Surviving Christmas

Money can buy happiness, goes the moral of this cynical yet mildly amusing Yuletide-season comedy. You know by the end of the opening-credit montage that when the sweet granny figure pops her head rather than her cookies into the oven that the movie plans on giving no quarter to sentimental slush. Though the film feels as if it were created by committee, this committee gets most of the key elements right. The story is high concept: A young, successful advertising executive gets lonely at Christmastime, so when he’s dumped by his girlfriend right before the holidays he returns to the home of his childhood in suburban Illinois and rents out the family currently living there to pose as his relatives for a quarter-million dollars. Fortunately, a game and competent cast was assembled to surround leading man Affleck, who is an antic fireball in his star turn as Drew, the ad man who brags that he could sell whale steak to Greenpeace. Gandolfini’s size and slow burn make a good foil for Affleck. (As the bearish paterfamilias of the Valco clan, Gandolfini, who wears a full beard in the picture, almost looks as though he took the role because not only was it something that fit into his seasonal hiatus from playing HBO’s Tony Soprano but it was also a script that allowed him to forego shaving for a few months). Comedy vets O’Hara and Applegate are enjoyably proficient, as is Zuckerman (who was last seen playing young Dr. Evil in the last Austin Powers). The film’s jokes are pretty constant, despite a third act that mostly spins its wheels. If one were to dwell on the logic of the story, the film would crumble. The most obvious example comes after Drew discloses the reasons for his lasting Christmas trauma: It becomes obvious that there is no financial way that the Valcos’ comfortably middle-class suburban home could have belonged to Drew’s hard-luck family in the real world. But, again, this is a movie that shows that money can indeed buy happiness, so economic common sense is hardly foremost in the filmmakers’ minds.