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Over the past few years, I’ve reminded you of the best Christmas specials and talked about some classic Christmas music. This year, it’s time to clear the field for the greatest adaptation of the greatest Christmas story.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves. The Colorado ruling calls the originalists’ bluff. Trump insists he hasn’t read Mein Kampf.

The holidays are a time to look back on a long year, but also to look forward to the new one. Give an Atlantic subscription to someone close to you and they’ll get a year of the best coverage on the most important stories—to stay informed and inspired as we enter the new year.

An Actual Ghost Story

Christmas, no matter what your religious beliefs, is a wonderful time to cherish our friends and family but also, in the season’s spirit of reconciliation, to recognize and embrace our common humanity with people everywhere. In the approaching depths of winter, we can recommit to kindness, peace, and joy. That’s why I would like to take this opportunity, right before the holiday, to make you all mad one more time with one of my cultural takes.

There are some good adaptations of the Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, and many bad ones, but only one truly great version, and it is the 1984 made-for-television movie starring George C. Scott.

Wait. Hear me out.

I know that many people are intensely loyal to the 1951 version (titled A Christmas Carol in the United States, and released in the U.K. as Scrooge), starring Alastair Sim. I understand why. It’s charming, in its way, but it is also enduring because so many of us grew up with it. For a time, it was like It’s a Wonderful Life, the black-and-white wallpaper always there in the background after Thanksgiving. And Sim is wonderful: He was only 50 when he filmed Scrooge but he looks much older; his Scrooge is so deformed by sin that his transformation later in the story is almost a physical change, wondrous and giddy.

But for me, too much of Scrooge is formal and stagey. And let’s not even talk about the other versions from the 1930s, or the Muppets, or Bill Murray, or the cartoons, or the more arty takes. Some of them are truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Guy Pearce.)

When I first saw the Scott version, however, I loved the tighter connection to the book, and especially the attention to detail and atmosphere. No, it doesn’t really snow that much in London, but the 1984 version is so evocative that you can almost smell Scrooge’s musty bedroom, the happy stink of the open-air butchers and fishmongers, and the scrawny goose roasting in Mrs. Cratchit’s tiny kitchen.

Most important, just as Sim carried Scrooge, this version is Scott’s movie, despite the outstanding actors around him. Scott was an American, and his British accent slips now and then—I always wince when he tries to get his tongue around “I wonder you don’t go into Parl-ya-ment”—but years of hard living gave him a face, a voice, and a stare that no other Scrooge could match.

And yes, he was fat. Scrooge, in most other iterations, is a scrawny geezer who doesn’t eat much or drink or “make merry” at Christmas. But Scott’s Scrooge is a barrel-chested bully, an imposing and nasty piece of work. He’s not particularly disciplined or monkish; he’s just a corpulent old bastard who can’t remember that he was once a human being.

Then there are the ghosts. They’re deeply unsettling apparitions, which makes Scott’s version a bit more PG-13 than most of the other adaptations.

Frank Finlay’s Marley, in particular, is not some old pal coming to issue a friendly warning. Marley is a damned soul, wailing and doomed. He’s a rotting corpse, for crying out loud. Angela Pleasence is a radiant and annoying Ghost of Christmas Past. At first, I found her off-putting, and then I realized: She’s supposed to be annoying. She’s not guiding Scrooge on a nostalgia tour of his youth; she’s taking acidic delight in showing Scrooge what a jerk he’s become. Every Scrooge loses his temper at these “pictures from the past,” but Scott’s anger seems especially justified as Pleasence smirks at him.

Edward Woodward, however, steals every scene he’s in as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Instead of some phantasmic simp gently reminding Scrooge of the need for Christian charity, Woodward is a striding giant, a knight of Christmas whose mirth barely conceals his moral rage. When observing Bob Cratchit’s family doting on Tiny Tim, he snarls to Scrooge: “It may well be that, in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child!” Woodward delivers it not as a rebuke but as a threat, and that moment still sends a chill through me.

I also have a very personal reason for loving Scott’s version more than any other.

My father was, if not a Scrooge, something of a Grinch, as my mother called him every year. He growled about how Christmas was a giant, expensive pain in the ass. But my dad was a churchgoing Christian, and he harbored a secret love for the holiday. Despite his bah-humbug approach, he insisted on a real tree every year, leaving the decorating to me and my mother. He wrapped his own presents, if you can count “rolling them through paper and tape” as “wrapping.” He and I would go to Christmas Eve services (in Greek Orthodox churches, they’re usually in the late afternoon or early evening) every year while my mother prepared dinner.

But my father was also a very difficult man, and my parents had an extremely volatile marriage. Like many men, my father carried his share of sins and secrets. And like most men of his generation, he did not often speak of them. Some, I know, weighed on him to the very end of his life.

So I was surprised when, one night in the mid-1980s, he joined us to watch A Christmas Carol. We sat in our dark living room with a small fire and no light but the blinking tree. He was chatty and seemed to enjoy it, but he became very quiet toward the end, when Scrooge realizes that at a not-so-distant future Christmas, he is dead and no one cares. Alone in the darkness and the snow, Scott pleads for mercy not like some accomplished thespian in the scene of his life but like an old man at the edge of the abyss, one who now fully understands how his own actions brought him to a desolate end.

I looked over at my parents. My mom was holding my father’s hand. And my father, quiet in the dark, had tears on his cheeks.

Until that moment, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my father cry, including at his mother’s funeral—and certainly never at a movie. Scott got to him, perhaps because Scott’s Scrooge was a man my father could understand: loud, tough, and full of anger and regret, rather than the effete, pinched-face slip of a fellow played by Sim and others.

In later life, I sometimes feel the same tears welling in my eyes when Scott pleads for one more chance. These tears are not only for my father, who struggled with his own burdens to the end of his life, but for myself as well. It’s easy to hate Scrooge when you’re young and think you have plenty of time to straighten yourself out. When you’re older, you start to wonder how much time you’ve let get by you, and whether you and the elderly miser have more in common than you might like to admit.

Scott’s A Christmas Carol isn’t perfect; it has some especially cringeworthy and twee moments with Tiny Tim. But this isn’t Tim’s story. It’s about looking into the grave and realizing that on Christmas—or any day, really—it is always within our power to change our heart and to become, like Scrooge, “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.”

To borrow another line from Dickens: May that be truly said of all of us.

Merry Christmas. See you next week.

Related:

We need a little Christmas (music). The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible.

Today’s News

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Egypt for talks with Egyptian officials about a possible new cease-fire in Gaza and hostage swaps. After three years of negotiations, the European Union reached a provisional agreement to overhaul its asylum and migration laws. Pending ratification, the pact aims to make it easier to limit the entry of migrants while still protecting the right to asylum, according to EU officials. The World Health Organization designated the new JN.1 coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest” yesterday because of its “rapidly increasing” spread.

Evening Read

Pablo Delcan

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

By Tim Alberta

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day …

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals … Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

Read the full article.

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A little more than halfway into his speech in Waterloo, Iowa, last night, former President Donald Trump returned to his new favorite line.

“They’re destroying the blood of our country,” Trump said, complaining that immigrants are arriving from Africa, Asia, South America, and “all over the world.” He said that unnamed individuals (presumably his advisers) do not like it when he uses these sorts of phrases. During this section of his speech, the packed crowd inside the Waterloo Convention Center was pin-drop silent. He suddenly assured everybody that he’s never read Mein Kampf. “They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that,’” he explained, adding, “in a much different way.” Then he was right back to it. “They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country,” Trump warned. “They’re destroying the blood of our country; they’re destroying the fabric of our country.”

Trump has enjoyed a double-digit lead in the polls for months. “We could put this to bed after Iowa, if you want to know the truth,” he said of the GOP-primary race. His first-place finish in the caucus less than four weeks from now seems all but certain. He continues to trounce Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose campaign has become something like a balloon expelling air, chaotically fluttering in its descent. And although former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has continued to rise in the polls, she remains a long shot in Iowa, and only slightly less of a long shot in New Hampshire. Congressional Republicans are coalescing around their leader. Over the weekend, Representatives Lee Zeldin of New York, Wesley Hunt of Texas, and Matt Gaetz of Florida were all stumping for Trump in Iowa. The former president smells it in the air. Last night, he seemed animated, as if taking a preemptive victory lap.

[Read: ‘Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump’]

As Trump’s position in the race has improved, his rhetoric has become more extreme. Speaking to the overwhelmingly white crowd in Waterloo, he spent even more time than usual demonizing nonwhite people. Immigrants, Trump said, are dumped on our borders, pouring into our country, bringing in crime. He said they were coming from other nations’ prisons and mental institutions, that they were “emptying out the insane asylums.” Later, he went after the kids. “You have children going to school, speaking languages that nobody even knows what the language is,” Trump said, adding that “there’s no room for our students in the classrooms”—emphasis on the “our.” He once again promised that, if reelected, he’ll carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.

Two weeks ago, Trump said he would be a dictator “on day one.” Last night, he praised the “great gentleman” Viktor Orbán of Hungary. “He’s the leader, he’s the boss, he’s everything you want to call him,” Trump said of the autocratic Orbán. He cautioned that our planet is on the brink of World War III, and that he, Donald Trump, is the only one who can prevent it. (He bragged about how he personally made sure our nuclear stockpile was “all tippy-top.”) Trump scoffed at his indictments, particularly the classified-documents case against him: “I have total protection. I’m allowed to do it.” He vowed to “take over our horribly run Washington, D.C.” and give indemnification to any police officer who “gets in trouble” for pursuing a criminal. I’ve watched Trump speak live in several different settings over the past several months. I’ve never seen him more bombastic this year than he seemed last night; he sounded like an unmoored strongman.

Scott Olson / Getty

Trump’s pageant of darkness unfolded against a backdrop of Christmas cheer. The former president was flanked by two Christmas trees, each topped with a red MAGA hat. Prop presents in Trump-branded wrapping paper dotted the stage. Red, green, and white lights glowed down from the ceiling. Trump opened with a long monologue from his earlier days: how we’re all saying “Merry Christmas” again. (His campaign volunteers handed out signs plastered with the phrase.) Even the press laminates were decorated with a string of cartoon Christmas lights.

One of Trump’s warm-up speakers, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, asked the audience, “What do you give the man who has everything as a Christmas present?” This was a slightly confusing setup for a joke about how Christmas is going to come late for Trump this year, when he wins the Iowa caucus in mid-January. People sort of got it.

Before Trump took the stage, I spotted Santa Claus leaning against a brick wall outside the assembly hall and asked for an interview. He wavered, then reluctantly agreed. The back of his red suit said MAGA CLAUS in gold block letters. Santa, it turns out, is a man in his mid-20s named Alex. He said he lives in Northern Virginia and works for Public Advocate of the United States, a conservative nonprofit group. He told me he plays all sorts of characters, such as Cupid and an evil doctor/mad scientist who forces people to take a COVID vaccine. He told me he had showed up at the Loudoun County school protests dressed as Uncle Sam. Two of his organization’s signs hung outside the venue’s entryway: Make the Family Great Again! and There are only TWO genders: Male & Female. Merry Christmas.

[Read: What is this ‘Christmas’ you speak of?]

Sitting at a nearby table was 81-year-old Susan Holland and her husband, Buzz. Both welcomed me with a nod as I pulled up a chair next to them. Holland, wearing a bedazzled Trump hat and an American-flag sweater with flag earrings, told me she had seen Trump in person about 10 times over the years. “We can hardly wait ’til he’s sworn in again,” she said. I asked her where she gets her news. “We watch Fox News,” she said. “We watch the regular news too.”

Over the past several months, I’ve asked dozens of Trump supporters if there is anything the former president could do or say that would make them withdraw their support. Mike Benson, a 62-year-old retired carpenter from Waterloo, was posted up a few blocks away from the venue at the Broken Record Bar earlier in the afternoon, wearing a red TRUMP 2024 hat, nursing a Bud. He told me about being out of step with his union buddies, who all staunchly vote Democratic. (He said he cast his first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan and has supported the GOP ever since.) I brought up that Trump had been praising people like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Orbán, and asked if he thought Trump himself would end up a dictator.

“Not a chance,” Benson said. “People confuse Trump’s praise for them. He’s not praising them; he’s acknowledging that they’re smart people. They’re smart enough to manipulate their population, and Trump is acknowledging that,” he said. “The devil is smart,” he added.

I asked him if he thinks Trump manipulates our population.

“No,” he said. “He puts what he believes is true out there, and if you believe that too, all you have to do is follow him. He’s not strong-arming people around. He’s not manipulating facts. He’s not militarizing government departments to go after opponents. He’s not doing any of that.”

Less than an hour before Trump took the stage last night, the Colorado Supreme Court had ruled that the former president was disqualified from appearing on the state’s ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his actions leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His campaign has already said that it will appeal the decision, and the case appears destined to wind up before the Supreme Court.

In Waterloo, Trump didn’t mention the Colorado ruling. Instead, he focused on Biden, the swamp, and the “deep state.” “We’re going to bring our country back from hell; our country’s gone to hell,” Trump said. By Christmas 2024, he countered, the economy will be roaring back and energy prices will be plummeting. He claimed responsibility for the presently high stock market—arguing that returns are up because people believe he is returning to office.

[John Hendrickson: Could the courts actually take Trump off the ballots?]

“Crooked Joe Biden” is “a low-IQ individual” and “the most incompetent, most corrupt president in the history of our country,” Trump said. “Other than that, I think quite a bit of him.” Later, Trump mocked Biden’s slow speech at a recent news conference.

Throughout the night, Trump pandered to Iowa voters, attacking electric cars, talking about persecution of Christians, and praising those who “still till that soil.” He fired off some strange ad-libs: “Does everybody in this room love their children? Does anybody in this room not love their children? Raise your hand. Oh, that guy in the blue jacket raised his hand!”

But his grotesque anti-immigrant rhetoric kept returning—a messier, ganglier version of “Build the Wall.”

As attendees filtered into the convention center, a 69-year-old man stood outside in the frigid cold and wind holding a handwritten sign. It read: EVERY TIME YOU EAT A PORK CHOP OR RIBEYE STEAK THANK AN IMMIGRANT. The man, Paul, had driven from his home in Manchester, about 50 miles east. He told me he used to work alongside many immigrants at a seed-corn plant. He said he was dismayed by all the slurs he had been hearing about foreigners. “I decided I was gonna come, I was gonna hold the sign,” and offer a message that was “at least halfway positive,” he said. I didn’t see any members of Trump’s flock stopping to consider it.

This fall, on a hike in Washington’s Olympic National Park, I found wildfire—or it found me. As I labored up a switchback trail, the air hung acrid with smoke from the half dozen fires that smoldered around the park. My windpipe burned and my head ached. The sun was a feeble orange disk; the mountains disappeared behind pale haze.

That the damp Olympic Peninsula—a region blanketed by temperate rainforest—was ablaze seemed telling. As the world has become hotter and drier, it has also become more flammable. This year Canada ignited, smothering the eastern seaboard in smoke; in 2019, Australia’s “Black Summer” released more carbon than many countries’ annual emissions; in 2018, California’s Camp Fire killed 85 people in the town of Paradise. “Fifteen years ago, a 100,000-acre fire would be the largest fire of your career,” one California firefighter told The New York Times in 2021. “Now, we have one-million-acre fires.”

[Read: A clear indication that climate change is burning up California]

Considering all of this, one could be forgiven for assuming that forests are burning more frequently than ever. In fact, the opposite is true: The United States, like Australia and many other countries, is operating at a fire deficit. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, nearly 4 million acres of forest burned between 1984 and 2015, which sounds substantial until you consider that, based on precolonial fire rates, about 10 times that area should have burned. The U.S., observes the journalist M. R. O’Connor in her important new book, Ignition, is “both burning and fire starved.”

These conditions—the fire deficit and our susceptibility to megafires—are connected. A principal reason megafires have become common and destructive is that the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies have quelled minor fires for a century, thus allowing fuel—brush, shrubs, dense clusters of skinny saplings—to accumulate on the landscape. By routinely stamping out smaller, beneficial fires, land managers have inadvertently spawned gargantuan infernos that threaten lives and property, a disastrous loop that climate change only exacerbates. This, O’Connor writes, is the fire paradox: “Putting out fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes.”  

Ignition investigates both sides of the paradox; its primary focus is on the side that gets less attention, the U.S.’s “missing fire.” Once, O’Connor explains, Homo sapiens inhabited a world of flame. Many fires were ignited by lightning, but most were anthropogenic, set by Indigenous “pyrotechnicians” to stimulate the growth of food plants and enhance habitat for game animals like deer. In New York’s Catskills, up to 95 percent of fires were once Native-set, producing a “nut orchard” rife with walnuts, chestnuts, and hickories. European colonists approaching North America reported that they could smell the “sweet perfume” of forest fires before they glimpsed land.

The preponderance of fire honed nature. Plants and animals evolved to exploit the low-intensity blazes that regularly swept through forests and grasslands. Lodgepole pines developed serotinous cones, which require fire’s heat to free their seeds; sequoia saplings thrived after fires opened canopies and permitted the ingress of sunlight. In the 20th century, however, fire became ignis non grata on American landscapes. In 1935 the Forest Service adopted its infamous 10 a.m. policy, which, as O’Connor writes, meant that any new fire, whether sparked by humans or lightning, “should be under control by ten the following morning.” In her telling, America’s fixation on fire suppression stems largely from its bias against Indigenous practices. Forest Service scientists dismissed traditional burning as “Paiute forestry” unbefitting an enlightened society. Later, environmentalists advocated for preserving forests as “untouched wilderness,” heedless of the Native people who had artfully managed them for millennia.

Although O’Connor persuasively argues that fire suppression has roots in racism, she might have spent more ink implicating capitalism. As the journalist Timothy Egan notes in The Big Burn, his comprehensive history of a legendary 1910 fire that seared the Inland Northwest, commercial logging interests and their political toadies first pushed the Forest Service to stamp out wildfire. After 1910, Egan writes, “the Forest Service became the fire service, protecting trees so industry could cut them down later.” Wilderness advocates may have contributed to the culture of fire suppression, as O’Connor claims, yet timber companies and their lobbyists are even more culpable.

O’Connor is an intrepid reporter whose journalism has taken her to Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Afghanistan; her previous books include immersive explorations of the science of de-extinction and the history of human navigation. In Ignition, she’s likewise disinclined to her desk. She travels to Nebraska to participate in an intentional, or “prescribed,” burn. She learns to wield fusees—“basically dynamite-sized matches”—and drip torches, canisters that “pour out fuel and flame.” She falls quickly for fire: its scent, its aliveness, its “intense aesthetic pleasure.” “Other than when I have given birth,” she writes, “I had never felt so integral to a life-giving process as I did lighting a fire.”

Over the course of a year, O’Connor pursues her “pyrowanderlust” to prescribed burns around the country and meets a growing “fire counterculture”—environmentalists, scientists, Native practitioners—seeking to restore fire to its rightful place. Just as every ecosystem contains its own flora and fauna, it has its own flavor of blaze, and O’Connor excels at describing these regional varietals. In the pine forests near Albany, New York, lapping flames turn “flaky bark into purple rosettes that glittered with charred reflectance”; in North Carolina’s lowlands, the “smoke smelled of caramel and hog fat and citrus.” In New Mexico, as night settles after a day of burning, she shuts off her headlamp and stares, mesmerized, at the sizzling ground: “The floor gently flickered with thousands of points of white light like a galaxy of stars had draped across the earth.”

O’Connor also explores the megafire side of the paradox, enlisting on a crew battling California’s 2021 Dixie Fire, a nearly million-acre inferno. There, she spends her days pulling hose, unearthing smoldering roots, chipping wood, and performing other mundane tasks, only occasionally glimpsing the fire front itself. The fight against the Dixie consumed significant resources with dubious gain: The operation cost more than $600 million, yet the fire raged for more than three months. Later, one fire-crew leader compares fire suppression to the Vietnam and Korean Wars: “Who are we fighting? And why?”

What we’re fighting is, in large measure, the U.S. government’s sordid history of delegitimizing and criminalizing “good fire.” In Ignition’s final act, O’Connor travels to California’s Klamath Mountains, where the Yurok Tribe singed the forest for thousands of years to improve elk habitat and cultivate hazel stems for basket-weaving—until the practice was classified as arson. There she joins a mixed crew of Indigenous people and wildland firefighters that, with the Yurok’s blessing and guidance, sets the mountains ablaze, rekindling timber and tradition alike.

To O’Connor’s delight, a third of her teammates are women, a high proportion in the hypermasculine world of wildland firefighting. For generations, one female captain says, the firefighting industry, with its flame-retardant-spraying airplanes, heavy machinery, and legions of troops, has taken a “militaristic view of wildfire as a war to be won,” a chauvinistic approach that, O’Connor writes, led “to a permissiveness around abuse of land.” In the Klamath, O’Connor glimpses a future in which people collaborate with nature rather than dominate it.

Although O’Connor doesn’t say it, wildfire literature, too, has historically been the domain of men. To name but a few books, there’s Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean’s meditation on a fatal Montana fire; On the Burning Edge, Kyle Dickman’s harrowing account of the deaths of 19 firefighters in Arizona; and John Valliant’s recent Fire Weather, which chronicles the 2016 blaze that virtually obliterated the Canadian city of Fort McMurray. These excellent works treat fire as a fearsome adversary against which humans must battle; Ignition is an invaluable addition to the canon precisely because it considers fire an ally.

[Read: We’re in an age of fire]

But does humanity still have time to heal its broken relationship with fire? As O’Connor notes, climate change has made it harder to keep burns under control. In California and many other places, the viable “burn window”—the period in which crews can apply prescribed fire without undue danger—shrinks each year. In the future, O’Connor writes, burning “will depend on people who are ready to exploit any and every opportunity as windows open and close with less and less predictability.”

It will also depend on people’s tolerance for smoke and risk. Although fewer than 1 percent of prescribed fires break containment, those rare mishaps can sour the public. Last spring, the skies over my home in Colorado blurred with smoke from a 340,000-acre megafire in neighboring New Mexico that sprung from a planned burn that had escaped human control. The Forest Service responded by issuing a 90-day suspension on prescribed fire until the agency could investigate the debacle—an understandable reaction, perhaps, but one that also perpetuated the notion that burning is inherently perilous. As Ignition ably demonstrates, though, the far more dangerous proposition is not letting forests burn at all.

Sean Durkin’s first film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, was about the complex aftermath of one woman’s escape from a modern Manson-esque “family” centered around sex and drug use. His second, 2020’s The Nest, looked at a high-society couple in 1980s Britain who buy a mansion and are subsequently haunted by the decision, struggling to stay above water as the property sucks up all of their money. Both movies were immersed in an atmosphere of gloom and anxiety that somehow didn’t overwhelm either; even as Durkin tormented his characters, he had real, obvious love for them.

That’s exactly what makes his newest work, the wrestling drama The Iron Claw, such a triumph. The Iron Claw is, like many films released in the lead-up to the Oscar nominations, based on a true story. It chronicles the lives of the Von Erich brothers, professional wrestlers who were mentored by their tough-love father, rose to fame in 1980s Texas, and were eventually plagued by tragedy. Usually, these biographical movies lean into the drama, exaggerating the shocking stuff for the big screen. The story of the Von Erich family is almost unbelievably tragic, however, as five out of six brothers met an early death, several by suicide. Durkin even removed one of the real-life brothers from his script, deciding (correctly) that one more death would be too much for audiences to take.

I realize that doesn’t make The Iron Claw sound like a tempting choice this Christmas season. But it is the kind of big, weepy, macho film that just doesn’t get made much anymore, a soaring power ballad that should prompt a lot of loud sniffling in the theater. Durkin is a somewhat challenging, arty filmmaker whose prior films left many things unspoken; The Iron Claw is more broadly appealing without losing anything that makes his work so unique. It’s rich with feeling, shrouded in darkness, but not despairing as it digs into the trials the Von Erichs faced, without merely dismissing the family as cursed.

The notion of a family curse is baked into the brothers’ lives from birth. Their father, Fritz Von Erich (played by Holt McCallany, a walking cinder block sporting a permanent scowl), was named Jack Adkisson in real life but took the “Von Erich” pseudonym because his initial wrestling character was a villainous Nazi, an easy figure for postwar audiences to boo. When the film opens, in the late ’70s, Fritz has already lost his first son at the age of 6 in a freak accident; his second son, Kevin (a beefed-up Zac Efron), is thus expected to follow his dad into the family business, and quickly becomes something of a local legend around Dallas.

[Read: A gory amalgam of truth and spectacle]

Fritz is fond of informing his sons which of them is his current favorite, running down his list at the breakfast table while reminding them, “The rankings can always change.” Durkin summons a grunting alpha nightmare environment, a hothouse of muscle-bound teens and 20-somethings all vying for the attention of their stony father and icy, remote mother, Doris (a magnificent Maura Tierney). Along with Kevin, there’s Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), a potential Olympic discus thrower who gets diverted to the family business after the American boycott of the 1980 Games; David (Harris Dickinson), who has a particular flair for the sport’s showy dramatics; and Mike (Stanley Simons), a moon-eyed musician who is roped in out of sheer familial obligation.

To wrestling nerds, the Von Erichs have a titanic legacy, and Durkin does his best to represent that by exploring the sport’s crunchy, amateurish pre-corporate age, when regional live events were the big moneymakers and television was largely ignored. Yes, the fights are scripted, but the athleticism is real and punishing. More important, as Kevin reminds the audience early on, a fighter could only succeed in the ring if the audience (and, by extension, Fritz) loved what they were doing. The Iron Claw manages a tricky balance, depicting the ups and downs of everyone’s careers and acknowledging the required showmanship, but without getting too much into the behind-the-scenes politics.

The real drama of The Iron Claw, obviously, is the awful fates of the Von Erich children, a swirling combination of bad luck, possible substance abuse, likely undiagnosed depression, and very, very lousy parenting. Although Dickinson is effortlessly charming and White brings the fiery intensity viewers will associate with his performance in The Bear, it’s Efron, as the ostensible top dog Kevin, who is burdened with the film’s big dramatic arc. Kevin is not the brightest and possibly not even the most talented of the Von Erichs, but he is the most well adjusted, and Durkin charts his difficult journey to realizing the poisonous circumstances of his upbringing.

Efron is very talented given the right material—he’s a charming doofus in the Neighbors films, and appropriately emo in the DJ dramedy We Are Your Friends. His work in The Iron Claw feels like a major leap forward, or at least a perfect match of skill and plot. As Kevin’s life drags on and his brothers’ lives are cut sadly short, Efron powerfully demonstrates the character’s perseverance and eventual acceptance that, no, he is not fated to a similarly destructive end. Durkin might be the feel-bad filmmaker of the decade, and I mean that in the best way possible: He can depict tragedy with sensitivity and grace, and somehow not let his films be overwhelmed by their darkest moments.