Sitting between 2 of my friends, the one on my right laughing so much she spent more than half of the movie rolling on the floor, and the one on my left whispering to me every 3 minutes: “This is stupid, very stupid, right? Why is Inbal –the friend on the right- laughing like that? This is not funny!”, I realized that my position, between the 2 of them, was exactly how I felt- some times- about the movie.
At times hilarious, at times predictable, at times touching, and at times cruel, the film is authentic to the way families act sometimes, and especially around the Holidays. No, my father would never say what Brad’s father (Robert Duvall) says: “I don’t want to talk ill about your mother on Christmas, but she’s a common street whore”, and my brothers would never pin each other, and then dry hump their armpits, but for sure we all know somebody resembling the characters in “Four Christmases”.
Kate and Brad, the city couple, think that everyone’s traditional relationship is wrong. Only their no pressure, “let’s avoid anything that has to do with family, marriage, and procreation” attitude is the way to a rock solid union. When their flight to Fiji is cancelled due to heavy fog and they are interviewed live on the news, they have no choice but to do the unthinkable, to do what they’ve never done, and make 4 visits to their 4 parents, on Christmas.
Their first visit, the visit to Brad’s father, is a riot (when Kate knocks Susan’s baby’s head into a door is when my friend fell off the chair) from the moment they walked in, until the moment they walked out (about an hour later, time in which Brad managed to destroy the whole house).
Their second visit, the visit to Kate’s mother was what bothered me the most. Not the visit. The visit itself had a lot of funny, classic moments, but the mother!? What a witch! Kate’s mother, played by Mary Steenburgen, is just the most unpleasant creature in the world. From the scene when Kate asks her for a private mother-daughter talk, and she implies that she has absolutely no interest in what Kate has to say, to the scene when the mother flirts with Brad, and finally the scene when she’s trying to humiliate Kate with painful, childhood memories, I have to say that this is like the mother from Hell!
Their third visit, is to Brad’s mother (played by Sissy Spacek), and it is here, over a heated game of Taboo, that Kate is beginning to question her “union” with Brad, and to reassess what she really wants out of their relationship. Her rapidly growing desire to have children (even though all the children she’s been interacting with are all little terrorists) seemed a little off, but I guess that could happen…
Yes, you guessed it, by the time of their fourth and last visit, the visit to Kate’s father (Jon Voight), Kate and Brad decide to call it quits.
I don’t know if the rumors of on-set tensions between Reese Whitherspoon and Vince Vaughn are true, but they are believable and engaging as Kate and Brad. They have good chemistry and charm, and they are perfectly matched. Director Seth Gordon got the best out of this fine comedic pair.
Yes, at the end of the day, I have to agree with my friend from the right, and admit out loud that this movie is the guilty pleasure of December, and even though it might not be a holiday classic for my friend on the left, it will always be a carefree, 82 minutes of family dysfunction I will always want to watch again… and again… and again…
