Staying alive

Noel Vera

Mike Mitchell's "Surviving Christmas" defies description, but the
words "car wreck," "train crash," and "bridge collapse" come to
mind. It's essentially ninety minutes of Ben Affleck doing his level
best to be annoying and self-centered, on which terms you could say
the movie is a howling success; question is, does anyone want to
actually sit through the experience?

Actually, it starts off promisingly enough: readers of Entertainment
Weekly and such erudite chroniclers of popular American culture
would be familiar with Affleck's obnoxious on-camera persona,
especially during that gruesome period when he was under the
delusion he had found true love with pop diva Jennifer Lopez; how do
you recover after a debacle like that? Affleck's answer is actually
fairly ingenious: you make a Christmas-movie joke out of it, with
Affleck himself as the butt of the joke.

Enter Drew Latham, Affleck's character, a handsome, obscenely rich
(but does Affleck play any other kind, nowadays?) advertising
executive having trouble with his girlfriend (a largely cosmetic
Jennifer Morrison) because he hasn't the slightest notion what to do
during Christmas--spend time with the family, or vacation in Fiji?
Turns out he has 'issues' with his family that prevent him from
having a normal Christmas, to which his girlfriend makes the
ultimatum: no family, no Fiji. Drew flounders about for a while,
then demands that his girlfriend's therapist (Stephen Root, looking
suitably harassed) tell him what to do. The doctor's advice: go to
your childhood home, write down a list of your 'grievances' with
your family, then burn it up, saying "I forgive you," this hopefully
creating some sort of closure, even of the symbolic kind. Drew
accepts this piece of drivel, drives up to his old house, lights up
his little piece of paper; meanwhile Tom Valco (James Gandolfini),
the house's present owner, sneaks quietly up behind Drew and whacks
him in the back of the head with a snow shovel. Drew is carried
inside the house unconscious, wakes up, and promptly offers to rent
the entire family for $250,000, on the condition that they help him
re-live the experience of a family Christmas.

Sounds plausible? Actually, it's crazy enough to work, and it might
have if there was real comic talent behind the movie, a distinct
comic sensibility with the shamelessness and storytelling rigor to
take the premise all the way to its logical conclusion. I can't help
thinking of Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa," where Billy Bob Thornton
played a mean-spirited, slovenly safecracker who snaps and snarls at
children, sodomizes fat women and prostitutes, and wakes up early
afternoons in an alcoholic haze. Zwigoff, whose previous works
include the brilliant documentary "Crumb" (about maverick comix
artist Robert Crumb), and the screen adaptation of Daniel Clowes'
graphic novel "Ghost World," has a genuinely subversive sensibility,
one that isn't afraid to turn Christmas-movie clichés on their heads
to show you something really different, something dark and truthful
and funny all at the same time. You wait for the film to go soft on
you, to give in and admit that Christmas is Good for the Soul the
way all Christmas movies do; eventually it does, but in a manner
Alfred Hitchcock or Preston Sturges might recognize--a happy ending
that makes a too-perfect fit into the movie's plot, the same time it
acknowledges it's a sop to conventional morality.

Mitchell's no Zwigoff; his filmography includes "Deuce Bigelow: Male
Gigolo," a movie which turns on the even less likely premise that
Rob Schnieder is attractive to the opposite sex. He's helped by
Deborah Kaplan and Harry Eflont, the writers responsible for "Josie
and the Pussycats" and "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"
(suddenly you know just why the characters felt so flatly cartoonish
in the Hanna-Barbera manner), who in turn are helped by Jeffrey
Ventimilia and Joshua Sternin (both "The Simpsons" veterans, which
may account for the occasional funny punchline--or may not; James
Gandolfini claims the dialogue was largely improvised).

The black comedy starts turning limp about halfway through, when
Drew realizes that what he really wants to do is help the fairly
dysfunctional Valco family with their problems: Tom and wife
Christine (Catherine O'Hara) want to separate; son Brian (Josh
Zuckerman) spends too much time online surfing web porn; daughter
Alicia (Christina Applegate) hates Drew's guts (sanest reaction in
the film, I think). What was supposed to be a riff on Affleck's
irritating persona becomes a soggy attempt at a standard-issue
Christmas movie, with the message that "one always needs family,
even if it's a rented one;" that, or "$250,000 will buy you
anything, even a dysfunctional family to play with for the holidays."

Affleck is Affleck--as I've noted before, that persona of his is
remarkably effective (if bottled you'd make millions in the insect
repellant industry) though he's far less convincing when actually
asked to act; Christina Applegate has acquired a more low-key, less
sitcom-ish delivery since her "Married with Children" days--a marked
improvement, I have to say; Udo Kier gives a brief if amusing cameo
as some supposedly brilliant fashion photographer. James Gandolfini
and Catherine O'Hara make a remarkably convincing couple, he with
the Tony Soprano glower, she with the skewered "Our Lady of the
Cannabis" smile; they not only look like they've been married a long
time, but are able to deliver recognizably human reactions to the
more odious portions of the script (instead of pinching their noses
the way any sane man would do). O'Hara's Christine seems
particularly heroic; for the first half she's asked to wear the most
unglamorous hair and makeup since Charlize Theron's in "Monster,"
for the second she's made-over into a heavy-metal 'ho.' Yet she
never loses your sympathy--when Drew asks Christine if anything is
the matter, she bravely denies it; you can't help but admire her
tenacity, the same time you pity her the misfortune of having her
deepest secrets exposed to such an insensitive lout. The woman
deserves a far better comic vehicle than this Christmas turd.

(First appeared in Businessworld, 11/19/04)

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