Rating:
All of us, as human brothers and sisters living together on the planet Earth, enter into a social contract with one another. One of the primary stipulations of that contract is that none of us will ever enjoy anything with a live action Tim Allen in it. It’s for our own good and, really, it’s just common sense. As remarkable as it seems, The Santa Clause forces us to violate the terms of that contract.

But it doesn’t seem that way from the start, believe me. Though it manages to redeem itself, the movie has to work hard to overcome the shakiness of its opening half hour.

Tim Allen is Scott Calvin, a divorced toy company executive whose son, Charlie (Eric Lloyd), seems much happier with the new man in his mother’s life than with his own father. (This new man happens to be Judge Reinhold. That seems to be a lateral move at best.) Charlie is spending Christmas Eve with Scott, but he’s not particularly thrilled about it.

In all these early scenes, before it becomes a movie about Tim Allen being Santa Claus, this unfortunately is just a movie about Tim Allen being Tim Allen, with all the unendurability and unpleasantness that suggests.

Young Charlie isn’t much better at this point, either. “How come we never do what I want to do?” he whines at his father, who has been trying his level best to make an enjoyable Christmas for his son. “How come everything I want to do is stupid?”

Let me tell you about what Charlie wants to do.

In the middle of the night, Charlie and Scott hear a commotion coming from the rooftop. When Scott goes outside to investigate, he finds a man in a Santa Claus suit mucking about atop his house. He calls out, the man slips and falls. Scott finds a card in the man’s pocket that says if anything should happen to the ostensible Santa, whoever finds the card should put on the red suit and trust some reindeer to know what to do.

That’s what Charlie wants him to do. When his dad reacts to this idea with perfectly understandable skepticism, Charlie is outraged and the audience is meant to take it as evidence that Scott is a bad father.

In fact, the whole essence of the movie is that doing the work of Santa Claus helps Scott make a necessary self-improvement, since he was such a lousy person and crummy father. But I’m not buying that. Yes, he’s sarcastic and curt with his ex-wife’s new husband, but is that really so shocking? And he does work long hours, then call his ex-wife and lie about having been stuck in traffic. So he isn’t perfect (I’m sure this is hardly the first time he’s come home late). But he’s basically normal when it comes to his relationships with other adults, and his relationship with his son seems to be the place where he makes the most effort to do what’s best.

But he doesn’t want to put on a stranger’s unlaundered clothes and climb onto an icy roof, so he is an Inveterate Humbug in Need of Reform.

Fortunately, once you get past the movie’s opening, with its unapologetic use of Tim Allen, twisted ideas of good citizenship, and totally out of place fart humor—oh, and the fact that the whole story hinges on Santa Claus dying in an accident—The Santa Clause actually becomes a pretty good movie.

By donning Santa’s gay apparel, Scott unwittingly entered into a binding contract; he’s now legally obligated to be the new Kris Kringle. This is when the movie takes off and offers two separate kinds of entertainment.

On the one hand is the magical world of Santa Claus. Reindeer fly and a magic bag spews forth a seemingly endless series of toys. The question of how Santa gets into houses without fireplaces is dealt with. The wonderland of Santa’s headquarters at the North Pole has never been quite so fantastic—trains and colored lights and candy canes are everywhere, and we meet many elves hard at work keeping the whole Christmas enterprise running. These sequences are Christmas magic of the finest kind.

In addition to these scenes, the movie explores what happens to an ordinary guy—a guy with a life and a career and a family—when he actually becomes Santa Claus. As Scott moves from not believing his new situation to reluctantly accepting it to, ultimately, embracing everything about it, he goes through other changes as well. He puts on weight in record time regardless of diet or exercise. He shaves in the morning, but by afternoon he has a full and bushy white beard. Everyone thinks he has essentially lost his mind, from his colleagues at the toy company who can’t understand his new attitude about the way Santa is portrayed in TV commercials to his ex-wife and her husband, who think he’s becoming a dangerous influence on Charlie.

These scenes, the heart of the story, are by turns funny and winning and emotional, or all at once, and the heartwarming, tear-in-your-eye moments are always handled with a deft touch. Scott and Charlie grow closer than ever before and everyone learns a little something about the power of believing in magic.

And that’s what a good Christmas movie is all about.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
• The Santa Clause 2
• Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town
• A Wish for Wings That Work
• Dateline North Pole