By Armond White

This Christmas
Directed by Preston A. Whitmore


Artsy-fartsy critics rarely take black filmmakers seriously, but Preston A. Whitmore’s This Christmas achieves an avant-garde coup that’s also a celebration of populist art. At the end of this not-August Wilson, glib-Charles Burnett, sub-Tyler Perry story of a Los Angeles family convening for Christmas dinner, Whitmore rises above his mediocre drama and launches the most daring, transgressive movie concept: duration.

The story proper is over, but Preston reunites the entire cast beyond diegetic logic and shows their reunion in a long, uninterrupted single-take. The cast (the family) includes original Dreamgirls alumna Loretta Devine (a too-whiney matriarch for my taste) but also the gorgeous Idris Elba as the bad-apple oldest son, Chris Brown as the baby-boy crooner with a closeted secret and the formidable Delroy Lindo as the alternative father figure. Reliable Regina King acts the daughter with a troubled marriage and Sharon Leal brings credible hesitation to giving up career for romance. They all form a Soul Train dance line and boogie their own curtain call. The fact of celebration—of Black American cultural ritual—is in your face, unapologetic and joyous. The longer Whitmore holds on the dance scene, the more amazing it becomes. Transcending Kubrick, past Straub and more physically beautiful than Tarkovsky, this sequence tells much about how families repair their differences and (pace Albert Murray) how Black folks “stomp the blues.”

It might help to know that the film is titled after Donnie Hathaway’s composition “This Christmas”—a song as traditional to contemporary African Americans as “White Christmas” is to the mainstream. But the smiles and body-work of the film’s ending dance line has its own authentic meaning. And Whitmore’s long-take is so bold—and so satisfying—that there isn’t a single movie this year that offers more insight or greater pleasure.