On the face of it, nothing much happens in Meet Me in St. Louis, one of MGM’s most resplendent technicolor musicals. This is a film where the small events are also the big events, where the concept of “big” and “small” are purposely confused in the evocation of a normal American family’s quiet, 19th-century life. In this movie, the darkest thing that happens is that a child visits a creepy house on Halloween, and the saddest thing that happens—the threat of the Smith family having to pack up and leave their midwestern home for New York—never actually comes to pass. There is no grand trauma for these characters, no quintessential rift or heartbreak—only the threat of heartbreak. Which makes it one of the most perfect Christmas movies of all time. The ending is a sigh of relief: the bad thing that we thought was going to happen doesn’t happen. The Smiths, as a unit, remain complete and intact. Their lives can go on as usual, for the moment. There are no rebellious children, no elopements, no threats to the happiness of a family that—rarity of rarities—ultimately gets along with each other.
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