Noelle


 Disney can’t do much without being pilloried for it, and ideally a film like this would sustain cinemas, and although the big screen experience is joyful I wouldn’t want to risk it even if I could. So in one sense, and especially now, it’s okay that decent new films are going straight to streaming. This movie is a Christmas movie about modern times: it’s a classic fish-out-of-water comedy about a member of the Kringle family who has to go on a quest to get Santa back…

And Anna Kendrick sells the idea of Noelle Kringle with everything she has. As a female member of the Kringle line she can never be Santa, but she has a full-time job in the family trade—and she majored in calligraphy and ribbon-making. She wears nutmeg deodorant. It’s that kind of funny. Nick, her brother with the name that’s right on the (red) nose. Said brother is having problems dealing with the weight of expectations: he messes up some elementary Santa stuff and decides to run away.


Noelle, and for some reason Shirley MacLaine as an Elf, decide to go to the real world in search of Nick. This is the fish out of water segment, like in Enchanted but with Santa references and a baby Reindeer pet as a sort-of side-kick. Noelle learns that in the real world people’s lives are very different to what she knows: which is year-round cheer and celebrating this notion of Christmas which they all understand to be about a specific thing. What’s even more fun though is the natural heir to the Santa title takes over in the North Pole and begins to operate like a business. They’re not kids, they’re “customers”—and if you assess children properly you find that they’re not that nice and you therefore don’t have to deliver so many presents. And you can use drone delivery or “Amazon Prime”.


But of course the notion that a girl can’t be Santa is nonsense, and Noelle meets a lot of ‘real world’ people in genuinely sweet sequences. It touches a lot on what kids want from Christmas and what their parents try to provide. It’s more than just “iPads”.


This is a charming holiday film with plenty of goodness and positivity for the target audience, and it’s got that satirical bite which is very appropriate. We can all remember when passengers became customers. The notion of streamlining and cutting the cost of Santa’s fantastical realm. Hopefully the film is enough of a straight arrow to avoid attracting criticism for being too “woke”—the idea of a woman becoming Santa in a lineage of Kringles doesn’t seem worth getting upset about. In this sense Noelle is so obviously of its time. Anna Kendrick is super-cute and has the comedy chops to land every single beat, but then she is often hapless, funny and well-meaning in all her films and that’s perfectly fine. It’s weird to see Shirley MacLaine in a role like this, and she is clearly an absolute trooper. This film has enough about it to be better than something like Santa Claus: The Movie but I would hesitate it to put it up there with Muppet Christmas Carol.

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