operate on the level of his past abilities following Home Alone's enormous success. 1992's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and '94's remake of Miracle on 34th Street at least show a few remaining glimmers from one of the most heartfelt comic voices of the eighties, transplanting his usual Chicago suburbs for the December bustle of Manhattan. 

It's persistently repeated that Hughes penned the script for Ferris Bueller's Day Off in one weekend. If that's to be believed, Home Alone 2 should have been completed by noon on a Saturday. It repeats all the beats that made the original a sadistic festive mega-smash, only this time it's more outlandish and loses any connection to Earth. Now when Kevin's mother (Catherine O'Hara) realizes she's lost her son, she not only stares into the camera and yells "Kevin!," she also faints by falling backward. Instead of causing a mess of his family's pizza dinner, Kevin's church choir solo is sabotaged by his brother, for which the audience unbelievably revels in his embarrassment, provoking Kevin to retaliate, for which his family unbelievably blames him entirely. The redundancy nullifies the first film. Neither Kevin nor his family have retained the life-altering lessons they'd learned last time, so why should viewers believe they'll retain them now?

Becoming lost in New York (there are specifics that involve getting on the wrong plane, which aren't meant to be remembered), Kevin enjoys hotel life, hilariously never giving his struggling bellhop an appropriate tip, and tries to thwart the same bandits from the first movie another time. 

It's of interest that when the crooks are led through their house of torment, Home Alone 2 is more grotesquely violent than outlier holiday standard Die Hard. Hughes and director Chris Columbus don't merely showcase violence as Bruce Willis does with his machine gun, their focus is the resulting pain. 

Of course, kids watching this extreme slapstick mostly didn't go home and jerry-rig a contraption to break their sibling's neck. Columbus even underlines the film's cartoon intentions by merging a TV image of the animated Grinch's malicious grin with that of Tim Curry's sinister concierge. Kevin then humiliates him by playing back sounds of a gangster movie that seemingly accuses him of having a gay tryst. It's now a dated joke, but also wasn't funny to any kids in even-more-homo-intolerant 1992 for any reason other than that they lived in a time when they were told it was supposed to be. 

By far the most ill-conceived scene in Home Alone 2 involves Kevin lecturing a homeless pigeon lady (Brenda Fricker) in Central Park. The first movie used a similar reversal in his meeting with an old man isolated from his son, making Kevin the adult and the senior the child. It was cute once. Now it turns Kevin into a patronizing boy-robot. Hughes' movies often take upper-class living as the American standard, but in scripts like Some Kind of Wonderful, he treated the rich-poor divide with empathy, where emotion remained universal despite the streets and homes separating us. Making Kevin McCallister a homeless woman's rich child-saviour involves giving her the guidance to just open her heart to love. It's gross, but without malice. Hughes and Columbus really don't appear to know better. 

A nicer, smaller moment occurs as Kevin, lonesome and missing his family yet again, returns a hand wave gesture to a boy sitting in a hospital window. It's easy to be cynical about its inclusion because, until a voice-over quickly reminds us that it's a plot point, it's presented without cynicism. Their shared motion, of commiseration and still undefeated spirit, is touching. It's the only moment where Kevin is permitted to be an actual human being. 

Nothing in Home Alone 2 is fresh and new. The same actors return, this time with money in their eyes. But the filmmakers know this family Christmas formula well, and too briefly, its spirit can be felt.

This feeling lasts much longer in Miracle on 34th Street, though there are times when it could pull back a bit. An early example of a remake of a classic, before that became most movies, it works because Hughes isn't simply exercising a photocopier. He's thoroughly convincing that he believes in Santa Claus, and at the movie's best, that's infectious. 

Young Susan Walker (Mara Wilson) faces a crisis of faith, brought on by her mother's insistence that truth is always more important than fantasy. When Susan reluctantly visits Santa at a Coles department store, she changes her mind, and must now convince a skeptical world. Kevin in Home Alone was always devout. Susan has an epiphany.

Bathed in the mid-90s rich orange glow characteristic of Party of Five and Jerry Maguire, Hughes and director Les Mayfield make Miracle on 34th Street an uncommon kids movie led by emotion over action. It overstays its welcome. Bruce Broughton's score is relentless and sugary, and the court sequences lose focus through hammy villains unable to mesh with anything else on screen. Richard Attenborough's Santa Claus is one of the best, though. Miracle on 34th Street is more stately than zany Home Alone 2, but Hughes scholars should take note. This feels like one he was truly happy to make.