Saturday, December 22, 2012

Fred Claus

David Dobkin, 2007
Rotten Tomatoes score: 21%

Santa Claus has been portrayed by countless actors over the years. Some have played him as a goofy old fellow, some as a wise and benevolent grandfather-figure, some as a mysterious supernatural entity, some as a combination of all those. Sometimes Santa is funny, as with Tim Allen; sometimes he's jolly, as in Santa Claus: The Movie.

But let me tell you, if there's one actor in the world who was born to play Jolly Old St. Nick, surely it's anybody but Paul Giamatti.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The movie opens with a totally unnecessary flashback to the birth of St. Nicholas. As it turns out, he wasn't the Bishop of Myra, as you might have read on Wikipedia. No, he was an insufferable little kid born in some ambiguously Northern European country in the Middle Ages, and he had an older brother, Frederick. Fred resented his brother, because their unbearable mother so shamelessly favoritized young Nick. As the movie explains to us, Nick's later canonization rendered him and his entire family immortal, so the story resumes hundreds of years later, where Fred has grown up to be Vince Vaughn.

Now, I liked this movie, and I have plenty of good things to say about it, but this prologue was a huge mistake. The movie does its best to let us forget that Vince Vaughn is supposed to be a centuries-old immortal, since he's really just playing himself. His performance is far and away the best part of the movie, but every once in a while you remember the premise, and it just doesn't work. If they wanted to make a movie about Santa's brother, why not just use the tried-and-true storyline of having the brother become the new Santa in modern times? That way we wouldn't have to reconcile the two notions that, on the one hand, Fred Claus has lived through hundreds of years on at least two continents, and on the other hand, he's Vince Vaughn.

Also, don't you have to die before you can become a saint? Never mind.

So Vince (I mean Fred) is working in Chicago as a fast-talking, sarcastic, terminally disingenuous repo man. He has a girlfriend who cares for him but dislikes his lifestyle and his flakiness. He also has a bad habit of getting into debt, and he now needs $50,000 for a (seemingly shady) business venture. After passing himself off as a charity bell-ringer in part of his latest con job, he finds himself in the big house with one phone call and only one person who can bail him out: dear old brother Nick.

And now we meet Paul Giamatti. He looks, speaks, and acts as jaundiced and flappable as he does in every other movie, but this time he's Santa Claus. This is another aspect of the movie that just doesn't fit. The character is likable enough, but it's impossible to buy into the idea that this guy is Kris Kringle.

Anyway, Nick's shrill, unpleasant wife Annette tells her husband to leave Fred in the cooler, but Nick's generosity shines through, and he agrees not only to bail Fred out, but to hire his prodigal brother to work in the family business for a few weeks. Fred is reluctant, but Nick offers to pay him the fifty grand he so desperately needs, so he agrees.

Fred's job at the North Pole (which enjoys 12 hours of sunlight a day and a mild snowy climate during the dead of winter) is to assign children to the naughty or nice list. He doesn't like the job, but he puts up with it. Meanwhile, Nick has received a visit from a Mr. Northcutt (Kevin Spacey), a bureaucrat who is hell-bent on closing down Santa's North Pole workshop. Mr. Northcutt refers to "the Board," but no one in the movie ever mentions what Board this is, or how on earth it could have the authority to fire Santa Claus.

Mr. Northcutt takes advantage of the sibling rivalry between the brothers Claus, eventually persuading Fred to throw a spanner into the works by marking every child "nice." Livid, Nick tells Fred that he cannot possibly make enough toys to meet the burden this imposes on him, but Fred doesn't care. Nick throws his back out during the ensuing snowball fight, and Fred takes his check and his sleigh-ride home.

In the movie's iconic scene (if anything in this movie can be called iconic), Fred attends a "Siblings Anonymous" meeting, where Frank Stallone, Stephen Baldwin, and Roger Clinton give him some perspective on how to deal with living in the shadow of a famous brother. (Oddly, the group members don't believe Fred when he says his brother is Santa Claus. Is it not common knowledge in this world that Santa has an immortal, wisecracking brother?)

Fred learns his lesson and spends the 50 Gs on a last-minute flight back to the North Pole. (We see him making a phone call and offering $50,000 cash to get to the North Pole within a day. Somehow I think it would take a little more than that.) He talks the elves into resuming Christmas production, but with Nick recuperating in bed, Fred will--surprise, surprise--have to make the deliveries himself.

I think you can probably fill in the blanks as to what happens for the remainder of the movie. Overall, it's a pretty ludicrous story, but if you like Vince Vaughn and his mile-a-minute schtick, you'll enjoy it. Certainly it could have done without the prologue, and I have no idea what they were thinking with the Kevin Spacey subplot, but overall, it's definitely


1. It's wrong for brothers not to spend time with one another.
Hey, we haven't had that one yet!

2. Naughty children always deserve a second chance.
Oh, I guess I forgot to discuss the part of the movie where this comes up. It has to do with an orphan kid that Vince Vaughn takes care of. Well, you get the idea.

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