It Sure Is Nice to Have Ben Stiller Back

The raucous Nutcrackers upholds Stiller’s place as one of American cinema’s funnier objects of humiliation. Photo: Rivulet Media

The last time we saw David Gordon Green, he was lost in the muddle of a cursed Exorcist sequel, which he’d made after a trio of interesting but wildly uneven Halloween movies. Onstage at the Toronto Film Festival world premiere of his new comedy Nutcrackers, the director admitted that the “inevitable darkness� of four horror flicks in a row had gotten to him; the Ben Stiller–starring Nutcrackers, Green said, was born of his desire to make “a movie without cynicism and viciousness.� He’s certainly done that, but in its own weird way, Nutcrackers reconfigures some of those previous films as well; it feels like an amalgamation of all the various stages of Green’s career.

One wonders if the sweetness and light of Nutcrackers was also what brought Stiller out of the woodwork, since he hasn’t done many high-profile parts since 2017’s one-two punch of Brad’s Status and The Meyerowitz Stories. Here, he plays Michael Maxwell, a Chicago real-estate developer who drives to small-town Ohio (in his yellow Ferrari, naturally) to take care of his four unruly nephews, who’ve been left orphaned and alone on a dilapidated farm after the deaths of Michael’s sister and her husband.

Wild, unkempt, and uncouth, the home-schooled kids are played by a quartet of real-life brothers: Homer, Ulysses, Arlo, and Atlas Janson, four vivacious nonprofessionals from rural Ohio who apparently inspired Green to make the film in the first place. The kids don’t speak much and they feed themselves on uncooked blocks of ramen, cheese puffs with ketchup, and popsicles dipped in … well, something. They roam around a farm filled with cats, dogs, hogs, guinea pigs, snakes, and chickens that scramble and slither in and out of their ramshackle house. Nutcrackers might be a goofy comedy, but when Michael is confronted by a silent nephew wearing a giant rabbit mask, or when he chases a chicken with a giant knife while the kids chant, “Pluck it, cook it, put it in a pot!� we can see how this might not actually be that far removed from Green’s unorthodox attempts at horror.

Workaholic city slicker Michael isn’t planning to be in Ohio for long. He just needs to watch the boys for a few days while the local children’s services rep (Linda Cardellini) lines up a new foster home. Stiller, who has a knack for playing everyday guys who somehow can’t help but act like total jagoffs, brings the right mix of relatable decency and cold calculation to the part; this is not one of his signature performances, but it’s certainly nice to have him back. Even as Michael grows to bond with the kids, he accelerates his efforts to find them a foster home, never once contemplating the possibility of caring for them himself. “I guess it’s true what Mom said about you then,� says one of the kids. “What did she say?� Michael asks. “She said you were incapable of love.� See, you can say that to a Ben Stiller character. He won’t fight back. He remains one of American cinema’s funnier objects of humiliation and abuse.

The narrative outcome of Nutcrackers is aggressively (some will say insultingly) predictable. We can sense the plot gears locking into place when Michael discovers that his sister had a much-loved dance school that’s since been abandoned. But here’s where it helps to have a director like David Gordon Green. For all the strange directions his career has taken him since he first burst onto the indie scene with understated small-town dramas like George Washington (2000) and All the Real Girls (2003), Green has never entirely abandoned the improvisatory spirit of his early work, be it in Apatovian fantasias like Pineapple Express or gentle indie comedies like Prince Avalanche, or even in the oblique and digressive Halloween Ends. He has a gift for infusing boilerplate material with just enough formal and emotional anarchy to make us wonder if the movies have suddenly left reality behind. And then there’s his love of faces — his ability to see the ordinary extraordinariness of real people — which elevates his work beyond a mere narrative accounting of what happened to whom and where. The familiar contours of Nutcrackers might deceive us, but its inspirations and interests crystallize its restless, independent spirit. It feels like both a summary and a homecoming for this strangest and most American of directors.