MISTLETOE OVER MANHATTAN
Mrs. Claus takes a job as a nanny for a couple going through a divorce and tries to repair their marriage.
I literally forgot the name of the movie I watched today. I was sitting here getting ready to begin my review, and I realized I had no idea what this movie was called. I had to look up the IMDB filmography of the movie's star, Tricia Helfer, and scroll down to 2011, when this movie originally premiered. And there it was, Moonlight & Mistletoe- err, Mistletoe Over Manhattan. That title simply was nowhere to be found in the recesses of my mind. I'm not sure why I didn't retain this information, really. I mean, it's not a great name by any means, but it isn't insultingly inane, either. Maybe that's why I had no problem remembering Charming Christmas; that title was so insultingly banal that it actually pissed me off. But at least the title of today's movie actually ties in to the film itself, so I guess that's something.
Our story begins in 1932, and Santa and Mrs. Claus are visiting the observation deck of the newly-opened Empire State Building in New York City. Santa looks like an old guy in a bad wig, and Mrs. Claus looks like she recently escaped from an institution for the criminally insane. They exchange some pointless banter and then suddenly it's present day, and Santa's sitting around the cramped quarters of his work shop, surrounded by brightly garbed elves as they hustle to and fro, doing whatever it is they do around this place, which appears to be mostly moving empty boxes from one end of the workshop to the other.
Santa's a little down in the dumps because everybody seems to be on the naughty list, these days. Nobody's into the spirit of the season, the spirit of charity and generosity. He's appalled at the level of entitlement and selfishness the youth of today exhibit, and is even contemplating retirement if things don't turn around soon.
In short: Santa's suffering from a serious case of seasonal depression. He's not eating right, he's barely sleeping, and he's just insufferable to be around. Even his chief elf, some weirdo named Sparky who eats rocks and grew up on a magic mistletoe farm, is noticing the change in the big guy's mood, and he doesn't like it one bit. He doesn't do anything about it, because Sparky is shockingly inept, but he sure doesn't like it.
Enter Mrs. Claus. This bug-eyed battleaxe hears that her man is thinking about hanging up his ill-fitting red suit and just loses her shit. She decides to get the fuck out of the North Pole and return to the concrete jungle of New York City to find the Christmas Spirit in an effort to raise her husband's morale and convince him not to abandon his holy mission to reward the overly materialistic children of the 21st Century with more material goods. She hopes to find individuals who are just bursting with the qualities that make Christmas the king of all holidays and use them as examples that the Christmas Spirit is not ailing in this modern era, but thriving.
Mrs. Claus waits until Santa passes out from exhaustion after a long night in the workshop trying to perfect some daffy dancing bear toy that he thinks will be a big hit with the kids and sneaks out to New York, via some arcane means to which we are never made privy, and that doesn't sit right with me. One moment, she's staring at her sleeping husband with those unnervingly empty eyes of hers, and the next she's wandering around Manhattan with an 80 year-old map and bizarrely modern luggage, which makes no sense. Where'd she get the new suitcase with the extendable handle and the wheels on the bottom? She clearly doesn't get out much, but she somehow has access to this brand-new luggage? Wouldn't it have made more sense, thematic-wise, if Mrs. Claus, being out-of-step with a post-industrial society, carried antiquated luggage? She doesn't know what tofu is, for pity's sake, but she's got a swank new suitcase. That's bullshit.
Eventually, Mrs. Claus finds herself drinking bad coffee in a shitty diner, worrying about her next move since she doesn't have enough money to pay for a hotel room and doesn't want to end up sleeping up on the streets like some common hobo. Suddenly, some little kid in a purple coat just leaps off his stool and steals her fucking purse, running like a man possessed out of the diner, but he ends up running right into a cop who was literally standing right in front of him because apparently this little thief's either rock-stupid of blind as a bat. Confronting the thief, Mrs. Claus refuses to press charges because she believes in the inherent goodness of the little boy who is staring daggers at her with his dull, black eyes, and the cop lets him go with a warning, because he's got better shit to do with his lunch break then schlep down to the local precinct and book a ten year-old boy on purse snatching charges.
Mrs. Claus insists the cop, named Joe Martel (Greg "thick as a" Bryk) join her for lunch, and he agrees, because otherwise this movie's main plot would never get off the ground. Joe just starts rambling to this perfect stranger about how his wife is divorcing him even though he still loves her, and he wants to work things out with her despite her already having moved on with another, richer man who owns several midsize sedans and two expensive smoking jackets, and he's got to cover a buddy's shift tonight even though he's supposed to be watching his two kids, and it's just all too much. This idiot just keeps blabbing and blabbing, spilling his fucking guts to this clearly insane woman in a crowded diner, sharing far too much personal information and just generally coming across as an annoying Chatty Kathy.
Luckily for Joe, Mrs. Claus, who introduces herself as Mrs. Clausberger (good save), volunteers herself to watch this sap's kids for the evening, and even though they've just met and Joe has no idea who this woman is, he takes her up on her offer, immediately dragging the strange old lady to his estranged wife's home to meet the kids. Joe's soon-to-be-ex Lucy (Tricia Helfer) is understandably wary about allowing this interloper to watch their kids without first vetting the woman with a series of hard-hitting questions. She instead throws two softballs at Mrs. "Clausberger", who provides a pair of distressingly vague answers that don't really answer the questions at all, because if she directly answered the questions she'd have to use trigger words like "flying reindeer" and "Santa's elves", but this textbook case of deflection is apparently good enough for Lucy, who invites Mrs. Claus to stay in her home as the family's new nanny, at least until Christmas.
Mrs. Claus notices that when they're around one another, Joe and Lucy tend to yell at each other and cry quite a bit, so she just naturally assumes that they're both still in love and decides to meddle in their personal lives to get these two lovebirds back on that horse the French call amor. She dazzles the kids, a little boy named Targus and a teenaged girl named Biscuit, with her delicious North Pole recipes and her off the chain decorating skills, making the entire house look like the Christmas corner at your local Wal-Mart.
But the parents are a tougher nut to crack, because no matter how much they may still love each other, every time they're in the same room they can't help but argue, dredging up the painful past with Joe's constant absenteeism and Lucy's lack of emotional availability, and it's all very real, and also very out of place with, shall we say, the lighter elements of the film.
Moonlight Over Manhattan- err, Mistletoe Over Manhattan, is tonally schizophrenic, jerking back and forth between screwball scenes of harmless frivolity and slapstick with Santa Claus and his goofy sidekick Sparky to realistic moments of pain and bitterness and regret with Lucy and Joe as they confront the triumphs and tragedies of their dying marriage. The titanic levels of dissonance created by these two different movies violently smashing into each other time and time again makes the simple act of viewing Mistletoe Over Manhattan an emotionally painful experience.
In the first five minutes of this movie, we cut directly from a scene of Lucy weeping alone in her home after her most recent argument with Joe:
To Santa Claus comically sneaking out of his own workshop after some random device breaks down and begins belching steam, causing the elves to panic:
This is fucking crazy. Movies aren't supposed to unfold in this manner. People who write screenplays are supposed to know not to make mistakes such as these. Why would anybody think piecing together a story in such an incongruous manner is permissible? These scenes don't play together at all. They belong in two completely different movies belonging to completely different genres, and that's exactly what they feel like, so when played one after another, they leave the viewer feeling confused and disoriented.
Here's another example: there's an extended sequence that's split into two different scenes spliced together, one following Joe and Lucy as they argue about Lucy's recent promotion and her potentially moving in with her new wealthy beau inside the house, and the other following Mrs. Claus, later joined by Targus and Biscuit, as she reunites with Santa and his vestigial twin Sparky out in the back yard in the middle of the night.
Inside the house, it's a "for your consideration" Emmy showcase with Tricia Helfer and Greg Bryk both swinging for the fences with their heartfelt performances, and outside the house, this high drama is being completely undermined by the antics of a manic old woman swapping ridiculous dialogue with some dingus in a dime store Santa suit, surrounded by some sincerely appalling production design work that tries and fails to transform a lush, green Vancouver yard in the middle of August into a snowbound New York yard in late December.
This sequence drags on forever, with Mrs. Claus comically banishing Santa and Sparky into the bushes to hide whenever Joe or Lucy deign to look out the window to see what the hell this other movie in the back yard is up to, and Santa and Sparky lumbering back into frame, huffing and puffing whenever the coast is clear. This sequence serves to break the narrative entirely, and it never has a chance to recover afterward. The movie was having serious trouble juggling both plots before now, but this shockingly produced sequence finally kills any hopes of salvaging the story. The fact that any of this tripe was allowed to be filmed at all beggars belief.
And there's an artless technical component to the outdoor scenes that I found highly distracting, beyond the shoddy production design. Throughout the sequence, there appears to be what I first thought was a spotlight focused on Mrs. Claus that follows her as she flails around the back yard trying to keep her husband out of sight. There is clearly a circle of light following her around the frame, with the corners of the frame significantly darker.
But I soon realized that there was no spotlight trained on the actress at all, because there were no shadows being cast by this light and instead of serving to truly brighten anything, this circle of "light" merely flattens the contrast, crushing any sense of depth in the frame. It finally occurred to me that this "spotlight" was just some cheap plug-in effect added to the sequence in post-production because the director of photography had failed to sufficiently light the set when the cameras rolled.
Here is an example of the effect I'm talking about:
Doesn't that look fucking horrible? It's pathetic that this crap was allowed to remain in the film. But by the time anybody realized their mistake, it was too late to re-shoot anything, so they were left with no good options. But Lucy and Joe get back together after they kiss under some magic mistletoe provided by Sparky, and Santa gets his mojo back because watching these two lost souls come back together has restored his love of Christmas, and I don't give two shits about any of that, because I'm busy hating this movie for completely wasting my fucking time.
Sure, Tricia Helfer and Greg Bryk were very good in their respective roles, but their roles and their entire story were completely buried by the wacky antics of Mrs. Claus and her dipshit husband's adventures in how not to make toys. Mistletoe Over Manhattan is a fucking train wreck, and I despise its very existence. It took three brain-dead assholes to write this movie, and they all deserve coal in their stockings every year from now until the end of time.
Tropes?!
Scrooged - This movie's plot is all about Mrs. Claus convincing her husband to believe in the spirit of Christmas by helping Lucy and Joe to rediscover their love for each other. So Santa Claus is the real Scrooge here.
Secret Santa - Duh.
Christmas In July! - Look at this shit. Just look at it.
I rest my case.
VERDICT: FUCK YOU
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