Four Christmases

Four Christmases?
Bah!! Humbug!

One is more than enough for anyone. That’s probably been a fair statement of my views ever since my first Christmas on call as a newly qualified hospital doctor, when I slept three out of 84 hours, couldn’t get a chest X-ray done for love nor money, had five patients die and an endless succession of nurses telling me: “you don’t look very Christmassy!”

Christmas may well be the liturgical celebration of our annually renewed awareness of God’s Presence in Christ in the World, but it can also be the precise antithesis of that - the most God-awful pretence of food we don’t want, people we don’t love, stress we don’t need, emotions we don’t feel and expenditure we can’t control. Which is why Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) see every reason to be elsewhere at the Christmas season. They live a life of California dreaming - a ménage á deux, rich, successful and contented in their three year relationship, happy customers of life, resolutely unsullied by matrimony or procreation, as gilded a couple as the twin towers of the golden gates of San Francisco – and just as rusty. If they think of their families at all, they think of them only like Arsene Wenger thinks of Preston North End – an early stage of human development as relegated to history as the Neanderthals of the Vauxhall Conference. So, every Christmas, rather than relive the traumas of childhood, they jet off scuba diving in exotic locations, having faithfully assured their families that they’d love to come home for the celebration; it’s just that they’ve agreed to go and do voluntary work overseas in poor Third World Countries – immunizing babies, building schools, all that sort of good stuff. The rationale is simple, as Brad explains: “you can’t spell families without l-i-e-s”.

These are nice people – clever, relaxed, liberal, broad minded, comfortable in their own skins and at one with the world. Brad exudes the uxorious contentment of a thirty-something ‘new man’ who every year re-reads John Gray’s “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus”. He cares deeply, shares deeply and (with the understandable exception of baseball play-off games) is constantly available to talk about Kate’s feelings. Reese Witherspoon plays a safely coupled Bridget Jones with just a hint less desperation and three degrees more dress sense: feisty but vulnerable and increasingly in need of manly protection. At one moment where she stands alone and bereft in front of her father’s house, I’m sure I saw every man in the audience lean forward as if to comfort. And it is she who gives the early subtle indications that something in the California idyll is about to crack.

Suddenly, it all goes horribly wrong: San Francisco airport is fog-bound – it’s on the national news - and so they have no excuse but to make the pilgrimage to the parents – all four of them. And a rocky pilgrimage it is: both Brad’s and Kate’s parents are bitterly divorced and bizarrely recoupled. Brad’s father (Robert Duvall) has reverted to trailer-trash type with Brad’s cage-fighting redneck brothers, while his mother (Sissy Spacek) has turned new-age hippy with a new toy-boy – none other than Brad’s childhood best friend. Kate’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) has turned to a fluorescent mid-Western Jesus as incarnated by local tele-evangelist Pastor Phil, while her father (Jon Voight) has – well, err, remained fairly sane, so that the film still has somebody credible around to deliver some heart-warming paternal wisdom at the end. Interestingly, he is the only man I have seen pray on screen for years and play it as neither kooky nor spooky.

And instantly Brad and Kate’s worst expectations are realised – not just that their families are embarrassing to be around because of how their relatives behave, but because their families know and reveal their own true realities. The surface patina of Californian civilisation is roughly scratched to show the hollowness of their present lives. No sooner has he walked through his father’s door than Brad’s mildly bombastic lawyer-persona is quite literally thumped back down to earth by his trailer-trash redneck brothers and he is back to the insufferable nerdy self-important swot they always knew he was. Kate's prissy twinset-and-pearls aunts crack open the old family albums to reveal her teenage years as a fat lesbian neurotic almost entirely composed of anxiety and acne.

But what they had not expected is the complete collapse of their modern, metrosexual relationship in the face of people they despise as their social and moral inferiors. Brad’s liberal tolerance is tested to destruction by his mother’s unconventional relationship. Kate’s confidence in her relationship is destroyed by the realisation that Brad’s disreputable redneck brother (a man from Mars if ever there was one) actually has with his wife greater depths of love, tender awareness and mutual knowledge than she does with Brad. And so the bottom falls out of their shared values faster than Lehmann’s Brothers.

I won’t give away the ending, but it’s not exactly a shock. The mildly conformist message of the film has earned it the angry ridicule of professional reviewers and the custom of millions at the Box Office. Perhaps there is actually a comfort in knowing that families are the people who still want you home at Christmas because they love you just like they loved you when you were sweet sixteen.

Paul O?Reilly SJ



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