Mixed Nuts is a Misunderstood Christmas Sleeper
There’s something inherently special about the year that we turn eighteen and become adults. Even if we were absolutely miserable during that most important of years, as I was, it still holds a special place in our hearts as the year we come of age whether we’re ready or not.
I turned eighteen, graduated from high school and entered college in 1994, the magical annum that gave us Cabin Boy, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Reality Bites, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Ref, Clifford, Red Rock West, Serial Mom, Lion King, PCU, Crooklyn, Fear of a Black Hat, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, True Lies, Fresh, Natural Born Killers, Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption, Ed Wood, Hoop Dreams, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Bullets Over Broadway, The Last Seduction, Stargate, Heavenly Creatures, The Professional, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Dumb and Dumber, Little Women, Nobody’s Fool and Chungking Express.
That, friends, is one hell of a movie year. I could not be more nostalgic for 1994. One of the things I love about Nora Ephron’s deliciously curdled Christmas black comedy Mixed Nuts consequently is how perfectly and purely it represents the all-important year of its release.
Mixed Nuts died an unmourned death with critics and audiences alike but it’s worth seeing if only for one of the most ridiculously loaded casts in the history of American comedy. Ephron brought together, in a single film, My Blue Heaven’s Steve Martin, Madeline Kahn, Robert Klein, Rita Wilson, Anthony LaPaglia, Juliette Lewis, Rob Reiner, Adam Sandler, Liev Schreiber in his film debut, Garry Shandling, Parker Posey and Jon Stewart on rollerblades, Steven Wright, Joely Fisher, Victor Garber and Haley Joel Osment.
This is both an amazing cast and an amazingly 1994 cast. The 1994ness of Mixed Nuts positively explodes off the screen.
A remake of the 1979 French play and 1982 film Santa Claus is a Stinker shot by Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Mixed Nuts casts Martin against type as Philip, a put upon everyman who works at a suicide hotline whose employees seem to be doing only slightly better than the distraught depressives who call seeking emergency help, soothing words of encouragement that will keep them off the ledge, literally and figuratively.
Ephron’s Yuletide Yuck-Fest opens on a uniquely miserable Christmas Eve. Phillip’s fiancé leaves him for a psychiatrist. His asshole landlord Stanley (Shandling) threatens to evict him and his associates—on Christmas Eve no less!—and his dyspeptic colleague Mrs. Blanche Munchnik (Kahn) gets stuck in an elevator.
Rita Wilson costars as Catherine O’Shaughnessy, Phillip’s coworker and love interest, who has been pining desperately for her boss for ages without hope of reciprocation.
Catherine is a Hollywood version of a wallflower. That means that she’s played by an actress beautiful and appealing enough to win the heart of probably our most beloved actor and icon but is less sensual than Jessica Rabbit.
Mixed Nuts has its version of the hoary cliche where a “plain” character, played invariably by an impossibly gorgeous movie star, takes off their glasses and lets down their hair and is revealed to be a ravishing beauty.
Only here it is a sexy red dress that transforms Catherine from an obviously beautiful woman who dresses a little dowdily to an absolute stunner. Catherine may be a hackneyed Hollywood cliche but she’s also a real charmer. Wilson has great chemistry with Martin as two lonely, ordinary, fundamentally good-hearted people who long furtively for each other.
Sandler steals scenes from a ridiculously over-qualified cast as downstairs neighbor Louie Capshaw, a sweetheart of a man who is forever ad-libbing ditties about whatever is in front of him, much to the annoyance of Phillip and the delight of everyone else., particularly sad-eyed transvestite Chris (Liev Schrieber, in a memorable film debut).
Chris fits all too neatly into the exhausted cliche of the tragic, self-loathing queen who seeks acceptance everywhere yet is doomed to be misunderstood and mocked by a world that does not understand them.
The bad taste joke of Chris is that he is a tall man (played by an actor big and macho enough to play Sabretooth in a Wolverine movie) dressed in women’s clothing who is sad and alone on Christmas Eve and mocked by his family for being unmanly and given the ironic nickname “Arnold.”
But even at the very beginning of an auspicious career, Schrieber had the talent and substance to make Chris a real character with real pathos and complexity.
In a wacky comedy full of broad comic types Chris initially seems to be the wackiest and broadest of the bunch but by the end of the film he reigns as one of the most nuanced and complex characters.
Even if Mixed Nuts were not a misanthropic dark comedy, a sub-genre people seem to abhor on account of it makes them feel like bad people to laugh at the misfortune of scoundrels, I suspect it would have gotten bad reviews based solely on the basis of Adam Sandler doing his crazy Adam Sandler shtick.
In 1994 Adam Sandler improvising songs in a man-child baby voice while haphazardly plucking a ukulele was barely considered comedy. It was literally beneath contempt of highbrow critics.
From the vantage point of Gen-X nostalgia, however, Adam Sandler improvising songs in a man-child baby voice while haphazardly plucking a ukulele represents the absolute apex of 1990s comedy, if not civilization as a whole.
The baby-faced comedy icon could not be more adorable than he is here. THIS is the Adam Sandler we as a culture fell in love with, the Billy Madison star/“Weekend Update” goofball who was constantly cracking up at his own jokes because he’s only human.
Sandler is a goddamn delight in Mixed Nuts but he’s never more winning than when using his superpowers of silliness to cheer up Schrieber’s depressed transvestite.
The unexpected but deeply disarming tenderness Sandler extends to the heartbreakingly vulnerable cross-dresser justifies a character that has otherwise aged terribly. The world might treat Chris like a lunatic but Louie treats him like a human being worthy of empathy, understanding and compassion like all of God’s creatures, regardless of gender or sexuality.
On the other end of the likability spectrum, Kahn is Hilarious as a dyspeptic widow so deliciously nasty that she seems to be actively rooting for the folks who call into the Suicide Hotline to off themselves.
Mixed Nuts is a movie full of wonderful little stand-alone moments that highlight the gifts of a cast full of ringers, like Mrs. Munchnik trying to attract attention while stuck in an elevator through a chintzy little toy synthesizer that amplifies her voice but also turns her into a talentless amateur musician.
Mixed Nuts ends with a happy ending that I once scoffed at with Scrooge-like cynicism. How dare a dark comedy end on such a sweet, syrupy, even saccharine note?
I know better now. The movie’s misfits deserve a little kindness from an unkind universe. That’s true of Mixed Nuts as well. It’s a shaggy, unloved orphan of a movie that I thoroughly dug. Call it a Christmas miracle, or just a case of softening with age, but what I once saw as a lump of coal I now see as an unexpected Yuletide treat, a sleeper seemingly the sum of humanity has slept on for far too long.
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