Karina's Movie Blog
Fred Claus - A painless holiday alternative
Neither as terrible as it could be nor as funny as it should be considering its cast, Fred Claus is a painless way to catch a new holiday movie this season without getting into a fight about what part was the lamest. The premise is interesting: Fred is the never-measures-up older brother of Saint Nick himself, and despite Fred's selfish motivation, he ends up (plot spoiler alert!) saving Christmas when even the Big Guy couldn't do it—while he saves himself in the process, of course. If I’m ruining something here, then you have never seen a Christmas movie.
I probably had higher hopes than a David Dobkin film merited (he did Wedding Crashers, but he also did Shanghai Knights), but come on! Vince Vaughan, Paul Giamatti, John Michael Higgins, Rachel Weisz, Miranda Richardson, Elizabeth Banks, Kevin Spacey ... how is this not a sure thing? The ladies (as always) take a back seat to the gents in generating farce and mayhem. But Kathy Bates comes in as the brothers' mother—the woman who caused the Rift That Almost Killed Christmas—and gives it an extra tang of reality that makes it enjoyable rather than shrill.
Besides the inevitable saving-Christmas theme (patent pending), holiday movies do tend to commit the crime of being too safe, regardless of their potential (would It's a Wonderful Life have survived today with its bleakness intact?). Casting so many people who usually come with interesting barbs and baggage in a homogenized feel-goodery is hobbling your racehorse at the starting gate. However, despite this lukewarm praise, the film does have entertainment and emotional merit and some fairly earned sentiment with real triumphs over dysfunction. But imagine what would happen if these darkly funny and wicked souls had been given a script that let them really be who we love them to be in movies!
Giamatti is genius casting as Saint Nick. He's real, in this world, so Paul plays him true to form: preternaturally jolly but also a realist. Vaughan is as Vaughan does, fast-talking and unwittingly a disaster waiting to turn epic, but he’s the most castrated by the venue. Spacey gets to be a cartoon version of Spacey, and that's okay too—but he seems uncomfortable with the inevitability of his character's arc.
John Michael Higgins (you’ll recognize him from Christopher Guest movies, at least) is Willie, the head elf, and they shot him elf-sized. Higgins being probably closer to 5-feet-10, the two ways to solve this problem are: Do the Lord of the Rings trick—carefully shooting and compositing the full actor body into a larger-than-himself scene—or paste his face on a little person and shoot a lot of long shots where he's not clearly seen. Wherever they could, the filmmakers shot Willie on the cheap, and some of the face-pasting shots are quite jarring. Considering the number of years it's been (14) since Spielberg stuck Ariana Richards' face on a stunt woman in Jurassic Park, wouldn't you think they would have that technology smoothed out by now?
Fred Claus had a huge budget, but they evidently spent it on the extraordinary North Pole sets. The modern-world-friendly, brand-name-manufacturing workshop is fantastic, and the village around it is incredible. The whole place, from each unique house exterior and interior to the gleaming halls of the workshop, has this fabulous holiday Swiss lodge–Germanic fairyland flavor, with colors and lights and patterns that dazzle but never overwhelm. And the North Pole is packed with more little people (apparently Russian circus performers) than Under the Rainbow. It's gorgeous.
If your family fights a lot at Christmas, or you suffer from parent-induced sibling rivalry, or you just love Paul Giamatti, you'll do okay renting this movie for a pleasant and mild couple of hours.
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This review copyright 2007 Karina Montgomery.
Member: Online Film Critics Society
http://www.cinerina.com
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