Gluck: Annie (2014)

In an era when Christmas films tend to be aggressively feelgood, it can be easy to forget how much the genre is bound up with hard times, specifically with the legacy and ongoing memory of the Great Depression throughout much of the twentieth century. In fact, before being adapted into the 1977 musical, and the 1982 film version by John Huston, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie was adapted as two Depression-era Christmas films, released in 1932 and 1938 respectively. Will Gluck’s 2014 film version is the first adaptation of the comic strip since then to frame it as a specifically Christmas message, and while various Depression-era references have been excluded – specifically songs relating to Roosevelt and the New Deal – it’s clear this this millennial version is also anxious to speak to our own Depression, and the lingering and ongoing ambience of the Global Financial Crisis. What’s unusual, then, is that for every insistent observation on the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States today, the original story is almost sanitised out of recognition, starting with the teenpop arrangements of Charles Strouse and Martin Chamin’s classic score, which tend to remove any real sense of longing, making “Tomorrow” feel like a fait accompli, something that’s already always here, rather than something to yearn and aspire for. Without that longing, there’s not a great deal to Annie herself – for all her bounciness, she’s a bit of a brat, really – and while Quvenzhane Wallis gives it her all, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Gluck’s poppy, upbeat vision actually forecloses real hope more than any of its precedessors, taking us on a tour of ultra-gentrified New York that’s obsessed with aerial status, the perspectives of penthouse suites and helicopter rides, sightlines that feel oddly distasteful and vulgar for what’s supposed to be a family film. As might be expected, Daddy Warbucks (Jamie Foxx) doesn’t have much scope to puncture that, especially since the racial element is immediately dissolved into a putatively post-racial cityscape in which race is even more clinically excluded from the big picture than in the earlier film. Even Miss Hannigan’s negativity might have suffered the same fate were it not for the fact that Cameron Diaz throws herself into the role with a lurid, over-the-top intensity and cruelty  - she’s the only actor who doesn’t feel as if she’s continually sanitising her hands, or squeamish about touching stuff - that’s so at odds with the rest of the film that it has to be a cult performance in the making, especially since Diaz almost seems to be in on the joke, dismantling each scene like she knows that it’s what the audience really wants to do as well.