'Fred Claus': The Family Embarrassment

Hmm, some executive making millions a year made the toughest decision of his life a few months ago. He decided -- hold your breath -- that the title "Fred Claus" was much funnier than the title "Joe Claus." Now there's courage!

But under any name, including "Aloysius Claus" or "Von Bulow Claus," the movie would be the strange duck that it is today, a lame thing that lies laughless and stupendous in the nation's bijoux for all -- or maybe not that many, once word gets out -- to see.

A seeming Vince Vaughn vanity project, it also stars Rachel Weisz, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Spacey, Kathy Bates and Paul Giamatti, brilliant actors all, and you can't help think how great a movie they might have come back with from a script by, say, Steven Zaillian and a director like Sam Mendes and a budget the size of the "Fred Claus" budget for catering or artificial snow. But no-oooo; instead they decide to create a seasonal cash cow in the Christmas Classic Category, something that could be counted on to sell a million DVDs every December for years to come.

Vaughn plays Fred, Santa's glum older brother, a lanky loser who works for some reason as a repo man in Chicago, where he hangs out with the world's most beautiful meter maid, the Cambridge-educated Weisz. For starters, is this relationship credible? Tall, goofy-looking guy with dead-end job and world-class beauty? Would she fall for such a galumph if he hadn't already made "Wedding Crashers" in the real world? I know it's a fantasy, but sometimes fantasy can be too fantastic for its own good.

Since Christmas is approaching, Fred is turning morose and acting out. The season recalls his unhappy childhood a thousand years ago in some Middle Earth glen under the thatched roof where his younger brother -- the baby's first words were "Ho, " and then "ho" again, and that passes for wit in the movie -- was the apple of his parents' and later the world's eye, particularly every Dec. 25 for some peculiarity (no one in the movie seems aware of the reason for the season). Santa even cut down the tree where nested Fred's Bluebird of Happiness. Thus Fred has grown up for the past thousand years -- no mention of the immortality issue is allowed -- with issues; he can't get with the spirit, he loathes (but loves) his little brother and despises Santa's annoyingly tart wife, Annette (Richardson). But when he gets in a scrape, he has no problem appealing to Santa for a quick job -- it is the busy time of year, after all -- to raise some extra cash.

You see the point, of course. It's to inject a modern hipster, with his tendencies toward snarkiness and existential despair, into the treacle of a department store window version of Santa at the North Pole and play his harsh psychological reality off Santa's cornball routines, first extracting humor from the contrast, but then watching as Fred goes over to the bright side.

But from the foregoing you also get a sense of the movie's utter weirdness. It never bothers to and appears not to see a reason to set rules in its evocation of realistic and fantastic elements. They coexist without comment: You can take the magic sleigh pulled by eight you-know-whats to get there, or you can hire a plane, an icebreaker and a dog sled, though the last takes a little longer. This pretty much makes hash of everything -- there's no base line of possibility from which the movie can take off -- and it bumbles artlessly from the mythic (that banal fantasy of the North Pole as a thatch-roofed village lit by electricity and buried in silicone snow) to the mundane -- Chicago's gritty West Side.

The movie doesn't care. It lurches into a ridiculous story of Fred's inability to pitch in and in the smallest way help his brother (played by Giamatti in a fat suit that turns his fingers to bratwurst). Just to increase the otherwise nonexistent tension, a completely arbitrary accountant from Corporate (corporate what? you might ask, and I can't tell you as the movie never told me) has been asked to examine the North Pole operation from an efficiency standpoint with a view toward closing it down. At least when Kevin Spacey (the accountant) is in the picture, it's got some life, even if he seems as if he's auditioning for a biopic of Jack Benny.

Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way. (It might have helped if it had been a PG-13 instead of a PG, but who could say no to all those tiny jujubes with Mommy's cash to spend at the mall multiplex?

As a movie illusion, the thing is pretty inert. There's a nice early sequence of Santa's sleigh, with Fred aboard, racing over the Chicago skyline. But conceits such as imagining "North Pole Control" as a kind of radar room after the fashion of the modern airport don't pay off, nor does a ninja-elf security team, with throat mikes and martial arts skill. And the little kid who wants a puppy! And, after close to two hours of secular hokum, to polish it off to the tune of "Silent Night"? Talk about Christmas chutzpah!

Fred Claus (120 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for some mild violence.