Taking a full year to make its DVD and Blu-ray debut, Four Christmases proves to be as confusing a holiday release in 2009 as it was in 2008. Even if the name “Four Christmases” leads you to believe the film will make for good Christmas Eve viewing, you’d be wrong. Its name begs for a mid-November release but its actual plot makes it suitable for release in any month of the year, because it’s not really about Christmas at all. It’s about a relationship and how spending time with your family and the family of your significant other offers insight into how they’ve become the person they are. The fact that the events of these films take place around Christmas is a fluke, any major holiday would suffice.
Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) live the ideal yuppie life: they maintain a joint apartment decorated in modern swag, they both hold down high-paying jobs, they use role playing to keep the sex interesting and they laugh off questions of impending marriage with practiced candor. If you ever had those friends who made you question your own engagement, it’s these two. But the candor requires Brad and Kate to live as a very superficial couple. The big questions like “Kids?”, “Marriage?” and “Why not?” echo in their ears and whenever one of them begins to question their stance, the other chimes in to remind them of how good they have it. Their delicately choreographed dance of anti-marriage loses step when their annual vacation (expertly timed to let them miss Christmas with their families) falters in the face of a weather cancellation and a news crew all too eager to question their backup plans on live television.
And so it begins. Their cover is blown and they begin the laborious four-stop journey to visit their parents (both pairs of which are divorced). Imagine a disjointed Meet the Parents wherein the writers realized they had a bunch of really awkward situations that didn’t fit with any one couple of parents, so they decided to split up parents and thus the jokes to make them all feasible. I’m sure some of these painfully awkward scenarios stem from personal experiences, but a lot of them are very universal and painful truths of taking home a loved one for the first time. All those childhood humiliations and teenage inadequacies you tried to leave behind get the limelight treatment from your parents as they attempt to fill in any information gaps your significant other might still have about your life. The trial by fire of a relationship has become a comedy staple in the last decade (with the aforementioned Meet the Parents perhaps being the most stressful of the bunch), and Four Christmases falls somewhere in the upper half of the mediocre genre. The direction of Seth Gordon keeps the jokes properly paced and the film clipping along pretty rapidly; though, the portion at Kate’s mother house seems to drag on forever in comparison to the other bits.
Splitting the film’s awkwardness into quadrants may be a cheap way of using jokes that had no business being in the same movie, but it also allows for a large ensemble cast. Having Robert Duvall, Jon Voight, Sissy Spacek, and Mary Steenburgen play the parents definitely helped to bolster down the quarters into something more than just a series of hit-or-miss jokes. However, additional appearances by the likes of Jon Favreau, Kristin Chenoweth, Dwight Yoakam and Tim McGraw also lend a lot of comedic value to the various pieces. Chenoweth and Favreau often steal the show as a slightly bitter sister and a menacing bully of a brother, respectively. The cast really saves the film in the long run.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Along with a digital copy of the film, the Blu-ray includes a whole slew of deleted scenes, a disappointing gag reel and three featurettes. The first featurette sees the cast and crew of Four Christmases recounting personally awkward holiday situations from their own lives and how they’ve manifested in the film. An HBO special, including all the typical behind-the-scenes pleasantries and gushing, and a cooking special starring Katy Mixon in her character from the film as she helps Paula Deen create a “seven layer” concoction round out the set’s extra features. They might not all be winners, but the cooking special and the holiday memories featurettes are unique enough to be interesting.
"Four Christmases" is on sale November 24, 2009 and is rated PG13. Comedy. Directed by Seth Gordon. Written by Matt Allen & Caleb Wilson. Starring Dwight Yoakam, Kristin Chenoweth, Mary Steenburgen, Tim McGraw, Katy Mixon.
