By James Bowman on 12.5.06 @ 12:02AM
Do you still believe in Christmas movies?
Christmas movies were once so popular in Hollywood because they
offered audiences a heaping helping of ready-made sentiment on
which the industry's dream machine found it easy to build. Judging
by such lamentable recent examples as Bad Santa and the
various Santa Clause movies, this is no longer true.
Nowadays, Christmas is just a junk box of discarded iconography out
of which routine and downright bad comedies find the wherewithal to
play dress-up. And they don't come much more downright bad than
Deck the Halls, directed by John Whitesell from a script
by multiple authors. So feeble is its comedy -- and so gratuitous
its connection with Christmas -- that it should have been called
"Dreck the Halls."
Optometrist Steve Finch (Matthew Broderick) considers himself
"the Christmas guy" in his small town in Massachusetts. He is
supposed to have invented a whole series of "family traditions"
about the holiday for his long-suffering wife, Kelly (Kristin
Davis), and two kids because he himself never had any when he was
growing up as a peripatetic military brat. Then, not long before
Christmas, the raffish Buddy Hall (Danny DeVito) and his family
move in next door, and Buddy, looking for some purpose in his life
-- "something big, something important, something monumental" --
decides he has found it in the attempt to make a Christmas
light-display so bright that it can be seen from outer space.
The idea sounded promising to me. Here, I thought, was a natural
scenario for a gentle satire on the secularization of Christmas,
the oxymoronic competition in display of the festive spirit, the
mindlessness and tastelessness of the celebrity culture's quest for
that legendary 15 minutes of fame -- and, of course, of our neglect
of the true meaning of Christmas. But I was wrong. The true meaning
of Christmas is as much a closed book to the film-makers as it is
to Buddy. Or, for that matter, Steve, who is nothing but the sort
of fastidious nerd that Matthew Broderick always plays and no more
genuinely concerned with the Christmas spirit than his rival. The
movie takes Buddy's megalomaniacal light display at face value, and
he comes in for criticism only for neglecting his family on its
account.
Even apart from this failure, it is a graveyard for comic ideas,
as one would-be wacky gag after another is introduced only to be
abandoned.
* A cross dressing Sheriff (Garry Chalk), makes a brief
appearance and then disappears.
* Buddy is said to be so great a salesman that he can sell a car
to the owner of the dealership where he works and make him pay the
sticker price. But that's all there is to be said about Buddy's
salesmanship.
* Kelly is supposed to be a bad cook and the author of
unpublishable cookbooks who finally breaks into print with the help
of Buddy's wife, Tia (Kristin Chenoweth), a free spirit and former
nude model. I hope you find this bare statement of a situation
funny, for that's all there is to it.
* Steve's precocious son, Carter (Dylan Blue), is said to be "a
ten year old with a mid-life crisis," but apart from one line --
"My life isn't working out as I planned" -- nothing more is said
about that either.
* Steve's teenage daughter, Madison (Alia Shawkat), takes in
hand Buddy's twin daughters (Sabrina and Kelly Aldridge), who are
well on their way to bimbo-hood, and teaches them (off-screen) to
appreciate Emily Dickinson. The entire comic potential of this
situation comes down to the single line by one of the bimbettes,
"Maybe I should go to law school or something." You'd think that
one of the film's three writers could at least have thought of a
better one-liner.
* The twins, in turn, take the dorky Madison in hand and teach
her to do a sexy dance with them that has Steve, completely out of
character, cat-calling "Who's your daddy?" in the moment before he
realizes that he's her daddy. He and Buddy are then shown
washing their eyes in holy water from the font in an anonymous
church. Hi-larious! But that's all for Madison and the
bimbettes.
Buddy is represented as being so literal-minded that he
professes not to understand when Steve comes out as he is working
on his display in the middle of the night and asks: "Do you know
what time it is?"
"Why?" he asks. "Aren't there any clocks in your house?"
"I was being sarcastic," Steve explains.
"I got to warn you," says Buddy in a friendly way, "stuff like
that goes right over my head." But of course this is the last we
hear of Buddy's literal-mindedness, whether it is assumed or
real.
Here, the joke is not a great one either, particularly as Buddy
is also supposed to be a super-salesman, yet it might have had
possibilities if the film-makers had stuck with it. But they have
the same problem we are told Buddy has, of not being able to stick
with anything. It's this quality that also gives rise to a
typically abortive attempt to be inspirational in something of the
way of the old-fashioned Christmas movie. "All my life I have been
looking for that one important thing," says Buddy. Ahh! Poor Buddy.
Now, he thinks he has found that one important thing in making his
house light up so that it is visible from outer space.
Will he succeed and so achieve his life's fulfilment? You guess.
But you've also got to wonder if the inclusion in Deck the
Halls of clips from tear-jerking Christmas scenes out of such
classic films as Meet Me in St. Louis and Miracle on
34th Street indicates that the film-makers imagine Buddy's
quest for illuminative glory should be seen as similarly
heart-tugging -- and, if so, if this Christmas movie represents a
new low in Hollywood nincompoopery.
topics:
Satire, Books, Hollywood, Movies, Law, Military
