A Merry Friggin’ Christmas

A Merry Friggin’ Christmas

The late Robin Williams is selling “A Merry Friggin’ Christmas” as a parting gift, and if it’s not an example of his tendency to breathe more sincerity and soul into slapdash movies than they otherwise deserve, then nothing is.

In this Yuletide themed combed directed by Tristram Shapeero, from a screenplay by Michael Brown Williams has a colorful but small supporting role. He plays Mitch, the alcoholic patriarch of an extended family he’s been disappointing since the ’70s; his son Boyd (Joel McHale), a tight sphinctered hedge fund manager, sees him as a cynical, boozing crank haunted by memories of Dad ruining every Christmas with drunken tirades against Santa Claus and other cherished myths: “The whole world is full of lies, boy,” Mitch slurs at one point. “The only road to heaven is to realize there’s no road to heaven.”

As an adult, Boyd overcompensated for his father’s chaotic darkness by embracing an Ozzy and Harriet idea of domestic stability. In a marriage to Luann (Lauren Graham), in which she has such a reactive part that she seems almost grateful just to be required to stand around and react, he enforces rules and nutrition on their two kids (Bebe Wood as Vera and Pierce Gagnon as Douglas) and abandons his childhood interests in bridge tournaments and painting landscapes for a boring but lucrative job in financial services. And he becomes consumed with preserving young Douglas’ belief in Santa Claus.

Boyd’s PTSD afflicted brother Nelson (Clark Duke) asks him to be godfather to the baby he’s adopting with his wife; the child will be christened on Christmas Eve. This necessitates a forced family reunion in Boyd’s native Wisconsin during which we spend quality time with Mitch, his long suffering wife Donna (Candice Bergen), and Boyd’s stereotypical redneck sister (Wendy McClendon-Covey) and her no-account husband (Tim Heidecker), a convicted flasher and all-around pig.

If that plot description makes “A Merry Friggin’ Christmas” sound like a bleak drama about an alcoholic trying to make amends, a low key comedy of family dysfunction in the vein of Jodie Foster’s sly Thanksgiving staple “Home for the Holidays,” or maybe even a corrosive comedy of can you top this outrageousness like “Bad Santa,” then I apologize for misleading you. What we get is a patchwork combination of all those modes none of which quite gel together.

There’s also lots of broad slapstick, some wacky-angry car chases, dumb jokes at the expense of immigrant Mexicans and Afghanis, many scenes in which characters scream tediously expository insults at each other (presumably to bully us into thinking that their dialogue is funny) and then occasional moments where the movie drops intriguing but regrettably unfocused hints that it has a deeper understanding of human personality than it knows what do with.

The core of “A Merry Friggin’ Christmas” is the relationship between a father who drinks too much and the children he has damaged and failed. (One of them has edited Mitch out of a family photograph: patricide by PhotoShop). The long dawning flashback that haunts grown up Boyd is, in its way, a metaphor. “Santa,” as a character, stands for our childhood illusions, or fantasies, about what life should be the lies we tell each other and ourselves, and society tells us, about what makes an ideal family or marriage or parenting; and that gnawing hollowness many of us feel when reality falls short of the hype.

(By protecting his son’s belief in Santa Claus, the hero is also protecting his boy’s belief in his father as a flawless, compassionate all-powerful monarch: Father Christmas indeed). The conflict between Boyd’s desire for his dad to apologize and reform, and Mitch’s refusal to change i.e., between our parents as we wish they were, and as they are might have yielded quiet-sad-observant human comedy.

But not here, because this movie smothers brains and heart under forced-pandering jokes that are actually tone-deaf. There are some nice moments of performance and filmmaking (including an elaborate choreographed closing shot), but they aren’t enough to save something that seems to shy away from the very unloveliness it was supposedly made to confront.

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