Tossed salad and scrambled eggnog: an inquiry into the Holiday films of Kelsey Grammer
Kelsey Grammer has stolen valour. The valour of Being English. It begins in his Shakespearian baritone, which has seen him through decades of work as two iconic TV snobbish fops, Frasier Crane and Sideshow Bob. It courses through his look, a giant, Saxon head perched above a lounge lizard’s suit. It lands in his heart, which favours Christian family values and low taxation, which holds boundless admiration of Putin ‘Because he’s most comfortably who he is.’ Like many conservatives who dare speak counter to the orthodoxy, Grammer has been blacklisted by Hollywood. All for the crime of Being British.
But that hasn’t stopped this tireless worker from amassing hundreds of credits on screen and stage. Grammer has found a way into the sub-industry within Hollywood, the contemporary poverty row, alongside the likes of Gibson, Voigt, Caviezel. But he’s softer, rarely appearing in an Actioner unless in the Basil Exposition role. As befits the credentials of an Englishman, he’s more suited to the polished interiors of a Christmas setting, spitting homespun wisdom from the actor’s repose of mahogany chair. As the narrator in Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas (1999), Grammer settled into elder-statesman resonance, which he channelled into a perfunctory Scrooge performance in 2004. In the diptych of Father Christmas is Back (2021) and Christmas in Paradise (2022), he stomps through a family milieu as a magnetic force whose sheer charisma puts an end to disfunction. Watch enough Grammer performances, and you’ll surmise that he must have a clause in his contract ensuring that his character is A) virile and desirable to younger women, and B), that he must have regrets of his past, but come out the other side wiser and kinder. Which leads Grammer, inevitably, to The North Pole.
Mr St. Nick (2002) opens on a divine trinity. Charles Durning is barely visible through the beard getup, as his Santa, or King Nicolas XX in this world, is rehearsing for retirement. A sleepy Wallace Shawn, who lets his voice do as much work as his hat, is the wizard ready to perform the ritual of passing the powers of Santa down to the next in line. Katherine Helmond’s Mrs Claus runs around with a conniving pagent beauty essence, foreshadowing the kind of woman who would be queen.
But where is the son? Where is Saint Nicolas?
Smash cut to Miami. Kelsey Grammer dances through a mock Roman arch at the front of a conga line, cocktail shaker in hand, wearing a suit straight from Frasier’s wardrobe. Saint Nicholas Jr, who we’ll call Nick, has been living it up in Miami through his wilting salad days as a playboy bachelor.
Chasing local knockout weather girl Heidi (Elaine Hendrix), Nick thinks he’s found a potential Mrs Claus. He plots to create an online startup, designed to disrupt Christmas through e-commerce, inventively named ‘MrSaintNick.com’. It’s here, filming an ad in a Santa suit, that the gears of farce begin to creak. When trying to change back out of his costume, Nick finds that it has a life of its own, the belt buckling up and his belly magically expanding.
Yes. it’s a carbon copy of the reprehensible Disney-produced Tim Allen vehicle The Santa Claus (1994), with Santa lore rejumbled (Nick has to wear a Christmas watch, for some reason) and a certain bad-boy edge given to the single and ready to siphilitically mingle Nick.
This puts Mr St. Nick as a forebear to such dirtbag XXXmas classics as Bad Santa (2003) and Fred Claus (2007). But it’s held on much more stable festive foundations: those two pillars of Grammer which hold that the playboy having a good time must balance with wholesome familial tradition.
Miserly Nick lords over his butler Jasper (Brian Bedford), an elf in name only, who feeds him breakfast in bed in a definitely platonic Jeeves & Wooster kind of way. Despite the opulent lifestyle which is located somewhere between Ebenezer Scrooge and Charles Foster Kane, Nick hides the truth of his family heritage, a choice that predicts contemporary class-shame politics. Through this plotline, the sour taste of gone off eggnog is brought to proceedings by knowledge of Grammer’s real-life politics. After his Indian cook quits because they refuse to eat her spicy full English breakfast, Jasper hangs around the welfare office until he finds a down-on-her-luck Venezuelan immigrant Lorena (Anna Ortiz), who he can strong arm into taking a job with the vague threat of deportation. What the hell, it’s Christmas!
As Nick evades his regal lineage in scenes showing off amazing y2k special effects (Santa’s teleportation spells whisk characters away in a Avid-era whirl of low-res candy) he soon shrugs off the costume, and is back to his low stakes meandering around Miami. Aside from a few blurted Ho Ho Hos, and later, mind-reading (is that one of Santa’s canonical powers? I thought you needed to send a list for the big guy to know what you want), for the most part, Mr St. Nick a domestic comic melodrama. Heidi of course has a malicious scheme up her dress, which will push Nick back towards his new maid in search of the next Mrs Claus. There’s none of the trademark Grammer regret here, just a forcing of elements into place, of class and racial conformity. Even Lorena’s family scenes are used to constantly reaffirm her devotion to Christianity and Christmas.
Mr St. Nick comes from the heyday of Hallmark Entertainment, but strictly shouldn’t be considered a Hallmark Film. Before they pivoted to the Holiday Film business model in 2015, and truly codified the genre, the company mostly sold films to other channels, in this case ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney strand. As such, Mr St. Nick has a level of production design and detail which may be unfamiliar to the later, made-for-streaming titles. Its soft colours and gently revolving ensemble cast lends it the feel of staring into a snowglobe.
I discovered this film on the Amazon Prime streaming app, just one tile among many on an AI generated ‘Christmas Crackers’ selection. I watched it last Christmas to razz on, to perform MST3000 with my nearest and dearest. We bathed in the lazy racial stereotyping, generic plot, and slumming character actors, but found comfort in director Craig Zisk’s unexpected commitment to decoupage, and in the Magnolian grace note of the climax—raining Frogs? How about snow in Miami? Our stretching disbelief may be truly reliant on Grammer as the knight in shining armour, his toe-curling gurn of a smoulder. His sheer fabrication, the unmerited authority, is in keeping with a season that revolves as much around lucrative John Lewis tearjerkers as goodwill among men. Perhaps the valour is earned for a man who symbolises the very spirit of a Hallmark Christmas.
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