Hollywood has given us its fare share of over-the-top Christmas comedies — cynical and secular Yuletide pictures in which acts of Christmas-tree terrorism fry felines (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) and cat burglars hold dysfunctional families hostage (The Ref).
In holiday movies, family is something to be endured and tolerated, not celebrated. There was even a film called Surviving Christmas, likening the holiday to a holocaust or natural disaster.
Edward Burns’ latest ensemble dramedy, The Fitzgerald Family Christmas, skirts this tradition by dodging ostentatious shenanigans. In avoiding both sardonicism and kid-friendly mirth, it’s almost an anti-Christmas movie, addressing as it does such themes as drug abuse, domestic violence and terminal cancer, all of them lacquered over with a Lifetime-esque sheen.
It’s not a picture to brew up some spiked eggnog and casually enjoy at a family gathering; at its best, it holds a mirror to our own frailties and failures — the root causes that sever families, even in what are supposed to be the best of times.
Burns’ 11th movie, and his first in some time to receive decent theatrical distribution, The Fitzgerald Family Christmas charts three tumultuous days in late December for a large, rambunctious, baggage-filled family from Queens. Matriarch Rosie (Anita Gillette) has just turned 70, two days before Christmas.
Her eldest son Gerry (Burns) tries to corral his six siblings together to celebrate the occasion, but that old line about herding cats comes to mind: His brothers and sisters can’t be bothered when there are more attractive activities to pursue or more apparently pressing matters at hand. Burns presents an observant case study in the callousness with which children treat their aged parents, in which a single evening together is an unbearable burden.
But this time, Gerry has a special reason to unite his kin. Their estranged father Jim (Ed Lauter) has expressed his desire to spend Christmas together, 20 years after abandoning them all. He has a secret that suggests this may be his last Christmas, and he wants to patch up wounds from the past. The main story hinges on Rosie and her offsprings’ debates between finding forgiveness after decades of hurt and kicking the old bastard to the curb.
But each of Rosie’s four daughters and three sons has his or own trauma or romantic quagmire to deal with, and Burns adroitly juggles them all as best he can. Caustic when it wants to be and reflective when it needs to be, Burns’ script regularly hits on perceptive truisms about large family dynamics.
Try as he might, however, Burns is not Robert Altman. His visual style is indistinguishable and made for television, and his multi-character gatherings never devolve into overlapping dins of diverging emotions, as they would in real life; most of the characters politely wait for each other to finish speaking.
Love interests are rotely predestined. The script is littered with obvious exposition. Potentially knotty conflicts are resolved with convenient flippancy. And the musical score — filled with sad-sack piano dirges that occasionally morph into familiar Christmas tunes — is unconscionably distracting.
Burns is a fundamentally agreeable director, playing to conventional audience expectations even as he filters them through his specific worldview as a working-class Irish joe from Queens. That The Fitzgerald Family Christmas manages to challenge at all is a surprise, given his questionable recent track record as a writer-director, and it will probably be remembered as one of his better films, despite its deficiencies.
THE FITZGERALD FAMILY CHRISTMAS. Director: Edward Burns; Cast: Edward Burns, Connie Britton, Kerry Bishé, Heather Burns, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Marsha Dietlein Bennett, Anita Gillette, Ed Lauter, Noah Emmerich, Nick Sandow; Distributor: Tribeca; Rating: R; Opens: Today at Lake Worth Playhouse, 713 Lake Ave., Lake Worth; Mos Art Theatre, 700 Park Ave., Lake Park; Cinema Paradiso, 503 S.E. Sixth St., Fort Lauderdale; and Bill Cosford Cinema at University of Miami, 1111 Memorial Drive, Coral Gables.