“The Christmas Story” trailer.

The reviews are in for the 400-theatre simulcast last week of Glenn Beck’s two-and-a-half-hour and $20-per-ticket one-man show, “The Christmas Sweater: A Return to Redemption,” and based on reactions from non-Beckerheads, Beck’s performance stank so egregiously that Beck’s fellow travelers in the right-wing pro-Christmas junta are probably wondering which side he is on in the War on Christmas.

Let me say up front that I have not read Glenn Beck’s novel, “The Christmas Sweater,” a wildly fictionalized account of his mother’s death 30 years ago. I also did not see — didn’t even know about — the one-man show based on the book that Beck took on tour last year. And I won’t be attending the repeat screening of the simulcast here in Los Angeles this Thursday, Dec. 10.

But none of that stopped me — nor should it stop you, dear reader — from enjoying a nice long soak in the frothy ooze of schadenfreude over the hilarious reviews, which kept me positively bubbling with holiday cheer all weekend.

The Story

First, here’s a short version of the plot from True/Slant’s Joseph Childers:

Eddie — a 12 year-old kid that is/isn’t supposed to be young Beck — is traumatized when his father kicks it at an early age, and quickly becomes an ungrateful twerp to his newly-widowed, now-poor, mother. Posing young Glenn Beck as a nasty, petulant little shit is probably the only believable part of the whole narrative. So, anyway, little Eddie wants a shiny new bike for Christmas, but the family’s heavily reduced income puts the kibosh on that plan. Cue the saintly single mother’s knitting skills, and soon enough the titular sweater sets the whole saccharine scheme in motion. Obviously, like most spoiled kids, Eddie regards handmade as almost as lame as second-hand, giftwise. He tries to feign gratitude for the sweater while at the grandparent’s house, but does a piss-poor job of acting (foreshadow of Grown Beck?), and Mom nixes their plan to stay the night there since he’s being such a brat. She decides to drive them home, in the rain, despite being pretty tired. See where this is going? Yep: Smash Crash Mommy Go Bye Now.

Now Mommy and Daddy can hang out in Heaven! Except, oops, now little Eddie doesn’t believe in it, or God, anymore. A more accurate title would’ve been Little Glenn Beck’s Atheist Summer, but something tells me the marketing guys would’ve 86’d that. So, Eddie’s now living with the grandparents, hating God, and just generally acting like an all-around insufferable twit. Almost out of spite, he befriends a mysterious farmer neighbor, Russell, who, like most of the adult characters, speaks exclusively in cornpone cliché. But forget that guy for a second, because Grandpa’s ‘bout to drop a bombshell. They bought Eddie his bike!

Or they did, back at Christmas. But Eddie was being such a jerk about his other gifts that they decided to “punish” him by sending him home sans bike. And, of course, that means they also ended up sending him home sans Mom. Naturally, Little Orphan Eddie is pissed at hearing this, and soon runs away on his ‘new’ bike. But then he gets lost in a cornfield during a storm, wrecks his bike, and is basically screwed. (Re) enter Russell, who delivers the least-believable monologue in stage/movie/anything history, the gist of which is something like this: “Be a man and walk through the storm because all of life is storms and rain and thunder but also God and your mom and love and something something strained metaphor.” So, naturally, Eddie grows a pair and hikes back home, lesson learned. The End? NOPE. Turns out, he spent the night at the grandparents on Christmas and dreamed the accident and everything after.

(For a more detailed recap of the story, check out Dave Holmes’review at American Aquarium Drinker.)

In case you’re wondering about the real facts of Beck’s early life, he was born (in 1964) and raised in Washington state. Until 1977, when his parents divorced, the family operated a bakery in Mount Vernon. Beck, then 13, moved with his mother to Sumner. Two years later, she and a male companion both died mysteriously during a boating outing in the Puget Sound. It has never been confirmed whether the deaths were accidental, dual suicides or a murder-suicide, but Beck has said he believes his mother killed herself. After his mother’s death, Glenn lived with his father in Bellingham while he finished high school.

Reviews of “The Christmas Sweater”

Rude Pundit (who refers to himself in third person):

The Rude Pundit would rather have his balls waxed by a beautician with hooks for hands than have to sit through Glenn Beck’s performance of “The Christmas Sweater” again.

And:

Beck’s performance involves lots of throwing himself on the floor, rolling around, doing stereotyped voices for every character, and crying, to the point that at some point it becomes a parody of crying. That would probably be when Beck is fetal on the ground, sobbing while the fat black woman sings something. Al Pacino at his most scene-chewing, barking mad would look at Beck and say, “Too far, motherfucker, too far.” Oh, and he uses a teleprompter.

The script itself (and one presumes the book) is so vilely calculating, conceived to parade every possible cliche’ in front of us, that, if Beck were a smarter man, it might seem like some Andy Kaufman-esque prank that mocks the audience for believing there actually was an America in the 1970s, when this takes place, where kids rode red bikes and said, “For Pete’s sake” and “Golly” and “This is the bestest Christmas ever” (that’s not a joke). It’s like he took every overused Christmas story element short of a Grinch, tossed it into a blender, and then threw in a bleeding Jesus doll.

The Christmas shit is fine, bland, whatever. But when the story gets into redemption mode? That’s when it goes bugnuts. Beck’s image of the swirling storm that represents life’s challenges and the urgings of Russell are the stuff of sub-Joel Osteen hope-mongering. And it left the Rude Pundit wondering, “What’s that skeevy fucker up to?” Beck’s put himself into the role of motivational speaker, about how once you face the storm in your life, you can heal or some such shit. Fuck him. Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s brilliant new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive-Thinking Has Undermined America. It is like a wrecking ball to this entire heal yourself movement.

But, mostly, Beck is a fucking liar, a con artist, and a sociopath. After the video of his sweaty, slobbering, sobbing performance, Beck cries and tells us that his publisher made him change the ending to have Mom come back to life. How does the Rude Pundit know Beck is lying? If all that choking up and crying is real, this fucker is dangerous to himself and others. Besides, he’s got a fucking tell. His pause just before each time his throat catches. It’s consistent and exactly the same each time. No one cries the same way every time.

But that’s not the worst of it. Put aside for a moment that the entire enterprise was a two and a half hour infomercial to make us buy his goddamn book. The lies just start to pile up. Beck told us he was going to reveal the truth behind the story. But he doesn’t. He teases us with the notion that “elements” of it are true so that people watching it conflate his story with Eddie’s. But that’s another lie, a lie he doesn’t dispel at all. He’s not Eddie, his mom didn’t die on Christmas, his parents got divorced – death is less messy than divorce, no? – but Beck is consciously tricking his audience into believing a story that is as much a fantasy as It’s a Wonderful Life. Beck’s redemption wasn’t an overnight transformation in a cornfield when he was 12. It was actually years of work to overcome alcoholism to be the dry drunk, hateful maniac he is today.

Joseph Childers had more to say about Beck’s sweating:

How Can One Man Expel That Much Liquid From His Body?

If Barney Frank and Michael Moore ran a marathon train session on Rush Limbaugh, I doubt it would produce the amount of sweat Glenn Beck expels in five minutes. Not even counting the words coming out of his mouth, I’m amazed at the amount of disgusting stuff that exits this guy’s body on stage. Spittle, sweat, and tears ooze of out of him constantly; I think I counted four shirt changes in an hour and a half. Nipples, shoulders, neck, stomach: every part of Beck’s body is a soldier in his sweat army. I was in constant awe at Beck’s inability to stay even moderately dry for more than two minutes…

Dave Holmes noticed Beck’s excretions, too:

Glenn Beck starts crying almost immediately. Like, in his introductory comments. Like, very early in his introductory comments. Like, literally fifteen seconds into the show. And his tears are the tears of someone who’s trying very, very hard to produce tears. Is there anything more uncomfortable than being in the presence of someone who’s trying to make himself cry? As it happens, yes: being in a movie theater full of people who are eating it the fuck up.

Ticket Sales

It was the headline at Raw Story that caught my attention on Friday: Beck’s movie bombs in New York, Boston — and Washington, D.C.:

In New York, Beck sold 17 tickets. In Boston, another 17. And in Washington, D.C., the hotbed of political activism, his tearful film drew only 30, Raw Story has found.

Glenn Beck’s new movie “The Christmas Sweater: A Return To Redemption” — released for a viewing Thursday night in hundreds of theaters across the country. While it performed better in the south and in rural, more conservative areas, his ability to draw viewers in major US markets was a bust.

“The theater’s almost empty,” a representative at Regal Cinemas in Manhattan told Raw Story moments before it began.

It sold better in the South, supposedly, however nationwide box-office reports weren’t widely available as of Monday morning.

In one sense, there is a lost opportunity here. This “filmed event” — it’s not quite a movie — sounds so hilariously awful that it has the potential of becoming an audience-participation films like “Rocky Horror Picture Show” or “The Sound of Music,” where moviegoers show up dressed like the characters and chant the lines as they’re spoken on the screen. (Imagine a theatre full of people dressed in Christmas sweaters, hosing each other down with spritzer bottles every time Beck cries or sweats through another shirt.)

But the exorbitant $20 admission and the fact that the proceeds would line the pockets of the Beckerhead himself make whatever fun that might be had mocking him totally not worth it.