Saving Christmas is Beyond Redemption
Once upon a time Growing Pains heartthrob Kirk Cameron was just another teen idol whose adorable mug adorned many an issue of Tiger Beat and its ilk. Then he found the Lord and became one of the most outspoken and vocal Evangelical Christians in show business.
Acting took a backseat to proselytizing. He’s less a Christian actor now than a Christian who sometimes acts.
In the small pond that is Christian entertainment, Cameron has become a very big fish. We’re talking Kevin Sorbo big, if not bigger. Cameron is mostly devoted to his Evangelical Ministry,,The Way of the Master these days, but he does occasionally dabble in acting in overtly Christian movies like Left Behind, Unstoppable and the surprise smash Fireproof (which cast him as a glum firefighter addicted to porn and masturbation) and 2014’s Saving Christmas, his preachiest and most didactic film to date.
Saving Christmas is a war movie. Only instead of being fought on battle fields it’s being fought places like Starbuck’s, which symbolically shivved Jesus in the back by having its baristas say “Happy Holidays” (the greeting preferred by Satan) instead of “Merry Christmas” (which Jesus and Santa both prefer).
Cameron’s harrowing war movie centers on another place the War on Christmas is being fought: in the mind of Kirk Cameron’s brother in law, the wonderfully titled Christian White (the surprisingly good Darren Doane, who also co-wrote, produced and directed), who is very Christian and also very white, but is he Christian or white enough for a movie like this?
Christian is a great husband and a good Christian but he’s disillusioned with the materialism of Christmas until his brother in law schools him, and everyone else in the audience, about how actually, splurging on luxury items and embracing materialism is a very direct way of honoring Jesus’ sacrifice, not a grotesque distortion of His message.
Saving Christmas opens with Cameron sitting in a chair in front of a giant Christmas tree and addressing the audience directly as he gushes about his love of Christmas, and all the tacky materialism and spending that goes along with it. Yet he warns that there are “some people” who feel differently. And in Cameron’s world, “different” is bad.
Cameron warns that some misguided fools think it’s perfectly fine to celebrate Christmas at home with your family, and enjoy your traditions, but that maybe tinsel and holly and carols shouldn’t be shoved down everyone’s throat from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day, and also maybe that the separation of Church and State is a good thing.
Stealing sips from an ever-present mug of hot cocoa, Cameron goes on to say that there’s a second group of fools who need to set straight. These are Christians who love Christmas but labor under the sad delusion that our culture’s relentless emphasis on consumerism and spending detracts from the true meaning of the season.
Going in, those both seem like more reasonable, even moral responses to the way Christmas is celebrated in our nation than the film’s strong conviction that Jesus really wants you to buy a big-screen TV and a giant Christmas tree with an abundance of lovingly gift-wrapped presents underneath.
The drama, such as it is, occurs at a Christmas party where Kirk Cameron’s brother-in-law Christian (Darren Doane) is moping about sullenly, unforgivably devoid of Christmas spirit. Christian is obviously suffering from some manner of low-level depression, possibly of the seasonal variety, but Kirk ignores his friend and relative’s obvious despair and instead diagnoses him as suffering from a bizarre, psychotic delusion that unchecked materialism goes against Jesus’ teaching.
When Christian confesses that he’s just not that into Christmas that year, Cameron springs into action. In a parked car where much of the film’s action takes place, he listens to Christian’s very legitimate, moral objections to the over-commercialization of Christmas and then announces that Christian is wrong about everything, and is “terrorizing” his friends and family by being insufficiently cheerful.
The look on Cameron’s face as he delivers his lecture is supposed to convey empathy and concern. Instead, it registers as stern, sour judgment. Everything about Cameron registers as fake. The smile feels forced, the peppiness hopelessly artificial.
Cameron is brittle and strident. He doesn’t have a conversation with his brother-in-law so much as he talks at him. There’s something weirdly creepy about Cameron here. The more Cameron strives to embody the child-like joy and wonder of Christmas, the more he comes off as a joyless demagogue in love with the sound of his own voice.
Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s Christian college, is listed as a production company on Saving Christmas. That seems all too appropriate, in that Saving Christmas feels so much like a lecture that you half expect it to end with a pop quiz. Like many a college professor, Cameron drones on and on and on, and then, when you think he’s stopped, he drones some more. It makes sense a college would help make this, since it aims to both educate as well as entertain, and fails miserably on both counts.
There’s something vaguely ominous in how tightly-wound and controlling Cameron is. After Christian sees the light and discovers that spending money is the key to celebrating Christmas the way Jesus intended, he tells Christian that Christian must go back into his home and announce to everyone that he was hopelessly misguided before but now understands the true meaning of Christmas, and how it’s really all about honoring the Lord’s ultimate sacrifice through proliferate spending and material possessions. In Saving Christmas, being a good Christian is largely a matter of doing what more devout Christians tell you to do, whether it’s loving a Christmas tree or announcing to an entire room full of partiers that you finally have the Christmas spirit.
If they were to reboot The Stepfather again, Cameron would be perfect for the lead because he has the dead-eyed, overly ingratiating personality of someone who could definitely snap at any moment and start killing people. Everything has to be done his way. Cameron seems personally offended, if not deeply wounded, that his very Christian brother-in-law Christian doesn’t see things the exact same way he does, and, in his most ridiculous straw-man argument, Christian argues that Santa Claus pretty much replaced Jesus in the public imagination. What a fool!
Think Santa Claus is some secular nonsense that distracts from the true, spiritual meaning of Christmas? Wrong! According to Cameron, Santa Claus is no sugary fantasy for children but rather Saint Nicholas, a gentleman we are told is “bad” meaning “good.”
Cameron offers a revisionist take on old Saint Nicholas that portrays the legendary gift giver as a totally extreme, in your face, wild-eyed maniac (for the Lord of course), who is so passionate about his religion that he smites a heretic on the cheek for his blasphemy. This is not your parents’ Saint Nick. No, this is an action Santa Claus who isn’t afraid to bring the pain when he’s not out giving gifts. This is a Saint Nick you can easily imagine in a bare-knuckle brawl.
Multi-hyphenate Doane might just have given too good of a performance. He’s entirely convincing as a man who just wants to be left the hell alone. In that respect, it’s very easy to relate to him. There’s real pain and confusion and sadness in Doane’s performance that’s the only that feels genuine here. He’s a three-dimensional character in a one dimensional movie. Christian seems so smart and grounded that it’s hard to believe he’d be so easily and dramatically won over by Cameron’s arguments.
Post-lecture, Christian is so overflowing with Christmas cheer that he can only express it through dance. And not just any dance, mind you. No, Saving Christmas ends with that hoariest of secular cliches: the film-ending dance party. Yes, Saving Christmas concludes with a bunch of white people in street clothes hip hop dancing.
The hilariously incongruous Hip Hop dance party certainly isn’t the best example of this curious breed, but it could very well be the longest.You’d understandably imagine that the film-ending dance party would, you know, end the film but we still have another five minutes to go, so Cameron stops doing the Funky Worm (seriously) along with his fellow revelers and hits us again with his closing arguments.
Cameron argues that we must see Christmas through the eyes of a child, and not an adult like Christian who asks if maybe it might be better for humanity if we fed the poor and dug wells in impoverished parts of the globe instead of splurging on the biggest Christmas tree available. Saving Christmas never responds to that argument. It might just be the only Christmas movie to implicitly encourage audiences to not think about the suffering of impoverished children across the globe and to focus on making sure you celebrate Christmas in the gaudiest, most materialistic manner imaginable.
Then again, Saving Christmas teaches us that the Christmas tree represents Jesus on the Cross and do you really want to piss off Jesus by not honoring his sacrifice in the most abstract manner possible? Because Saving Christmas is a very literal movie Cameron’s line about seeing Christmas through the eyes of a child is dramatized by having a newly joyous Christian slide across the floor on his belly so he can look up at the Christmas tree and presents as a child would.
Yes, we must all look at Saving Christmas through the eyes of a small child devoid of critical judgment in order for this to be anything other than an astonishingly bad, amateurish vanity project that deserves to be ridiculed every Christmas time as a holiday tradition of another sort.
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