Rotten Tomatoes score: 9% (audience rating)
I watched this movie with some friends via Zoom last night, and I decided it was something that my zero to four readers needed to hear about. (For those of you reading this in the distant future, Zoom was a popular video-chat program that people used to communicate with their long-lost friends and acquaintances during the Horrible Horrible Plague of 2020. You can tell all your friends about it using your futuristic cybernetic telepathic brain implants! Or you can go visit them at their houses, if that's still around.)
This is a wonderful movie. It's boring, has virtually no plot, doesn't actually take place at Christmas, and inexplicably features three former kickboxing champions, one of whom is Cynthia Rothrock, who crossed over into acting in the 80s and was moderately famous for a while. It also features Robert Mitchum's son as a clean-shaven Santa Claus—clean-shaven presumably because Chris Mitchum couldn't be bothered to put on a fake beard, but the movie tries to use it as an excuse to tease the audience about his true identity. He's Santa.
I'm a little shaky on the early stages of the plot, because—full disclosure—I was out of the room cleaning up a glass of eggnog that I knocked over in the kitchen. But I think I got the gist.
A group of summer travelers whose flights were cancelled due to fog have somehow turned up at an extraordinarily bland-looking beach house. The house is occupied by a kindly woman who calls herself Nanna. (That's how it's spelled in the credits. Don't try to hang this on me. I know how to spell nana.) Nanna's husband Pop is out of the house for no reason that's ever explained, but she invites the inconvenienced vacationers to stay a few nights for free.
The travelers—a mother and father with their teenage son, a pair of beautiful sisters, one of whom is an amateur photographer, and a sleazy-looking guy named Bryan—reluctantly agree.
So far this sounds like the set-up to either a horror film or a soft-core porno, but stick with me. It's much more boring than either of those things would be, I promise.
Pop returns in time for dinner to enjoy Nanna's specialty, plain pasta with a large glass bowl of red sauce on the side. During dinner, Nanna and Pop strong-arm the guests into playing a game of Secret Santa, despite the fact that it's not Christmas time in the movie and the fact that they have no opportunity to shop for gifts.
Nanna says the gift exchange will take place "after dinner", but apparently she means the following evening. Actually, it's more or less impossible to tell what time of day any scene is supposed to be taking place. We momentarily thought the pasta meal was supposed to be lunch, but in the next shot the teenager is waking up on the couch, so I think a night is supposed to have gone by.
Everyone gathers to play a thrilling game of croquet on the lawn. I have no idea how to play croquet, and I have absolutley no athletic talent, but I'm 100% positive that if you stuck a mallet in my hand, I would be able to do a better job of it than the characters in this movie. But, after Sadie (the teenager's mother) wins the game, she reveals that her husband confided to her that he let her win as a Secret Santa present.
Think of that. This is a man who has chosen to throw a pointless, no-stakes game of pick-up croquet as a gift for his loving wife. And then he told her about it, just to make sure she didn't accidentally feel good about herself. What a catch!
This is where the movie starts to become a gripping portrayal of alienation and marital dissatisfaction. Former kickfighter Kathy Long shows us a Sadie who is middle-aged but still vital, married to a man she once loved, a man whom she desperately wants to go on loving, but who no longer has the ability or the will to satisfy her needs. We look into her eyes and see the smouldering ember of a flame that yearns to burn as brightly as it once did, a flame that has been mercilessly smothered by a life of mediocrity. As we contemplate the crushed spirit of this beautiful and broken-down creature, we wonder, what is this life, this charade, this circle game, this tale told by an idiot? Can there be such a thing as fulfillment? Is it all, in the end, just vanity of vanities?
Then all the male characters sit in a hot tub together.
That night, we learn why Pop and Nanna have contrived to bring these travelers to them. It turns out that all of them once wrote letters to Santa Claus wishing for things that he could never find a way to give them. Pop shows them the letters for them to read aloud, helpfully adding a good 10 minutes to the film's running time.
So they all exchange crappy Secret-Santa gifts and learn to appreciate each other or something. I'm probably leaving some stuff out, but I was a few more eggnogs in by the end of this thing, and my powers of concentration were not at their acme.
But I'll say again that it was a wonderful movie, and everyone should watch it.
