By December 1914, the First World War was only six months old. Perhaps it was because of the brutality of the battles or maybe it was a lack of military discipline, but come Christmas Eve, peace broke out.
On that famous night, German, French and British troops laid down their arms after the Germans decorated their trenches and began singing Christmas carols. The Brits responded in kind, followed by season's greetings and then actual physical meetings. The unofficial Christmas truce also gave both sides a chance to collect and bury their dead.
Joyeux Noel, written and directed by Christian Carion, pulls together all of the threads associated with the event and attempts to tell the story from three sides—Bavarian, Gallic and Scot—represented by Benno Furmann, Guillaume Canet and Gary Lewis, respectively. Bruhl plays Horstmayer, a German officer; Canet is Lt. Audebert and Lewis is Palmer, a priest. All sides are played fair and given equal time, and therein lies the film's main problem.
Early on, Carion develops an even rhythm, going from one character to another to another and back again. While the approach is egalitarian, it doesn't give him the chance to fully develop any of them further than being simple representations. Worse, when we see the inevitable scene of the troops getting dressed down, we have to see it (and many other scenes) three different times.
The movie's other weakness is Benno Furmann as an opera singer drafted into the German army as a private. Much of the film revolves around him, his love affair with a soprano and, you guessed it, all their singing on the Western front. While the rest of the film is based on fact or apocryphal stories, the opera is simply too big to swallow.