Four Christmases
Rated PG-13 for some sexual language and humor.
reviewed by Christopher Lyon
Here is a philosophical question: Is it possible for a movie to unintentionally make you like everyone a little less? I mean all of humanity? Could the experience of sitting through an unfunny Vince Vaughn/Reese Witherspoon Christmas rom-com actually create in a person less good will toward men? It seems unlikely and, yet, there it is.
The Story
Brad (Vaughn) and Kate (Witherspoon) have a great life with limited complications. Basically, they're happy together and they don't do anything they don't want to do -- like getting married or having kids or hanging out with their outrageously dysfunctional families. This Christmas, they're going to Fiji -- while telling both sets of divorced parents they'll be in Burma doing charity work.
But when all the Christmas flights out of San Francisco get delayed for a day by fog, a local news crew covering the event catches Brad and Kate on camera. Now that their families know they're in town, the pair is forced to make the rounds to all four Christmases (his dad, her mom, his mom, her dad).
Start the tour: Brad's dad (Robert Duvall) lives in a lower middle class house, drinks a lot of beer and chuckles when Brad's wanna be ultimate-fighting brothers (Jon Favreau and Tim McGraw) and their kids terrorize Brad with choke holds.
Kate's mom (Mary Steenburgen) lives in a pristine, upscale house with lots of man-hungry female relatives. There, the couple is dragged to a wild church pastored by Kate's mom's boyfriend (Dwight Yoakam). Next up: Brad's hippy mom (Sissy Spacek) and her boyfriend, Brad's former best friend from grade school. Finally, we arrive at the relative sanity of the home of Kate's dad (John Voight).
Along the way, the couple learns lots of new information about each other, threatening their tidy, self-serving relationship. One of them begins to wonder if there's more to life than just avoiding responsibility and attachment.
The Verdict
What we thought of the movie on its own terms
What Works: You won't find many films with a more impressive cast list than this one: Oscar winners, indie movie and country music superstars, and genuine romantic comedy royalty in Reese Witherspoon. But you wouldn't know it from watching any of the awkward performances here. A very few times, Vince Vaughn plays a funny comedy riff for a few minutes. Mostly not.
Some of the ideas propping up the film are worth thinking about (see below), but those ideas are not enough to make it worth the time to sit through the movie.
What Doesn't Work: Making a really good "outrageous comedy" must be one of the hardest jobs in Hollywood. You have to create real characters that an audience can care about a little so that when the crazy, over-the-top stuff starts happening (and it never stops here) you feel a little of their pain. Otherwise, the wild, wacky scenarios just feels like sketch comedy segments that don't quite work.
Few of the characters in "Four Christmases" ever feel like more than just an idea. The selfish, beer-drinking dad. The ultimate-fighting brothers. The mom sleeping with your best friend. Even the selfish couple starting to wonder about making a few commitments. None of these people or the relationships they're in feel real. Not until the very end of the film do any of the extended family start to show some humanity. By then, though, it's too late.
Worse: The movie seems to be trying to make everyone on the screen especially unattractive. What they say, what they do, even how they look. I don't know that it's intentional, but it leaves you without anyone sympathetic to root for. And that makes for a long 90 minutes.
Content: Lots of crude sexual content and language gets screen time in "Four Christmases," making the whole thing even more unappealing. There's also a lousy church scene in which Dwight Yoakam administers a mocking spoof of Christian churches and the Christmas nativity.
Worldview
How the film's take on life compares to a biblical perspective
After meeting their families, Brad's and Kate's unwillingness to commit to marriage makes sense. In fact, many children of divorce feel that way about marriage. Why repeat the cycle of pain, betrayal, and abandonment? Why not just be together for as long as we both like and move on without strings when we're done?
Brad and Kate have added a layer on to that idea of not wanting to spend time with anybody they don't really like, including family or friends. They exist to serve themselves, and they're okay with that.
Eventually, though, the story decides that family is a valuable thing, even if it's ugly, broken, and insane. Without commitments and responsibilities to other people, Kate kind of says at one point, you can never have true love or a real life. Even if your family ends up as broken and mangled as these families do, it's still family.
That idea resonates with Scripture, to a point, but it also disagrees. Family is not the most important thing, as the film says. In fact, that idea is one thing that breaks families. "If family is the most important thing and mine looks like this, I need to find a new one!"
Jesus said our commitment to following Him will make our commitment to our families look like hatred by comparison. (See Luke 14:26-27.) We love our moms and dads and kids and spouses with a bit of cold-heartedness, understanding that the real reason to love them is because we love Him and not because they deserve it. If we wait for them to deserve it, we'll never truly love and forgive our family members.
That makes a huge different. Yes, the Bible agrees with the film: "Don't be like Brad and Kate!" But it's about more than just not being selfish. It's about committing ourselves to a lifelong ministry of helping make broken people better by loving them with God's love.
And we're convinced we are not doomed to repeat the pattern of our parents. God gives us the power to be different people, people like Jesus, from the inside out. That gives us a chance to be better husbands and wives and sons and daughters than we ever could be on our own.
Living to serve others is messy. It does make it harder to go to Fiji for Christmas. (Boy, that sounds nice right now.) But the life of serving Jesus by serving others is the only life worth leading. So bring on the mess.
Questions:
- Did you dig "Four Christmases"? Are you a fan of Vaughn or Witherspoon?
- Of the four houses, which was the funniest? Which was the least funny? Why?
- Do you look forward to spending time with your extended family at the holidays? Why or why not?
- Do you see your life as a Christian as a ministry to broken people, including the ones you live with now?
- Have you ever been to Fiji? Is it nice there?
