“Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944), directed by Vincente Minnelli and written by Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe and based on a novel by Sally Benson, opens with the Smith family waiting for a phone call. An appropriate start, since they spend the film in a state of anticipation over one thing or another: a marriage proposal, a big move, a heartbreaking goodbye, and the approaching 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair with its promise of a new age for the growing city. What better film to celebrate Advent, our season of holy anticipation?
We focus primarily on the four Smith daughters who are all at different stages of growing up—itself a sort of waiting, teetering on the edge of adulthood. Rose (Lucille Bremer), the eldest daughter, longs to get engaged. Esther (Judy Garland) wants the boy next door, John Truett (Tom Drake), to notice her. The youngest daughters, Agnes (Joan Carroll) and Tootie (Margaret O’Brien, who won a special Juvenile Oscar for the performance), are still ensconced firmly in childhood, but face their own growing pains and rites of passage. But when their father (Leon Ames) announces that he’s taking a new job in New York, all of this anticipation turns to worry. Will they be happy in their new home? What about the romances left unresolved, the friendships that will be left behind? At the beginning of the film, the World’s Fair represents a bright and exciting future. But as the move approaches, the future becomes more uncertain.
But “Meet Me in St. Louis” isn’t a movie about anxiety; it’s a movie about hope. No one embodies that more than Esther who insists that everything will work out—or, if necessary, can be made to work out. “We could be happy anywhere,” she says, “as long as we’re together.” But the impending move tests her resolve. How do you have hope when the future holds so many unknowns?
That is a question that I often wrestle with during Advent. I’ll happily sing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” at Mass, but sometimes it is just words. In my heart, I am full of worry and doubt about the future: my own, my family’s, the world’s. At the best of times the holiday season has a special power for producing anxiety, and I would have a hard time saying that we’re living in “the best of times.” But then, Jesus wasn’t born into “the best of times” either. The Roman Empire broadly was at peace, but his corner of the world chafed under foreign occupation and the capricious rule of Herod the Great. It is his birth that sparks the flame of hope and announces that God’s promises will still be fulfilled. Even then, his birth does not banish all pain and suffering from the world—but it gives us a hope that transcends all fear, a hope for eternity.
So what to do when that hope seems far away and the future appears clouded and uncertain? “Meet Me in St. Louis” offers one of the most poignant answers in film history during its climactic Christmas Eve chapter, set mere days before the Smiths will move to New York. At the end of a night full of heartache, joy and growing up, Esther finds Tootie worrying about what the future will hold. She comforts her sister with the bittersweet “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” “Let your heart be light,” she sings. “Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” Esther has no assurances that this will be the case, just the faith that as long as their family is together, they will find a way to “muddle through.” She is not making a promise that everything will be O.K., but a statement of hope that good things lie beyond the horizon, even if they’re invisible right now.
Our lives are more Advent than Christmas, more journey than destination. Someday, we believe, we’ll see the lights of a better world gleaming in welcome. But until then, we wait in hope.
“Meet Me in St. Louis” is streaming on Max and Tubi.
