Call Me Claus (2001)

There is a specific genre of made-for-cable Christmas movie that arrived in the late 1990s and early 2000s: over-lit, warmly scored, built around a recognizable star who has agreed to show up and not try too hard. Call Me Claus, the 2001 TNT film starring Whoopi Goldberg and Nigel Hawthorne, belongs to that genre. But it earns a different kind of attention, because Nigel Hawthorne died 24 days after it first aired, and what he does in this unassuming little movie turns out to be a genuinely moving performance in a way nobody quite intended.

What Call Me Claus Is Actually About

The premise is clean and well-worn: Santa Claus has a 200-year term limit. His current tenure is ending, and he needs a replacement. He has identified Lucy Cullins, played by Goldberg, a cynical producer at a home shopping channel called Shop-A-Lot, as his destined successor. The connection goes back to 1965, when a young Lucy sat on Santa's lap at a Los Angeles mall. He placed his magic hat on her head and it glowed bright, marking her as the one.

Then Lucy's father was killed in a car accident on the way home from that mall visit. Her faith in Christmas collapsed. Three and a half decades later, she is exactly the kind of person you'd expect: professionally sharp, personally guarded, with no patience for sentiment. When Nick, this tired, gentle Santa nearing the end of his long shift, shows up to audition as a seasonal pitchman for the network, Lucy hires him without realizing who he is.

The film follows their orbit toward each other. She thaws. He convinces her. Christmas is saved. You have seen this movie before, even if you haven't seen this particular one.

What Nigel Hawthorne Does With a Thin Role

Hawthorne was knighted in 1999 for services to theatre, film, and television. He won four BAFTA Television Awards for playing Sir Humphrey Appleby in the British sitcom Yes Minister, won the Tony for Shadowlands on Broadway in 1991, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Madness of King George in 1994. He was not, by any reasonable measure, a man who needed to spend the last months of his life playing Santa on American cable television.

He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in mid-2000. He died on December 26, 2001, at his home in Hertfordshire, aged 72, having returned there from hospital just in time for Christmas. Call Me Claus premiered on TNT on December 2, 2001. Three weeks and four days passed between its broadcast and his death.

What makes this strange and unexpectedly affecting is what Hawthorne brings to the role. The Variety review, writing at the time, noted that his Santa is "sweet and generous, but also ineffectual and on the verge of horrible failure with the weight of the world on his shoulders." That's exactly right. He plays Nick not as a jolly icon but as an old man facing the end of his purpose. There's exhaustion in him. A gentleness that reads as the gentleness of someone who does not have much fight left. The film did not intend for this to cut quite so deep. It does anyway.

Goldberg Doing What Goldberg Does

Whoopi Goldberg won her Oscar for Ghost in 1991 and her first nomination came for The Color Purple back in 1985. By 2001, she was an EGOT: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony. She was also one of the film's executive producers, which tells you something about how much creative investment she brought.

As Lucy Cullins, she leans into the irascible competence that has always been her strongest register. Lucy is not cartoonishly mean; she is just a professional who has built walls, which is a more interesting version of the same character. Goldberg's timing is reliable throughout. She cannot do much with a script that asks her transformation to happen on schedule rather than organically, but she keeps the movie watchable in the sections where Hawthorne is offscreen.

The supporting cast is solid without being remarkable. Brian Stokes Mitchell, coming off his Tony-winning run in Ragtime, plays Cameron with warmth and gives the film a secondary relationship that the script doesn't quite earn. Victor Garber plays Taylor, Lucy's boss, with the smooth calculation the role requires. Taylor Negron is cast as Ralph, an elf sidekick, and does what he can.

The Garth Brooks Dimension

Garth Brooks was an executive producer on this film. He also wrote and performed the original title song, and the soundtrack was released as Garth Brooks and the Magic of Christmas: Songs from Call Me Claus. This detail requires a moment to sit with. The most commercially successful solo artist in American music history at that point co-produced a Whoopi Goldberg Santa succession comedy for basic cable. It is an unusual pairing.

The music itself is pleasant and unobtrusive, which is the appropriate register for this kind of production. Brooks understood what the project was and served it without overwhelming it.

The Film as a Time Capsule

Watch Call Me Claus now and you are watching something from a specific, vanished moment in television. This is pre-streaming Christmas content made for a network that understood its audience wanted warmth, a star, and 90 minutes of no complications. TNT was competing with the early Hallmark Channel movies and the ABC Family fare for this market segment. The production values show it: competent cinematography, functional sets, a color palette that never strays far from red and green.

What the film does not have is the self-awareness that later Christmas comedies would develop. It plays everything straight. A woman really will become Santa Claus. The magic hat really does glow. Nick really does deliver presents. The sincerity is total, which is either its strength or its limitation depending on your tolerance for the form.

The 5.4 rating on IMDb and the 42% on Rotten Tomatoes tell you this is not a great film. But the Variety reviewer had it right when they wrote that the cast manages to make it watchable. A better script would have used what it had. Hawthorne's Santa deserved the movie that gathered around a performance like that and built something lasting from it. This one merely preserves it.