Zach Vasquez
This week, we’ll be focusing our posts on holiday movies, including several that we feel are worth putting into your holiday viewing rotation this year. Follow along here.
From its opening scene, Abel Ferrara lets us know exactly what kind of story he’s telling in his 2001 Manhattan-set crime thriller ‘R Xmas. We watch as Tiny Tim from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol runs down some cobblestone streets, joined in celebration by a small rabble of impoverished, Victorian-era tots while a jaunty winter jingle plays trippingly over the scene.
Ferrara, the Bronx-born bad boy of American independent cinema, breaks the illusion pretty quickly, literally pulling back the curtain to reveal we’re actually witnessing a children’s play being performed by a group of grade school kids, among them the pampered daughter of our dual protagonists, a handsome Dominican couple known only as The Wife (Drea de Matteo) and The Husband (Lillo Brancato Jr.)
But this opening switcheroo is not some clever or ironic twist on the part of Ferrara. He’s being 100% sincere: ‘R Xmas is a full-on Christmas fable, his version of Dickens’s perennial classic or Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. But here, the machinations that set the possible salvation of our heroes—whose comfortable lifestyle and community-minded largess are financed entirely by drugs— in motion comes not by way of a trio of ghostly apparitions or a shambolic angel trying to get his wings, but a dirty cop looking to justify his own sinful actions. As in all of Ferrara’s—ever the good, guilty Catholic—work, said salvation hurts. And there’s no guarantee it will stick.
‘R Xmas follows The Husband and The Wife over a couple stressful days leading up to Christmas, as they search up and down Manhattan for a popular doll their daughter has her heart set upon while also dealing with the ever-present threats of their shared vocation, including a distributor short-changing them, a rival gang encroaching upon their turf, and a close associate possibly snitching to the police. These slow-burning hazards finally explode into catastrophe when The Husband is scooped up by a trio of mysterious thugs, led by the outwardly aggressive, but weirdly conscience-stricken, Kidnapper (Ice T). The Wife is tasked with giving over as much money as she can lay her hands on within the hour, or else The Husband will be killed.
In anyone else’s movie, this would serve as the premise for a breakneck, real-time thriller. But Ferrara places the entire ordeal in the middle of his story, resolving it with a whole final act still to go. And as short as the film’s 86-minute runtime is, it bears the quiet, languid pace and impressionistic yet docu-drama style that has come to define the second half of his oeuvre.
The kidnapping scheme is neither the focus nor even the inciting incident, but it is the catalyst that makes The Husband and The Wife reconsider their lot in life, the moment of clarity that leads them to weigh the mortal and moral consequences of their actions. The question they’re left with–and the question Ferrara leaves the audience with–is whether or not one’s conscience is strong enough to overcome the creature comforts provided by an amoral adherence to capitalism.
(In this, ‘R Xmas shares its overriding concerns with The Sopranos, the second season of which would have aired a year prior to the film’s debut. De Matteo is obviously best known for her portrayal of the doomed Adriana La Cerva on that series, but co-lead Brancato Jr. also featured heavily that season, sharing scenes with de Matteo and thus making ‘R Xmas a reunion for them.)
Ferrara has always balanced his spiritual concerns with political ones, and in ‘R Xmas he explores deep-seated tensions across racial and economic divides, while also humorously drawing comparisons between the commercial aspects of Christmas and the illicit drug trade (he leaves open the question as to which is more cutthroat). But, as with many a Ferrara joint, the true subject at the heart of the film is the city of New York herself.
‘R Xmas is bookended by two short scrolls of text. The first establishes the period in which the events take place: “In December of 1993, the Honorable David Dinkins was completing his first and only term as Mayor of New York.” The latter lays out what’s to come: “Less than one month later, Rudolph Guiliani is sworn in as the 107th Mayor of New York City. To be cont…”
The state of uncertainty in which The Husband and The Wife find themselves unmoored is reflective of what New York was going through at the time: Democrat Dinkins, the first and, until the recent election of Eric Adams, only Black mayor of NYC, attempted to initiate broad reforms that hoped to address the hardships, including crime and addiction, facing the city, as well as the rampant corruption of its police department. However, his ouster by the Republican Giuliani, who ran on a reactionary and racist campaign, would usher in an authoritarian style of policing known as ‘Broken Windows’ that only exacerbated the issues, even as it swept much of them under the rug in order to allow corporations to move in and strip New York of much of its long-standing personality.
At the end of ‘R Xmas, all signs point to The Husband—who Ferrara makes clear is suffering from PTSD—pushing aside his troubled conscience in order to get back to work. It’s less clear where The Wife stands, but in all likelihood, she’ll follow him back into The Life. This is the easy choice, the same one New Yorkers embarked upon when they elected Guilini. However…
‘R Xmas debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 2001 (though it, like a number of Ferrara’s films, suffered distribution problems and so didn’t see any kind of release until a few years down the line). Four months later, New York would suffer the largest-scale tragedy in its history in the terrorist attacks of September the 11th. Ferrara’s film—and particularly its closing coda—take on a prophetic dimension in light of what was to happen. So too do the events in the story: even though The Husband and The Wife survive their dangerous ordeal, and even if they do manage to bounce back financially (as it’s hinted that they do), a full and inescapable reckoning lay just around the corner.
Ultimately, Ferrara understands that the true meaning of Christmas—from its earliest origins as the pagan solstice to its re-mythologizing around the birth of the Christian messiah—is to mark a period of transition and change. In his cosmology, there is no ‘ever after.’ There is only ‘To be cont…’ 
“‘R Xmas” is available for digital rental.
