Ben Stiller in David Gordon Green family comedy

David Gordon Green nutcracker sees the director return to his indie roots, looking at characters sprouting organically from rural or small-town settings. This adorable fish-out-of-water comedy about a family’s unexpected rewards attempts to emulate the naturalism, lyricism and raw emotion of Green’s earlier work george washington and all real girlsbut it’s too sentimental to have a similar effect.

The idea came from Green meeting the four spirited young sons of an old friend, and Leland Douglas’ script seems to allow the boys to semi-improvise, playing versions of themselves. This gives the film a disarming sincerity that matches Ben Stiller’s sensitive, understated performance as an uptight Chicagoan in an awkward parental role. But copious montages and copious slow-motion hilarity only serve to highlight the lack of narrative substance.

Green admits to being indebted to youth films such as bad news bear and break awayexpressed his desire to tell a story without cynicism, with young characters unencumbered by the usual cinematic sheen. In this regard, he owes his success to the spontaneity of the Janssen brothers, who were clearly adept at playing unruly homeschooling shenanigans and caring for the pets and livestock that roamed freely in and out of the messy house.

Renamed the “Kicklighters” for the fictional experiment, they include 12-year-old Justice (Homer Janson); middle child Junior (Ulysses Janson), 10; and 8-year-old twins Samuel and Simon (Atlas and Arlo Janssen).

Another seminal film cited by Greene is uncle buckStiller’s Michael plays a similar role to John Candy’s title character in the comedy in many ways. Except Michael wasn’t a drunken slacker. But he was not a typical Stiller neurotic either. A carefree real estate developer, he drove his flashy yellow Porsche to Ohio hoping to sign several documents authorizing the placement of his nephew—whose parents had both been killed in a car accident—in a foster home. , his nephew became an orphan. But things didn’t go that smoothly.

Kids break into an amusement park at night and hotwire one of the rides, then a security guard wakes up and realizes what’s going on and they rush across a field, jumping gleefully into the air as they go. Michael receives a bill for the damage they caused, as well as back rent from the ballet studio run by his sister, the boy’s late mother. Family services agent Gretchen (Linda Cardellini) also tells him that promising foster care candidates she had wanted to adopt the boys had been passed over.

Brother Michael (or Mike) insisted on calling him after they finally decided to talk to him, but he wasn’t bothered by having to take care of four nearly feral kids instead of returning to Chicago to close a major real estate deal he’d been working on. Feel excited. He knew nothing about them, and all they seemed to know was that their mother had once said that he was incapable of love.

The Kicklighter boys are a fun collective, and they maintain a close bond even when Justice is occasionally alone and has a crush on Mia (Maren Heisler), a girl in dance class. All but the eldest have long golden hair, which gives them an ethereal aura that contrasts with the voracious appetite for chaos that makes them so rare.

The Janssons are not professional actors, and their dialogue is often muffled and lost. But they make up for it with a real connection to the world of the film and a deep unity as true brothers and sisters, often talking at the same time.

Douglas’s screenplay effectively drags out time by teasing out the possibility that two different would-be parents (played by Toby Huss and Eddie Patterson) are initially eager to accommodate the brothers. But the template for this heartwarming comedy is set in stone, so it’s clear from the start that it’s only a matter of time before Uncle Mike relaxes and settles into his destined de facto father role. To the filmmakers’ credit, the formulaic aspects are never overemphasized, and the gentle hints of a possible romance with Gretchen are well underplayed.

There’s something charming about the way Michael’s last walls of resistance are broken down through the boys’ performance in the town. nutcracker beardwho themselves completely rewrote the Tchaikovsky ballet. It’s also a tribute to a deceased parent, a sad feeling of loss that’s otherwise largely unexplored.

Perhaps so as not to burden the boys with too much heavy lifting in the acting department, the script generally focuses less on the brothers’ grief and more on Michael’s rediscovery of the heart, an organ that clearly has no need in the soulless world of real estate. He was lightened by fond childhood memories of playing with his sister, which was a part of his life and a central figure in his life, but which he had archived.

nutcracker While not as strong as an uplifting family comedy, the emotional payoff will be impactful for viewers willing to sync up with Green’s free-flowing pacing.