Reel Politique: Movie Review, Fred Claus
Each December 24th, at least in our Christian nations, children retire to bed knowing that in the morning, the heralded Santa Claus will have planted beneath the communal Christmas tree those gifts that embody their most secret desires. Thus gifted, the children and their parents are cleared to spend the rest of the day basking within the glow of the familial light, enhanced by food, reunions, and the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. There’s time to hate them all the more, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, the other three hundred and sixty four.
The premise of Fred Claus is that Santa’s family is just as dysfunctional as those he visits every year. From the day of his birth, Nicholas Claus has been undermining his elder brother Fred — chasing away his bluebird of happiness, stealing the love of his mother — until he achieves “sainthood,” which means, at least in the movie’s terms, he and the rest of his family is given eternal life, and Nick goes to work for some mysterious “board” that holds the franchise on all children’s festivities, from the Easter bunny to the Tooth Fairy, to work as Santa Claus out of the North Pole branch. Fred, meanwhile, ends up Chicago as a repo man. If there is no hope for the Claus clan, what is to become of the rest of us?
Fred Claus is a good premise, or at least seemed to be so in the teaser trailer that came out before the film was probably even shot, showing Fred and Nick bickering on a couch. In the final result, however, Fred Claus is predictable heartstring pulling Xmas fare that frustratingly fails to live up to its potential. The goal of the story is to position cynical hustler Fred (Vince Vaughn) so that he has to change his stripes and take up the cudgel for the neutralized Nick, which he finally does after the film’s most glorious scene, in which Fred, back in Chicago in the wake of a disastrous sojourn in the North Pole, attends a meeting of Siblings Anonymous and finds guidance from the likes of Frank Stallone, Roger Clinton, and Stephen Baldwin.
Fred Claus is a backwards Elf, a reverse engineered The Santa Clause, but without the charm that would mask its derivative tear jerking tropes and borrowed cliches (”Fred, I have a bad feeling about this”). It’s the third collaboration between Vaughn and David Dobkin, with whom he previously did Clay Pigeons and Wedding Crashers, and in just those three short films the team has evolved from an unusual collaboration over edgy black humor material to crowd-pleasing comedies that rely on predictable set pieces. VV’s shtick is getting a bit tired. It’s Bill Murray overlain with an impatient edge, and more explicit anger. VV’s character is generally unlettered, hedonistic, a gambler and a hustler with the gift of gab and charm for the ladies. There’s the inevitable public dance scene, a bit that goes back to Ferris Bueller. Here, the scene is followed almost immediately by another standard, the “teaching an uptight guy how to dance” scene, in this case to the Stones’s “Beast of Burden.” It has an all-star cast, with Paul Giamatti, Rachel Weisz, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Spacey, and Kathy Bates — all of whom have received Oscars or at least nominations, but takes the easy way out with its broad jokes about Christmas and commerce and its treacly music, credited to Christophe Beck, that channels Desperate Housewives when it is not telling us to be uplifted by panoramic shots of special effects light shows.
The most interesting thing about Fred Claus is that it is a strike film, but not in the sense you’d expect. It’s not necessarily a film that was rushed into production to out-race the threatened writers’ strike, now in effect. Rather, it’s a film that reflects the preceding worry about a strike, found in the scenes in which the villainous Clyde Northcutt (Spacey) cuts the power, or Fred disrupts the workflow with his antics. We’ll probably notice similar evidence of worrying in other films about to come out. But aside from this purely sociological interest, Fred Claus quickly goes from “Ho ho ho” to “No no no.”