Finding Mrs. Claus

Finding Mrs. Claus / 2012 / made-for-tv movie

Will Sasso is undeniable.

This is a bona-fide Santa movie.  It’s about fucking time.  There’s no skimping on the set pieces - all of the Vegas location shots are great, and the North Pole cabin scenes are good enough to make me forget I’m watching a made-for-tv movie (there must have been some serious Nevada Film Office kickbacks, because this thing’s got a legit budget).


Will Sasso’s Claus is undeniable - all low grumbles and furrowed brows, he’s a beaten down workhorse of a man, and his broad face doesn’t get lost behind his epic beard.  Poor Mrs. Claus (Mira Sorvino) is sick of being on the backburner - he forgets their 500th anniversary and that’s the last straw.  She jets off to Las Vegas.  

This movie makes some interesting structural choices.  I'm serious, I know it seems like I'm not, but, like, for real I am.  If I was reading this instead of writing it, I would think, this guy's fucking kidding, right?  Wrong.  This flick mixes it up.  First of all, we get a nice switch-up with the empowered, empathetic Mrs. Claus driving the story forward, who, despite being down on love, feels obligated to answer a young girl's letter to help her single mom find a special someone (sound familiar?).  Sorvino unleashes a comedy of errors as a straight-laced old-fashioned soul trying to make sense of the modern dating scene.  But back to the structural shift - this movie frees up both it's romantic leads, the hardworking single mom and the bright-faced bartender with Vegas crooner dreams - to exist in a decidedly un-christmasy universe, i.e., a regular romantic-comedy world.  Picking up the brunt of the holiday cheer, we have the incomparable Sasso and chipper Sorvino as the Platonic-Ideal prime Christmas couple.  One love-story arc sizzles with a slow-burning sexual tension, the other focuses on reconciliation and the long-haul of marriage.  The device pays off - the young couple delivers a sexed up B-plot relatively uncluttered with holiday baggage, and the Kringles bumble their way through the alien realm of a Vegas casino, spreading seasonal joy and ultimately patching up their now happy union.

A moment to reflect on Mr. Sasso:

I remember watching Sasso on Mad TV when it first came on the air.  I liked him, but I couldn't get a read on his style of humor (granted, at the time I was a younger, dumber version of myself).  I kept half an eye on him, but for a while he seemed to fall off my radar.  Then I started to watch his Vines.  And I was fucking floored.  It's commonplace to observe artists gravitating toward a medium, but a rare gift to watch an artist and a medium seem to collide into a black hole that sucks everything else into its gravitational center.  Sasso on Vine is a phenomenon.  Every detail is funny - his cuts, his camera angles, his pacing, his framing, his resampling and refilming and remixing.  And his face, that crazy bulldog face.  The comedy-nerd part of my brain wants there to be some grandiose secret formula to funniness, but Sasso makes a dumb face and I laugh.  He's too funny.  Even in something as benign as a made-for-tv Christmas movie, there were moments when a Sasso eye twitch or brow shift had me laughing hard enough for tears to well up.  The man is a goddamn force of nature.


SM - Santa Movie
ECM - Extreme Christmas Mysticism
WWC - Warm Weather Christmas
EN - Elfie Nominee - Will Sasso, "Best Santa"


Keeping spirits bright,

- Jon Bobby Elf