Best kept wrapped

It's only when forced to view the annual Hollywood Christmas film that I begin to sympathize with holiday-skittish Jehovah's Witnesses. How pleasant it must be to exempt oneself from the festal vulgarity of this season, with its imposed cheer, naked commercialism and its trampling fatalities among Wal-Mart greeters.

The latest leaden bauble from Tinseltown is, in many regards, one of the worst holiday films in living memory, and I write that claim having survived Christmas with the Kranks, Deck the Halls and the witless Fred Claus, which starred Vince Vaughn, our helpful segue into the subject at hand, Four Christmases.

Yes, everyone's favorite linebacker-as-teddy bear, Vaughn, is back in another flatlining rom-com for these hollow days. Vaughn is one of those puzzling personalities that you can never quite believe has achieved stardom. His shtick (the comic big guy) is inoffensive, if dull. He's no Jackie Gleason, however. He's not even a passable Dom DeLuise.

Yet, there he is, popping up in one forgettable film (The Break Up, anyone?) after another (Into the Wild being the exception that proves the rule), satisfying some mysterious longing found among the popcorn-munchers. So, I give him to you. Happy Hanukkah!

His latest vehicle, Four Christmases, is a veritable car wreck that leaves some truly talented actors (and a director) in bloodied heaps. It should go without saying that Christmas films are contrived affairs. But the cheap, lazy, slapped-up quality of Four Christmases makes Christmas with the Kranks feel like something crafted by Kurosawa.

Brad (Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) are a happily matched couple living in San Francisco. As neither can fully tolerate their own families, they've spent a good many years canceling out on holiday get-togethers so that they can fly off to some exotic resort.

On this particular Christmas, they find themselves stranded at San Francisco's fogbound airport. Accidentally caught by a local news camera team, their plight is broadcast to their fractured families (both sets of parents are divorced), who then insist that they finally come visit.

The film becomes four visiting vignettes, where we meet Brad's parents (Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek) and Kate's (Mary Steenburgen and Jon Voight). Were proof needed that an Oscar never furthers anyone's career, here's the cast for the case.

The inspiration for what follows can be had, should you have the stomach, in those Stiller-born comedies, Meet the Family and Meet the Fockers, where a number of A-list actors got the chance (or were sentenced) to play ogrish parents.

In Four Christmases, a visit to the Duvall residence will treat us to almost every conceivable white-trash setup, while Steenburgen's home is a cartoon of suburbia. Hippy send-ups are found at the Spacek pad, while the Voight manse (thankfully, our last stop) provides a Hallmark ideal of family.

Surprisingly, it took a talentless pool of four men to construct this piece, which was then handed to director Seth Gordon, a man of intelligence and skill, who, it appears, raced through the filming and editing just to get it over with.

Poorly shot, Four Christmases' primarily technical flaw is its editing, something Gordon proved to master in his exceptional (and never shown in Prague) film King of Kongs. Putting aside the film's contrivance of the pea-soup fog, which, mysteriously, like some John Carpenter creation, comes and goes as it pleases, there are shots that seem to have been taken in Southern California rather than Northern, a handicap when trying to present multiple visitations within a 12-hour period.

More intriguing is the non-use of the wonderful Carol Kane, who pops up in the Steenburgen episode but hasn't any lines, and is never even given a scene. Obviously, there must have been at least one given to Kane, though it somehow wound up on the cutting-room floor, leaving this notable performer as part of the set furniture.

Gordon and his editor might have felt the missing Kane scene was somehow not up to the level of the rest of the film, leaving you to ponder on the uncomfortable idea that there was an actual standard involved. For short of having had her soil the carpet, Kane's performance could hardly have been any worse or embarrassing than what's been merrily delivered to the projection booths.  

The performances are all colorless, and it is painful to see actors like Witherspoon, Duvall and Spacek trapped here, not to mention Dwight Yoakam and Kristen Chenoweth. It's all a shockingly calculated moneymaker, that has already raked in millions Stateside, as expected.

My Yuletide wish for the world is that it rebels against such rubbish, and that a moratorium on any future holiday films is put in place. Besides, nothing in the sorry stack of ill-wrapped-up Christmas packages over the past 20 years has come close to Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey, Alastair Sim's Scrooge, Cary Grant's Dudley opposite Loretta Young as the bishop's wife, or of Crosby, Kaye and Rosemary Clooney crooning a Berlin songbook.

No performance, with the exception of those in the French-German-British Joyeux Noel from 2005, has topped young Peter Billingsley as Ralphie, with his Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle.

Four Christmases, when properly seen in the distance, will prove to have all the appeal of a piece of December fudge found under a couch in July. This year for the holidays, stay home.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com