Santa's Got Style (2022)

There’s a certain language to movies that you will see time and time again, the more movies you watch. The most basic language is that of the visuals. The colour palette that makes up a movie. The flow of a character from one shot to another that makes their movement make sense. Low angles and high angles that make a character feel more powerful or weaker. All sorts of visual cues that you might not even think about when watching something.

When you dig a little deeper, you get into transatlantic accents and costume design and the music. Oh, the music that truly sets a tone for a scene. Scores can be super important at making the audience feel the way they feel. Even licensed music can hit the audience in just the right way. Every little bit of the movie is a piece of language that helps tell the story.

I should get into the written story, though, since that’s the bit of movie language I want to talk about. Well, part of a written story. It’s difficult to come up with a story that is truly original. So many stories have already been told. Everything will feel like something that came before. How many movies have been made with some unstoppable killer hunting a bunch of teenagers and killing them before one girl figures out a way to stop that killer? That’s a whole subgenre of horror movies right there.

You can break things down beyond the overall story into scenes, characters, plot points, and tropes. Certain elements that you see over and over in many movies. Part of the language of filmmaking has been using these elements time and time again. Audiences are familiar with them. A story must be told. Using familiar elements should, in theory, help an audience connect with that story. Unless that element has been used too often or too frequently. Or it hasn’t been used in an interesting or new way.

This has all been a long setup to get into the movie at hand, Santa’s Got Style. There were two things about the movie that felt very familiar. One was the story. Madison (Kathryn Davis) needed to hire a Santa Claus for her department store. She wanted one that would appeal to adults, so she went to her friend Ethan (Franco Lo Presti) to hire a model from his firm for the job. Ethan couldn’t find a model, so he did it himself without telling Madison. He thought she’d be upset that he gave himself the job. Madison fell in love with Santa while Ethan fell in love with Madison and the whole double identity thing came to a head.

Okay, so you can see the familiar story in there. Right? One of the main characters pretended to be another person and didn’t tell the other main character. Eventually, they wouldn’t be able to keep up the charade, and the other main character would find out about the double identity situation. Some sort of tension would come from that, but it would all be resolved in the end. Everyone would live happily ever after. This wasn’t a new concept to Santa’s Got Style.

Another example that immediately came to mind was Mrs. Doubtfire. The whole movie was about a divorced man pretending to be an old woman so he could work as a nanny for his separated family. It has been a few years since I saw it. Probably since I was a child. I don’t remember the specific details. But it played out much the same way. He wore prosthetics to pretend he was someone else. Eventually, they found out who he was. Tension rose, and everyone lived happy ever after once the tension was resolved.

For whatever reason, this storyline has become one that writers have clung onto. There’s something about this double identity concept that intrigues them. Glen Powell has written two projects, and each of them has used this same concept. Hit Man was about a teacher who moonlit as a police entrapment tool. He pretended to be a hit man so people would hire him and get arrested for hiring him. He fell for a woman who wanted to hire him and kept his hit man persona to keep his relationship with her. Chad Powers was a television show from earlier this year that he wrote about a controversial football player using prosthetics to pretend to be a college player and find a fresh start. The whole show was about him struggling to not get found out. Glen Powell seems to really like this double identity concept.

Santa’s Got Style wasn’t even the only Christmas movie to utilize the double identity storyline. I recently watched My Secret Santa, which had a mom pretend to be a man so she could take a job at a local ski resort as Santa Claus. This job would allow her daughter to get snowboard lessons at the resort’s ski hills for half the cost of tuition. At the same time, the mom fell in love with the owner’s son. She was eventually found out and yadda, yadda, yadda, everyone lived happily ever after.

As you can see, this storyline has been rolling around Hollywood for years. It has continued to be used because people continue to be receptive to it. Audiences like this story. The different ways that it has been told have been original enough to keep it interesting. The stylish Santa doing advertising for a department store. The father trying to be a part of the family he was separated from. The football player trying to move past the drama and get back to what he loved, football. There have been a bunch of different stories told through the same storyline that have connected to many different people.

That wasn’t the only part of Santa’s Got Style that felt familiar, though. There was a specific scene near the end of the movie that has been a part of many of these stories, as well as stories that haven’t been about double identities. Well, I guess it is specific to double identity movies, but it was sort of an inversion of a scene that has been in many a romantic comedy or situational comedy stories. Or any other story, for that matter.

There were two big moments that had the same trope involved. Most sitcoms and romcoms use the trope of one person on two dates at the same time in the same place, or close to the same place. Santa’s Got Style inverted that and had Ethan being himself and Santa at the same place at the same time, trying to have nobody notice. The first scene was a party in Ethan’s apartment where Santa was invited. By the way, people knew he wasn’t really Santa. He was Rafe, Ethan’s cousin. Or so Ethan said. Anyway, Rafe and Ethan were both supposed to be at the party, so Ethan had to go upstairs and change into costume to allow Rafe to be there. The other scene, the one where he was found out by the department store’s security officer, was a fashion show that Ethan was supposed to be helping run while Rafe was supposed to walk the catwalk. Each scene was a balancing act for Ethan to try not to get found out.

Now we will go back to My Secret Santa, where the same thing happened. Not the same exact thing, but the idea was the same. There was a party held by the owner of the ski resort that both the main character and her Santa were invited to. She had to keep excusing herself to the washroom to switch into or out of costume. That was, until someone ran into the party and said her daughter had been injured on the ski hill. She dropped her entire second identity at that moment because her daughter came first.

Mrs. Doubtfire managed to merge the two opposing tropes into one double trope. The main character was invited to his ex-wife’s birthday party as Mrs. Doubtfire. At the same time, he was invited to a meeting at the same restaurant, as himself, with the CEO of a television station about a new children’s show. He had to switch in and out of costume while also participating in both dinner reservations. Double identity movies always tend to have the in and out of costume scene, an inversion of the two dates at once trope.

As you can see, this trope has been used time and time again in stories where a character had a second identity. What better way to ratchet up the tension than to have the character need to be both personas at the same time? The character will get anxious. The audience will get anxious. It will make the movie more suspenseful and, hopefully, more entertaining.

This is how the cinematic language works. When a person speaks, there are certain words that fit with each other in ways that other words don’t. They’re just more satisfying when spoken together than when other words are in their place. That’s the same with certain scenes in certain movies. A story arc about someone with a double identity always feels better when they’re at risk of being exposed. That conflict drives things forward or brings things to a conclusion.

Santa’s Got Style wasn’t the best movie. It wasn’t the most entertaining movie. But, when it came to the script, it used a familiar story and the tropes within to tell what could have been a compelling tale in better hands. It was really only the set design that didn’t quite work. The movie had no reason to look as cheap as it did. One bad chapter does not make a bad book.

There are many bits and pieces to the cinematic language. The story structure and the tropes that come with it are only one part of the whole. They give the backbone for the movie, but all the decoration still needs to be put around them. The performances, the set design, the shots, the colour palette, the sound editing… There are many parts that work together to make the language more beautiful than it has any right to be.

That’s the beauty of film as an entertainment medium. The basic language of cinema is only the starting point. Like many languages, there are ways you can add flourishes. You can spruce things up to make them look, feel, and sound better. The stories and the tropes are only the starting point. It’s what happens with them that makes the movie magic.

Now for a few quick notes to close this post out:

• The only returning actor in Santa’s Got Style was Lanette Ware, who had a role in The Christmas Consultant.
• Have you seen Santa’s Got Style? What are your thoughts on the double identity story? Let me know in the comments or find me on Threads or Bluesky.
• Threads, Bluesky, and the comments are great places to suggest movies for me to watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.
• Okay, a quick look forward. I got this post done a lot quicker than I expected, thanks to a snow day. I’ve already got another Christmas post lined up. I watched A Wrestling Christmas Miracle, a movie from the same people behind A Karate Christmas Miracle. I had to check out the other one. You know? Anyway, yeah, that’ll hopefully drop next week. See you then.