This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
It’s a treat whenever someone posts something on X that gets everyone annoyed, but it’s extra fun when there’s a special holiday edition of the dragging. (Dear Santa: All I want for Christmas is to not have to refer to that godforsaken site as X anymore. Please, Nick, my buddy. My pal. I beg you.)
To be fair, the catalyst for this recent social media discourse is less egregious than it would make you think (and then, after thinking, politely refute). The inciting statement: a tweet—I mean X post, ugh!!!—alleging that “there hasn’t been a new Christmas movie good enough to watch every holiday season in over 20 years.”
As someone who resents the plague of Hallmark, Lifetime, and Netflix holiday movies that have irrevocably afflicted society’s brains, to the point that people have been conditioned to believe there is actual entertainment value in that nonsense, I appreciated this hypothesis.
I remember the fun of crowding into the family van as a kid, shivering under blankets until the heat kicked in, driving to the movie theaters, ordering popcorn at the snack bar with giddy excitement, and watching the year’s new big holiday movie like it was an event. That we’ve resigned to these corny, paint-by-number TV movies as our seasonal entertainment depresses me. But then I saw the responses to that initial post, revealing just how many great ones there have been these two decades and was heartened.
People mentioned films like Spirited, Tangerine, Jingle Jangle, Christmas With the Kranks, The Night Before, Klaus, and Single All the Way as recent standouts that merit repeat annual viewings. The Holdovers, which is currently in theaters and pegged for a slew of Oscar nominations, will definitely join my roster of “films I will watch on a cold December Sunday, drink one glass of wine too many, and then silently weep.” Speaking of movies that make me silently weeping: There’s The Family Stone and The Holiday, which both make the list/fit the bill.
I know the original poster was alluding to the fact that watching Elf, Home Alone, The Santa Clause, A Christmas Story, and their ilk are annual traditions akin to decorating the tree, trotting out Mariah Carey, and gossiping a little too much at the holiday office party. Author and podcaster Danny Pellegrino made a shrewd observation in reaction to the post: “Cable made it so ’90s kids saw the same things every year. We don’t see stuff over and over as much.”
It’s true. Revisiting holiday favorites is much less of a passive pursuit now than it was in the “Hey, look at that, The Grinch is on TV!” days, requiring the labor of wanting to see something and seeking out how to watch it. So this, my friends, is a long preamble to what that post about rewatching Christmas films really reminded me of: my dismay that there is one movie, which my family revisits each year, that is always inexplicably missing from the list of classics. On the occasion of yet another social media discussion of the best holiday films, I am here to demand its justice.
Here it is: Why aren’t more people obsessed with The Preacher’s Wife?
There is a holiday rom-com that stars Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington, features some of Houston’s most thrilling on-screen vocal performances, and, for those who care about such things, has religious themes too. Why is this not a film that everyone talks about each Christmas?
Directed by Penny Marshall, the 1996 remake of The Bishop’s Wife starred Houston at peak WHITNEY HOUSTON!!! fame as Julia, the wife of a preacher (Courteney B. Vance’s Henry) at a struggling Baptist church in New York City. The stress of trying—and failing—to keep the church afloat for the community tests their marriage, so Henry prays to God for help.
The prayer is answered in the form of Dudley (Washington), an angel as charming and irresistible as, well, an actual angel played by Denzel Washington would be. Henry is skeptical of the interloper, but Julia and their son Hakeem (Darvel Davis Jr., in a child acting performance that ranks among the all-time most adorable) are smitten—and grateful for the burdens he almost immediately lifts from their lives.
Like all great holiday movies, there is something slightly problematic about the film: There is so much chemistry between Houston and Washington that you kind of want the preacher’s wife to ditch the reverend husband and fuck the angel. But hey: The holidays need a proper balance of naughty and nice.
Houston is luminous, and Washington is so debonair as to practically dazzle through the screen. Loretta Devine and Jenifer Lewis provide uproarious comic relief. (Learning that Lewis was only six years older than Houston when playing her mother in the film is a wild experience.) And then there’s the singing.
There’s a moment in the film when Houston sings “I Believe in You and Me” at a jazz club that gives me chills just thinking about it. The vocal gymnastics are so impressive and so impeccable that the ballad has become a standard on singing competitions like American Idol and its descendants. It’s one of my favorite musical performances in any movie, not just holiday ones.
The way the film incorporates church singing and gospel music is also quite beautiful and rousing. Houston’s soft, tender performance of “Who Would Imagine a King” would have the Grinch asking to borrow a Kleenex from Ebeneezer Scrooge. And Houston’s roof-raising rendition of “Joy to the World” that’s become a holiday radio staple? It debuted in this film.
It’s such a lovely, fun movie that captures that swirl of hope, melancholy, faith, and the power of community that surrounds the holidays. So while the internet is debating which movies merit yearly revisits, may I offer The Preacher’s Wife as one to add to the list?
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