In the Christmas-movie genre, there are the rightful classics (e.g., National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation), the overplayed standards (A Christmas Story, etc.), and the wildcards that only qualify by technicality (such as Die Hard and In Bruges). And then there is one holiday-themed film that has never gotten the love it deserves: 1994's Mixed Nuts, which turns 20 years old this month.
I found Mixed Nuts where all the best cult movies are found: at the bottom of a clearance bin. By the early 2000s, my local Blockbuster in Miami was already closing down and selling off its VHS tapes for next to nothing. Most of the merchandise had been picked over by the time I got to Mixed Nuts.
It's almost hard to believe that the film was such a critical and commercial failure. This was a Steve Martin comedy directed and co-written by Nora Ephron one year after Sleepless in Seattle. Many of the cast members would quickly become big stars in comedy and film: Liev Schreiber, Adam Sandler, and Juliette Lewis—plus Parker Posey (!) and an MTV-era Jon Stewart (!!) as a couple of yuppie rollerbladers who insist upon the perfect Christmas tree ("absolutely symmetrical!").
Then again, it is not hard to see what went wrong with Mixed Nuts. Even for a Christmas comedy, it's blasphemous—delightfully so. It's not just set in Los Angeles, but Venice Beach, right on the boardwalk, home to greased-up weightlifters, tacky tourist shops, and syringes. The marketing clearly pushed Steve Martin as the lead, but that's not quite accurate. Instead, as Philip, the operator of a crisis helpline on Christmas Eve, Martin is the milquetoast center of a much more interesting ensemble of weirdos, including his frazzled staff (played by Rita Wilson and Madeline Kahn); his unsympathetic landlord (Garry Shandling); a pregnant bohemian (Lewis) and her bum-artist boyfriend (Anthony LaPaglia); a broad-shouldered, lonely transgender woman (played with sensitivity and deft comic instinct by Schreiber); a singer of charmingly incoherent holiday tunes (Sandler from his SNL days); and Posey and Stewart's previously-mentioned yuppies, who are the West Coast counterparts to the obnoxious neighbors in Christmas Vacation.
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Mixed Nuts was also too fatalistic for holiday-viewing audiences. Several jokes in the help-line office hinge on suicide, including a hilarious payphone gag involving comedian Steven Wright. The title of the film comes from an anecdote Martin's Philip tells early on about his dad, who once said that "in every pothole there is hope" right before being run over by a truck carrying nuts. Unlike Ephron's more sentimental romantic-comedies, Mixed Nuts has no interest in pandering or lying to its audience. At one point, Philip is dumped by a woman who says she would've preferred to fax the news. "The truth is nothing comes to him who waits," another character says. There, the film seems to relish telling us, is your fucking cheer.
If that sounds bleak, the French film on which the material is based is even bleaker. Indeed, what one has to conclude from watching Mixed Nuts again, 20 years after it was largely panned, is that it was ahead of its time. The no-hugs-no-lessons attitude, selfish characters, and observational dialogue about human inanity have a lot in common with the concurrently airing TV shows Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show, and with Larry David's derided 1998 comedy, Sour Grapes.
Ephron does allow herself one hug and one lesson, however, at the very end of the film, when all the various plot threads become interwoven and its true conviction about the holidays comes out. The dejected losers stand on the boardwalk and witness a Christmas miracle. To paraphrase the film's final message, Christmas is three horrible things and then something wonderful. There's always hope.
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