'Four Christmases': Zero Fun

by Brett Parker

I was just watching Swingers the other day. What a great comedy. It still holds Vince Vaughn’s best performance, one in which he creates the silly-charmer persona we would come to love him for in later pictures. You know what made Swingers so great? It was honest. In telling the story of young actors who enjoy a fun California nightlife, men everywhere found a film they could strongly relate to. We know these characters. We have friends just like Vaughn and Jon Favreau. We hung out at bars just like theirs. We tried to pick up women the same way they did. In great comedy lies great truth.

Four Christmases, the latest comedy from Vince Vaughn, suffers from favoring the opposite idea. It takes a seemingly relatable scenario-visiting family on the holidays-and takes it to such manic and bizarre extremes that it becomes the furthest thing from any recognizable reality. This wouldn’t be a problem if laughs were delivered, but this is one of the most dead-in-the-water comedies in recent memory. The film wants to be a hilarious spin on real-life holiday anxieties, but we’re not laughing and we’re not convinced.

The film stars Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as Brad and Kate, a happy and loving couple who reject the idea of marriage and family. Both are children of divorce with dysfunctional families and are fearful of repeating the mistakes of their parents. Their indifference over their families has also caused them to skip out on Christmas year after year. They feed their families lies about going on global peace missions while sneaking off to exotic locales for Christmas vacation. However, their current escape plan goes awry when all the flights at their airport are cancelled due to fog. A local news station ropes them into a live interview on TV about their travel plans, allowing their families to realize that they are in fact home for the holiday. Seeing no way out, Brad and Kate decide to visit all of their parents in the same holiday.

Brad and Kate’s divorced parents, and each of their respective families, are a crazed showcase of dysfunctional people. There’s Brad’s father, Howard (Robert Duvall), a macho meanie who raised Brad’s brothers (Jon Favreau and Tim McGraw) into UFC Cage Fighters. There’s Kate’s mother, Marilyn (Mary Steenburgen), a sweet cougar with an obsession over a new age Pastor (Dwight Yoakam). Brad’s mother, Paula (Sissy Spacek), is eerily dating Brad’s childhood friend (Patrick Van Horn) and Kate’s father, Creighton (Jon Voight) is…well…a surprisingly patient and gentle older man.

Spending time with family over the holidays is pretty much a subject we can all relate to. We all know what it’s like to be thrown together into the same room with our extended families and others, in a situation where we must display kindness even if we have serious reservations about certain family members. Instead of making honest and insightful observations about holiday bonding, Four Christmases favors zany sitcom situations that possess alarming hostility and awkwardness with very little humor. We can hardly relate to the family situations the characters face, therefore we find little reason to care. Does anyone really have overly-hostile brothers who viciously attack them every five minutes for no reason? Has anyone ever been plucked from a Church audience and thrown into a staged re-enactment of the Nativity story without direction? Has anyone ever had a Christmas where they’ve gone berserk on children from within a bouncy-bounce? If you’ve answered yes to any or all of these questions, my prayers go out to you.

Dysfunctional families thrown together for the holidays can be, and has been, the source of great comedy. You won’t find it here. I think I only laughed three times throughout the entire film. I’m not exaggerating, I literally counted: three times. Brad and Kate role-playing at a party, Brad performing in the Nativity scene, and a look through Kate’s childhood scrapbook provided the only laughs I had throughout the entire film. This is a comedy dead-zone of silence. I was also annoyed by how the film basically limps toward its ending. I should probably be grateful that the film doesn’t attempt to prolong the inevitable happy ending, but some kind of plot finesse or complication would’ve been nice.

Maybe I was too spoiled this year by My Best Friend’s Girl and Role Models, two comedies that put me in absolute stitches. I was hoping to keep the cinematic laugh train in full steam, but alas, it’s hit a brick wall. Those two earlier films showed talented people wonderfully pulling big, goofy laughs from everyday social situations, something Four Christmases strides for and fails at. The film’s director, Seth Gordon, pulled humor from real life in the documentary, The King of Kong, yet shows little grace with fictional comedy. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are enormously likeable and have nice chemistry together, yet the material doesn’t do their talents justice. They deserve better.

Vince Vaughn is a fine comic actor who has created a large comic fan base over the years. Many of his fans will be compelled to buy a ticket to his latest outing (I know I was) yet they will be supremely disappointed. They’re better off kicking back with Old School, Dodgeball, or one of my favorites, Starsky and Hutch. And by god, if you haven’t seen Swingers yet, do yourself a favor and rent it immediately. The struggling actors of that film would probably despise going to audition for Four Christmases.