Schlock-Mas: Day Ten

THE CHRISTMAS CLAUSE

A stressed-out lawyer asks Santa for a break from her chaotic life, and learns that freedom has its price.

Lea Thompson plays SOPHIE (she spells her name in all-caps. I know it's weird, but we're just going to have to roll with it), a married woman with three annoying kids, a limp-dick husband, and a shitty job with a boss who expects his employees to prioritize their jobs over literally everything else in their lives, including such trivial matters as giving birth and being there for gravely ill family members. SOPHIE is stretched a little thin having to juggle so many balls in her life, and she has just about reached her breaking point.

Her two young daughters, both named Chuck for unknown reasons, are probably the two worst children in the world, at least as far as they are presented in the first act of this movie. They're constantly complaining about literally every single thing in their lives, pissing and moaning like they're trying to break a world record in their limited screen time. Comparatively, SOPHIE's youngest child, a baby boy named Billy, is not such a big deal, because at least he can't talk yet, so he hasn't learned how to complain. But he will, and soon.

And her husband, this simpering little worm with a ridiculous name like Dane or Dash or Dish, is supposed to be some sort of architect, but he hasn't really designed anything of note in his life, and he's already middle-aged, so time's-a-wastin'! He mostly putters around in his garage/office, trying his level best to stay away from his ticking time bomb wife and their nightmarish brood at all times. He just lets his miserable wife deal with everything, including the cooking, the cleaning, taking the children to school each morning, and the grocery shopping, even though he "works" at home and has a pretty open schedule, because he needs to be left alone to do his very important work that doesn't put a scrap of food on the family dinner table.

So poor SOPHIE's been so busy trying to be everything for everyone, a truly Sisyphean task if ever there was one considering she gets absolutely no support from her horrible family, and she no longer recalls the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. Her life is a never-ending nightmare, and it actually gets worse right before Christmas, if such a thing is even possible. Waking from a fitful, dreamless rest by the caterwauling of her indignant children, SOPHIE's day begins with burnt pancakes and a crying baby. She notices her oldest daughter, only ten years old, is wearing an astounding amount of make-up on her face for absolutely no reason, so she remarks that the child looks like a hooker and needs to go wash her face.

Then baby Billy just pukes all over some of SOPHIE's important business documents, and her worthless husband Dish Network suddenly complains that the house is too loud and he doesn't think he'll be able to concentrate on all of the important architecture work in his garage, and SOPHIE gives him a look that says she's finally reached the point where she would be perfectly fine strapping her family into their busted old SUV and driving right off a bridge into a rushing river, mercifully ending their combined existence in one fell swoop. It's just that kind of day.

After a hard day at work being humiliated by her misogynistic boss for not being enough of a team player despite her working herself to the point of exhaustion each week for shitty benefits and no overtime, SOPHIE picks her ungrateful kids up from school and takes them to the mall to see "Santa Claus" and to pick up a new dress for the evening's mandatory office Christmas party. SOPHIE is asked by the mall Santa, who sounds more like a character from a parody of one of Martin Scorsese's gangster movies than jolly old Saint Nick, what she really wants for Christmas. SOPHIE replies that she wants peace and quiet for a change, and the weird dude in the itchy suit creepily winks at the exhausted mother, chuckling quietly to himself as she hurriedly leads her children away.

While trying to leave the mall, SOPHIE runs into her old friend Marcia in the food court. Marcia is wearing a fur coat in a middle-class shopping mall because she likes to flaunt her wealth in front of the less fortunate. It's just a kink of hers. Marcia tells her pal SOPHIE how much money she's making at her own firm, and that they should really go out for drinks sometime to catch up. Then she disappears in a cloud of dollar bills and expensive perfume before SOPHIE's very eyes, which is something Marcia's been doing ever since high school, and it's never not annoying.

Immediately after this random encounter, little Chuck deliberately pours hot chocolate all over SOPHIE's new dress and then steals the car keys and starts running around in circles, screaming incoherently like some sort of cherubic gremlin. This sets big Chuck off, who chooses this very moment to tell her mother that she sucks the big one for so many reasons, rattling them all off in a belligerent tone in a very public space. SOPHIE tries calling Douche for some help, but of course he's too busy pulling his pud in the garage to answer the phone, so SOPHIE just gives up the ghost and passes out in the middle of the mall.

Waking up in a big, comfortable bed in a quiet mansion, SOPHIE finds she's wearing a fur coat that looks suspiciously like the one her pal Marcia was wearing earlier, and not much else. After quickly admiring her reflection in the mirror, SOPHIE get a hold of herself (so to speak) and realizes that she's suddenly found herself in a really bizarre situation, so she tries to sneak out of the place and discovers the creepy mall Santa, now out of his dumb costume, lamely attempting to clean the spacious swimming pool outside.

The counterfeit Santa explains that this is actually SOPHIE's house now, because he's actually an angel in training, and he's been tasked with granting SOPHIE's Christmas wish, which was, essentially, to be unburdened by her awful, awful family. For some odd reason, SOPHIE acts like she actually misses her wretched children and skid mark of a husband, and she demands her wise guy angel send her back to her hideous old life, post haste. Unfortunately, he explains, the magic doesn't work that way. According to this asshole, SOPHIE has until midnight on Christmas Eve to figure out what truly matters to her in life in order to break the spell and return to her family, otherwise she'll be stuck in this new world where she's the successful owner of her own law firm and never settled down with Dork and all that jazz. Fake Santa implies that SOPHIE must reconnect with Dingus in this world in order to do that, then he fucks off for Las Vegas, because he also has a crippling gambling addiction and figures having a few days to kill on planet Earth is the perfect excuse to scratch that old itch.

I don't understand this plot. The angel man tells SOPHIE that she needs to figure out what really matters to her in order to return to her old life, and she does that immediately, but that's apparently not good enough, because she needs to find her once-husband in this new world and get him to fall in love with her again, and only that will actually get her home. Maybe. He's not exactly sure. Why would falling in love with this guy, who, by the way, somehow became a successful architect in this world without being tied down to a wife and kids, in an alternate dimension be the key to sending SOPHIE back home?

And why would she want to go home, anyway? SOPHIE's life before she made this hasty wish was a never-ending torment, as the movie made abundantly clear. She should be looking at this whole situation as a chance to start over fresh, a clean slate to live the life she always desired, not wasting all of her time moping around her palatial estate because her terrible family isn't around to treat her like dirt every day. I understand what message the movie is trying to convey, but it doesn't work, because it never bothers to present SOPHIE's pre-wish existence as anything less than a living hell.

Weirdly, The Christmas Clause doesn't seem to care about its own plot, mostly using nearly half its run-time finding ways to showcase Lea Thompson in various stages of undress, which is incredibly bizarre considering the movie received the official "Family Approved" seal from the puritanical Dove Foundation. In addition to telling her daughter she looks like a hooker, SOPHIE refers to herself as a slut in one scene, fondles herself excitedly as she ogles her reflection in a fur coat and négligé, takes a very long and... let's say "hands-on" bubble bath, gets blackout drunk and dances suggestively in front of a coterie of paparazzi at a charity fundraiser, and also listens to her housekeeper complain about how her previous boyfriend spent too much of his time in the bathroom shaving his crotch and not enough time satisfying her in bed. And those are just a few examples of an inexplicably ribald family-friendly, made-for-TV holiday affair.

Also, the movie is ugly. Not Lea Thompson, who is very easy on the eyes, but the movie itself. The Christmas Clause takes place at Christmastime, but you wouldn't really know it from any of the locations showcased onscreen. Every location, interior and exterior, is drab and unappealing to behold, just a series of neutral rooms and buildings for the production to shoot cheaply and quickly, without even the slightest possible work performed to make any of these places look at all holiday appropriate. If you weren't reminded at the beginning and end of the story that it takes place around Christmas, you honestly might not ever pick that detail up on you own, which is a cataclysmic failure in terms of a successful holiday movie.

I remember being incredibly disappointed at the lack of seasonal trappings in 12 Men Of Christmas, which I watched back in 2014, and this is the first movie I've seen since that has been on that level, even surpassing that particular movie, since at least 12 Men Of Christmas bookends its narrative with appropriately festive sequences, complete with jolly decorations and blankets of fake snow. At least 12 Men Of Christmas tried, if only a little. The Christmas Clause can't ever be bothered to put in the minimal effort required to make a Christmas movie feel at all like Christmas, which I think is an actual sin.

That's what I get for watching another movie on UP TV. You can fault Hallmark Channel for a great many things, but they always try pretty hard to make their movies evoke a bit of that warm and fuzzy holiday spirit. Very rarely do you watch one of their movies, good or bad, and come away astounded at just how visually unappealing they are. Hallmark's got that "holiday glow" down to a science, and it seems the other networks are still playing catch-up on that front. The Christmas Clause just looks generic and dull from beginning to end, the kind of movie that makes my eyes hurt from forcing myself to keep watching despite my instincts telling me to look away from all the insipid earth tones and dreary architecture on display.

In the end, SOPHIE finds her way back to her family on Christmas Day, astonished to find her husband cooking breakfast, even though he burns the shit out of everything because he's completely fucking hopeless, and her awful kids wish her a happy holidays through gritted teeth as they all open presents under a crooked Christmas Tree. The next day, SOPHIE resigns from her job at the he-man woman haters law firm and goes directly to work for Marcia, since apparently she had just happened to have a job opening for her estranged friend, and none of this matters because The Christmas Clause is a colossal waste of time and money. I'd say it was a waste of effort as well, but we all know no effort was put into making this horseshit.

Lea Thompson was fine in her role, although she played things a little too broad during the overtly comedic first two-thirds of the movie for her character to feel truly believable during the big emotional moments that inevitably arrive at the story's climax, when she's crying and missing her family and begging to be given a second chance with her husband and children at Christmas. For the first hour, she's all exaggerated facial expressions and pratfalls in a series of wacky situations, then the movie switches gears and everything's serious business, and the story never recovers from this abrupt shift in tone, not that it was doing terribly well beforehand.

I can honestly say that I've never seen quite so much of Lea Thompson's legs before viewing The Christmas Clause, which is a bonus, I guess, but your mileage may vary. Alas, a lovely pair of legs isn't enough to save this woebegone malformation. In the words of legendary film critic Jay Sherman: IT STINKS!

Christmas Magic - the smart ass angel-in-training cavorting in a dime store Santa suit uses his God-given powers to turn SOPHIE's life upside down in a major way, but he spends far too much of his screen time complaining about how he can't wait to get back to Heaven to eat some delicious meatballs, so he's a bit of an uncomfortable Italian-American stereotype.

Assistant Chef Jen - SOPHIE's boss is just a no-dimensional dickhead who thinks everybody in the world exists to make his life easier.

Christmas In July! - The Christmas Clause embodies this trope perhaps more than any other movie I've watched since I began this Schlock-Mas nonsense five years ago.

VERDICT: FUCK YOU (BUT NICE GAMS)

See? This guy gets it.