MERRY SHAKE-UP OF THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST
Jingle Jangle (PG, Netflix) Verdict: Enchanting ★★★★
I The Life Ahead (15, Netflix) Verdict: Tender and touching ★★★★I
HERE’S a pair of Netflix films really worth seeing — though perhaps not yet, in the case of Jingle Jangle, if like me you disapprove of Christmas movies coming out before November is even halfway done.
It’s a real song-and-dance charmer, though, and with a mostly black cast against the backdrop of Dickensian England, neatly topical. Folk can rail all they like about historical truths, but I can see why it must rankle with black audiences that Christmas on screen is overwhelmingly white. Jingle Jangle is a well-timed subversion of that tradition.
Conceived as a stage musical by writerdirector David E. Talbert, it has distinct echoes of The Greatest Showman and even classics such as Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Through the familiar device of a modern-day grandparent (Phylicia Rashad) telling her grandchildren a story, it plunges back into Victorian times where the great toymaker Jeronicus Jangle is robbed of all his inventions by his own apprentice.
Thirty years later, Jangle (a really lovely performance by Forest Whitaker) is a sweet, sad old man in hock to his stern but kindly banker (a bewhiskered Hugh Bonneville). He needs a worldshattering new invention to pay off his debts and outsmart his dishonest former protege (KeeganMichael Key), which he may or may not achieve — no spoilers here! — with the help of Journey (Madalen Mills), the lively granddaughter he has never met.
■ THE Life Ahead, a touching Italian-language film, tells a very different story of an inter-generational alliance, in this case between Madame Rosa, a Holocaust survivor and former prostitute superbly played by 86-year-old Sophia Loren, and Momo, a feisty 12-year-old orphan from Senegal (Ibrahima Gueye, also wonderful), who scrapes a living peddling drugs on the streets of Bari.
Directed and co-written by Loren’s son, Eduardo Ponti, and loosely adapted from a 1975 novel by Romain Gary, it’s a love story, in a way, all but guaranteed to make your heart melt.