The Rancid 2006 Dark Comedy Deck the Halls Is Ho, Ho Horrible!
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’ve also been writing up selected films of Danny DeVito for a much-appreciated patron. We’ve been hopping around on the timeline for that one. Last month, against my better judgment, I chose to experience the actor’s little-loved monkeysploitation stinker Going Ape! and now I’m commemorating the holiday season with a mortified look back at 2006’s Deck the Halls, a curdled Christmas concoction that pits the tiny king against Matthew Broderick in an all-out war for the dubious distinction of being the neighborhood King of Christmas.
I watched and reviewed Deck the Halls when it came out and remember it being egregiously awful in a manner that unwittingly illustrates why the vast majority of Christmas movies are bad but also disingenuous, smarmy and dishonest.
Hope nevertheless springs eternal and I try to remain forever open to pleasant surprises. Would Deck the Halls improve upon a second viewing? Would this ugly duckling of a Yuletide stinker transform into a cinematic swan?
Fuck no, alas, but I did find some very minor things to like this time around, sublime little moments in a dire oasis of curdled black comedy, labored physical shtick and muddled misanthropy.
What makes Deck the Halls so frustrating, beyond the fact that it fucking sucks, is that it has so much in common with some of DeVito’s best work and some other beloved dark comedies. Like War of the Roses, Ruthless People, Tin Men and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Deck the Halls is about damaged, pathologically competitive schemers who see life as a rigged game that you win by playing dirtier and harder than your opponent.
Thematically and plot-wise Deck the Halls alternately reminded of the pitch-black Belushi/Aykroyd vehicle Neighbors, Joe Dante’s rightly revered suburban social satire The Burbs and Frank Oz’s similarly beloved dark comedy What About Bob?
Deck the Halls shares a lot of creative DNA with a lot of memorable comedies that took big risks and reaped bigger rewards yet manages to be almost impressively forgettable. I had forgotten, for example, that the surname of DeVito’s character is Hall, which means that a title I previously only remembered as bland and generic also involves groan-inducing wordplay.
We learn the backstories for our squabbling family men in artless explosions of clunky exposition. Dr. Steve Finch (Matthew Broderick) was an Army brat growing up, never staying in one place long enough to have the kind of magical Christmas he always dreamed of. So he grew up to be a miserable, uptight adult, Ned Flanders without the warmth and likability, for whom nothing is more important than ensuring that his family follows the same rigid set of Christmas rituals year after year the exact same way.
Then one day Buddy Hall (Danny DeVito) moves into the neighborhood along with his unfailingly cheerful and supportive, as well as busty wife Tia (Kristin Chenoweth) and identical twin 15-year old daughters Ashley (Kelly Aldridge) and Emily (Sabrina Aldridge).
The one joke the unfortunate real-life identical twins playing DeVito’s improbably tall, gorgeous daughters have to share is that they’re barely into their teens yet queasily over-sexualized, scantily clad sexpots who date sailors and send Dr. Steve’s neurotic ten-year-old son Carter (Dylan Blue) into an erotic frenzy with their nubile good looks.
Deck the Halls doesn’t seem to realize that its need to intensely over-sexualize a pair of fifteen year old girls for some bad taste gags that never land reflects terribly on the film itself, not on its characters.
In Deck the Halls, our odious enemies briefly and improbably bond at a Yuletide function by spontaneously deciding to sexually harass a trio of nubile young female performers in slinky garb whose faces they cannot see, and consequently whose identities and ages they do not know.
Nothing Dr. Steve Finch has said or done up to this point suggests that he’s anything other than a figure of complete and total sexual repression, a man of upstanding moral rectitude who has never even had an impure thought in his life, let alone expressed or acted upon it.
Yet for the sake of a joke we see coming from miles away the screenplay asks us to believe that this milquetoast, G-rated fussbudget would briefly turn into the world’s crudest construction worker and start loudly, insistently cat-calling the girls in the sexy, slinky Santa-wear.
Egged on by the crude and brazenly sexual Buddy, Dr. Steve Finch begins yelling at the young women, “WHO’S YOUR DADDY? WHO’S YOUR DADDY? WHO’S YOUR DADDY?”
The answer, of course, is that Dr. Steve Finch and Buddy are both the daddies of the slinky Yuletide seductresses. When the sexy dancers are revealed to be Dr. Steve’s daughter Madison (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat) and Ashley and Emily Hall, the doctor sports a look of pure mortification that suggests that he’s extremely sorry that he got a raging hard-on, then yelled incestuous double entendres at his own underage daughter, seeing as he seems VERY concerned with his reputation and how he’s seen in the kind of small town where everyone knows everybody else’s business, up to and including who is (hilariously!) secretly a cross-dresser.
Buddy is a natural born salesman who can sell anything to anyone but he can never finish anything he’s started so he ends up moving from town to town and job to job, never sticking around long enough to set down roots.
Despite being mired in debilitating credit card debt and losing his job as a car salesman, Buddy decides to build the neighborhood’s biggest and most spectacularly tacky Christmas light display, one so dazzling and enormous that it can literally be seen from outer space.
There’s something inspired in the idea of a Christmas light display so magnificently tacky and excessive fucking Martians can see it as the ultimate expression of crass consumerism. Buddy’s actual Christmas display is a candy-colored nightmare of lights and sound and delirious excess that’s oddly hypnotic in its all-consuming tackiness and there are some clever gags scattered throughout rooted in Dr. Steve’s anxiety over losing status in his world due to his crass neighbor usurping his identity as the “Christmas guy.”
DeVito should be in his element here playing a borderline feral apogee of bad taste and terrible judgment we should nevertheless be able to both laugh at and find oddly likable, even lovable.
Not even an actor as irresistible as DeVito can make Buddy anything other than a creep who brings out the worst in a man who was already borderline insufferable. Dr. Steve deserves every slapstick indignity he suffers here, whether in the form of a horse-drawn sleigh taking him on a wild ride that ends with him plunging into a frozen lake, his family tree lot going up in flames or the doors getting torn off his car. The loathsome snob deserves every horrible thing that happens to him and more but his awfulness doesn’t make his humiliations funny or emotionally satisfying.
Like way too much sub-par Yuletide fare, Deck the Halls invites us to laugh derisively at the comic suffering of unlikable idiots who transform magically into wonderful, selfless good samaritans overcome with the true spirit of Christmas once December 25th comes around.
If directed by a black comedy specialist like Frank Oz or DeVito, Deck the Halls might have amounted to something. Instead it was directed by John Whitesell, the director of Malibu’s Most Wanted, See Spot Run and the second and third installments of the Big Momma’s House trilogy.
Whitesell seems mostly concerned with executing big, broad physical comedy set-pieces that fail on both a storytelling and humor level, like a speed skating race notable primarily for how little effort the movie puts into creating the illusion that the short, squat, fifty-something DeVito is a competitive speed skating dynamo.
There’s something weirdly reassuring about seeing the same shitty holiday movies year in and year out. I just re-watched and wrote about 8 Crazy Nights, for example. These movies are like fruitcake, I suppose.
Seemingly no one likes them yet we find ourselves craving them in December all the same, albeit for their cozy familiarity and seasonal appropriateness rather than for their non-existent quality.
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