Monologue Monday: Thanksgiving!

Who better to kick off this short work week than Christina Ricci, who my friends and I long ago dubbed "Queen of Thanksgiving Trickery." Her career seems strangely off the track but it was delicious all throughout the 1990s, the decade in which she delivered, not one, but two eviscerating cinematic speeches skewering this week's classic American holiday.

We'll kick it off with the hilarious Addams Family Values "White Meat! And Dark Meat! Take it awaaaayyyy..."

Wait, we can not break bread with you.

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf, and eat hot h'ors d'ourves. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts.

The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims ... especially Sarah Miller. And for all of these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.
~Christina Ricci as "Wednesday Addams" in Addams Family Values (1993). Screenplay by Paul Rudnick.

If that scene alone didn't earn Ricci as a Thanksgiving hall of fame, than consider its companion piece four years later in The Ice Storm in which Ms. Ricci drop kicks the festivities again:

Dear Lord, thank you for this Thanksgiving holiday. And for all the material possessions we have and enjoy. And for letting us white people kill all the Indians and steal their tribal lands. And stuff ourselves like pigs, even though children in Asia are being napalmed.
~Christina Ricci as "Wendy Hood" in The Ice Storm (1997). Written by James Schamus from the book by Rick Moody.

Jesus. Didn't Joan Allen and Kevin Kline (her screen parents) watch Addams Family Values? This is not a young woman who you trust with a family prayer at Thanksgiving.

FWIW, let me just add this: Christina Ricci deserved Oscar nominations for both of those performances, her two greatest. That's my opinion and I've stuck with it ever since I first laid eyes on both the wickedly funny former and the wicked but subtly wounded latter. Fine stuff from a gifted actor.

Tags: actors, cinema, Academy Awards, Christina Ricci, Addams Family, film, movies, film, Thanksgiving