Miracle on 34th Street (PG)
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Caution: spoilers.

This is a 1994 remake of the 1947 film of the same name. I didn't see it until 2024, ten years after I watched the original. By that time I didn't remember the original in great detail, but I knew I had liked it more than I liked this. I'm not really sure why, though, except to say this movie might be a bit too treacly. I did like the remake, but it felt sort of unnecessary, as remakes often do. The plot is almost exactly the same as the original, with a few minor details changed. It's still a good movie, and I'm glad I watched it.

Dorey Walker (Elizabeth Perkins) is in charge of special events for a Macy's-like department store called Cole's. This includes the Cole's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Before the parade starts, a man who calls himself Kriss Kringle (Richard Attenborough) has an altercation with the parade's Santa Claus, a man named Tony Falacchi, who is drunk. Dorey then fires Tony and hires Kriss as a replacement. He's very popular with the crowds, and she then hires him to be the store's Santa for the holiday season. Meanwhile, Dorey's six-year-old daughter, Susan (Mara Wilson), doesn't believe in Santa Claus, because Dorey had taught her long ago that Santa isn't real. She does befriend Kriss, however, and thinks he's a very nice man. She's also friends with her mother's boyfriend, a lawyer named Bryan Bedford (Dylan McDermott), who would rather she did believe in Santa.

Well, Kriss becomes very popular with Cole's shoppers, partly by advising them on where they can find better deals at competing stores. Because of his honesty, they become more inclined to shop at Cole's. Dorey and a coworker go to Mr. Cole himself with this idea, and he likes it, so they make it a whole advertising campaign. This frustrates the owner of a competing store, Victor Landberg, who wants to buy out Cole's, but won't be able to if Cole's makes enough money over the holiday season. So he assigns a couple of employees the task of either hiring away Kriss for their own store, or else making him look bad. They fail at the former, but succeed at the latter, using Tony to provoke Kriss to violence. Kriss keeps his cool until Tony implies that he might be a pedophile, which prompts him to hit Tony with his cane. A crowd suddenly shows up as Tony lies on the sidewalk, pretending to have been hurt more than he was. So Kriss is arrested, and his public image is tarnished. Landberg wants Kriss to be committed to a mental institution for believing he's the real Santa Claus, but Bryan defends him in court. And he manages to get the public back on Kriss's side, though the judge, Henry Harper, feels conflicted about the case. He doesn't want to have Kriss committed, but feels he'll have no choice if it can't be proved that there is a real Santa Claus, and that Kriss is him. There's also the implication that Harper might rule against Kriss because of Landberg's support of his reelection campaign, though I don't believe that was really an issue for him.

Well, Bryan and the prosecutor, Ed Collins, present strong cases for and against Kriss, respectively. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that Bryan wins, but I won't reveal how he did it. It's a bit different than the strategy used in the original film, but it was a similar concept. It's still never really revealed whether Kriss is the real Santa Claus or not, but the spirit he represents is more important, anyway. After the trial, Kriss tries to manipulate events to fulfill a wish of Susan's, but I won't reveal what that wish was. I'll just say there's a very happy ending.

One thing I didn't fully like about the movie is how convenient everything was, how improbable. Like, aside from Landberg and his employees, and Tony, just about every character in the movie seems impossibly nice. They make choices it's really hard to believe people would make in the real world, which kind of took me out of the story, just a bit. But it didn't ruin my ability to appreciate the story. I still liked most of the characters, and the acting. And overall it's a decent story. I still prefer the original, but however unnecessary this remake may be, there's nothing terribly wrong with it, in my opinion. And I guess I don't know what else to say.