Audient Audit: The Ref

This is the final installment in my 2019 monthly series where I've been checking my lists twice to see whether I was naughty by adding films I'd never seen to them. 

So I'm finally getting around to seeing my first Christmas movie of the season (second if you count Last Christmas way back in November, third if you count the 40 minutes of Die Hard I watched last weekend), and thereby writing my first Christmas post of the season, and it's one that doesn't even have a Christmas-related poster.

In a thing it definitely has in common with Die Hard, which came out six years earlier, The Ref appears to have been marketed in such a way as to downplay/entirely disregard its Christmas setting. That would never happen today. If anything, they'd want to play up any little Christmas association they could find. At the very least, you'd have this same picture with a Christmas tree behind Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis.

But no, in 1994, apparently it was considered a bad thing that your movie might feature Christmas. And The Ref apparently was not successful enough to have generated even one alternate poster. When you google "The Ref movie poster," this is all you get.

But the reason there's no Christmas in this poster is the same reason there's no Christmas in the Die Hard posters: The Ref was not released at Christmastime. It was released on March 11, 1994, so putting a Christmas tree on the poster would have been a weird thing indeed. The big change today would be either it wouldn't have Christmas as a backdrop, or it would have been released at Christmastime. Gone are the days when movies that have a significant Christmas theme are released at any other time than mid-November.

The Ref had made it onto my various lists because I had seen at least a few scenes of it. I remembered the scene where Denis Leary tips Spacey and Davis over in their chairs, for example.

As it turns out, though, that was it. I didn't remember most of this film.Which means either my memory is bad, or I didn't see it.

Not remembering it is a good thing, because I came in with the impression that The Ref was a mediocre black comedy, one which others raved about but which hadn't worked for me at the time. I'm glad I'm remembering it wrong, probably from never having seen it at all, because I thought this thing was hysterical.

It's all about comic timing. The three leads are all masters of that, as the lines they spit out really sing because of their skill in this area. Then you've got legit comedy vet Christine Baranski, whose imperious and sarcastic line readings have always been her calling card. But some of the funniest lines come from Baranski's dopey husband, a "that guy" I recognized from numerous previous projects, whose name is Adam Lefevre. He's the straight man to all these sarcastic dynamos, asking in childlike naive surprise "Why?" when his brother and sister-in-law say they're getting a divorce. Despite a movie's worth of their bickering.

When all the performers are good, you have to credit the director. The late Ted Demme (I guess both Demme brothers are now "late," sadly) made a number of really solid films during his career, among them Beautiful Girls and Monument Ave., also with Leary. His career started early enough that he was still only 38 when he died eight years after this movie was released. We might have gotten a lot more great movies from him if a heart attack -- one likely fueled by cocaine use, an irony since his last movie was Blow -- didn't take him from us too early.

The thing that worried me about making this our Christmas Eve Eve viewing on our holiday to Tasmania was that it would be too acid, too dark. I liked the idea of watching something that wasn't soppy with holiday sentiment, but I was worried this would drive us to places we didn't want to go. (And as it happened, it was the second straight movie my wife and I watched involving marital strife, after Marriage Story.)

Well, lucky this film ends up having a lot of heart. Sure, Davis and Spacey bicker their way through the kidnapping/home invasion perpetrated by Leary's cat burglar, but there's no real violence in this film, and comeuppance is only waiting for characters who really deserve it. And, as it turns out, none of our three leads fall into that category. The issues Davis and Spacey argue about are not petty, but seem like real concerns of real married people -- while also managing to tickle our funny bones. And the fact that they both start to sympathize with Spacey, and vice versa, shows that decent people see the decency in each other even in a world that's marred by bitterness and betrayal.

A big win to end the series on.

I'd normally end this series with a kind of wrap-up along the lines of ranking the films from first to worst, but I'm not going to do that this time. Instead, I'll just give you a final count of the movies I saw, and which ones I had legitimately seen before. Here we go:

January - Roxanne (hadn't seen)
February - The Witches of Eastwick (had seen)
March - The Dollars Trilogy (hadn't seen)
April - Speed 2: Cruise Control (hadn't seen)
May - The Pink Panther (hadn't seen)
June - Modern Times (hadn't seen)
July - The Magnificent Seven (hadn't seen)
August - Breathless (hadn't seen)
September - Manon of the Spring (hadn't seen)
October - Heartbeeps (had seen)
November - Ran (had seen)
December - The Ref (hadn't seen)

So a pretty scant three titles I ended up pretty sure I'd seen before. Which makes me a pretty big liar ... but also pretty good at identifying when I might have lied.

I'm still weighing up two different options for my 2020 monthly series, but will decide in time to watch the first in January. Merry Christmas!