Back in my drinking days, I would frequently go dry-January, which seems in 2023 to be all the rage. Since I’m now dry-January-to-December, having given up alcohol permanently, I’ve lately been practicing another avoidance so that I might, at least in spirit, join the hordes in the rest of the country who are so chatty about their abstinence. After the grittiness of Slow Horses (Apple TV+), the decadence of The White Lotus, Season 2 (HBO Max), the 24-wannabe formula of Jack Ryan, Season 3 (Amazon Prime Video), the dark comedy of Glass Onion (Netflix), I have decided to forgo darkness in my viewing habits for the month of January. Surely PBS had me in mind when it scheduled the new season of All Creatures Great and Small to begin broadcasting after the first of the year. But this month I need more than an hour a week of endearing Brits helping large animals and navigating human relations with superhuman kindness.
Norman Cousins famously wrote about curing his depression and illness with laughter. He watched classic film comedies on videotape and, so he claimed, laughed his way to better health. Now I’m not depressed, not wistful, not melancholy, not blue, not even a wee bit triste, if I understand the mild connotation of that French adjective. But I’m not writing fiction at this moment in my life, and I’m at my happiest when I’m writing a story. For now I’m allowing the 40,000 or so words I wrote in the fall to settle into something I can go back to revisit. My imagination is hibernating for now, and while I’ve learned to live with that dormancy, I don’t like it. So on New Year’s Eve I taped all six of the Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. The first three, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and directed by W.S. Van Dyke, are the best, but all six are cheerfully entertaining. All the movies make light of Nick Charles’s astonishing addiction to alcohol, but it’s nice to see that Nick and Nora genuinely enjoy and love each other.
But January is a long month. I need a heavy-duty dose of inspiration, and so it came to pass that I subscribed to the ad-free version of Disney+ for the month and went on a feel-good rampage. First stop: the 2017 film version of the Broadway musical Newsies, with superb performances by Jeremy Jordan, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, and the entire scenery-chewing cast under the steady direction of Jeff Calhoun and the Olympic-gymnastic-level choreography by Christopher Gattelli. Next up: Iron Will from 1994, with McKenzie Astin deftly carrying the movie about a kid who has to win a 500-mile dog race in order to save—I kid you not—the family farm. It was interesting to see the now-reviled Kevin Spacey performing so well alongside so many other old pros, including Brian Cox, who, unlike his character in Succession, never tells a single person to fuck off during the entire movie. After that: Third Man on the Mountain, with James MacArthur, playing an 18-year-old who, at the outset of the movie, saves the life of Michael Rennie’s character and thus earns a chance to climb the Matterhorn. Then a super-feel-good two-night viewing of The Rookie, the 2002 movie starring Dennis Quaid as Jimmy Morris, the real-life high school baseball coach who in middle age was able to realize his lifelong dream of playing major-league baseball. I’m leaving out a lot. But those movies are so feel-good that they make the stuff on the Hallmark Channel seem like the work of Martin McDonagh.
Finally, I want to talk about Miracle, the 2004 movie about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s 1980 victory over the team from the Soviet Union. It stars Kurt Russell, who plays Herb Brooks, a prickly, driven, histrionic coach whose methods today would raise eyebrows and probably objections. But Russell, who has been appearing in Disney movies since he was a boy, somehow manages to keep the audience sympathetic to this man even as he drives his team to exhaustion and tests the patience of his wife, nicely played by Patricia Clarkson. After all this Disney dosing, I am feeling fine and am ready to return to the mordant stuff. But you know what would really make me feel good long after this January is over? To know that Kurt Russell is going to win a long-overdue award for his acting. He deserves one.