Forget Elf or Love Actually – there’s a good chance the best Christmas film of recent years is one you’ve never seen.
Pathé/Tom Phillips/BuzzFeed
The conversation happens every year, as people start discussing their favourite Christmas films of recent times; when they're quoting lines from Elf at each other, or having the old debate about whether Love Actually is romantic or kind of creepy. I slightly dread the conversation, because it always makes me a bit sad. It normally goes something like this:
"Elf/Love Actually is the best Christmas film. I love Elf/Love Actually."
"Have you seen Millions?"
"Eh?"
"Millions. It's a Christmas film. Came out in 2005. It's by Danny Boyle; you know, Danny Boyle. Slumdog Millionaire. Olympic Opening Ceremony. That guy. It's wonderful."
"...I've never even heard of it."
Exactly why Millions hasn't been lovingly adopted into the new Christmas canon is, frankly, a complete bloody mystery. Granted, it might be that at the time – years before the Opening Ceremony elevated the creative team of Boyle and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce to national treasure status – "it's a heartwarming family film from the director of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later and the writer of Welcome To Sarajevo and 24 Hour Party People" probably wasn't the easiest sell.
Then again, it might be the fact that (for reasons not immediately clear) the film's distributors decided to release this potential Christmas classic in the middle of May. At the same time as Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge Of The Sith. Big round of applause to everybody involved in that decision.
Pathé
Because Millions really is the perfect Christmas film for modern Britain: rooted in messy, funny real life, not some fakey recreation of American baby-boomers' idealised memories of Christmas in the 1950s. There's no Bing Crosby or postcard-perfect drifts of crunching snow; instead, there's a slightly crap Nativity play and a robbery soundtracked by Muse. And yet, amidst the realism, it manages to be completely, utterly magical.
The film centres on Damian (the astonishing Alex Etel), a seven-year old boy who is warm-hearted to the point of piety, and who obsessively reads up about the lives of the saints in the same way other kids collect football stickers. They're his imaginary friends. "Clare of Assisi, 1194 'til 1253?!" he exclaims as she pops by his hideaway near the railway tracks for a chinwag. Saint Clare lights up a suspiciously long, chubby cigarette, and starts discussing her role as the patron saint of television. Which is when a large bag stuffed with money falls out of the sky right next to Damian.
