My extended stay here in Massachusetts with my sister's family has been an absolute delight. What started as a Thanksgiving visit turned into an invitation to stay through Christmas. Every moment has been a joy.
Still, I do enjoy escaping the farmstead at regular intervals, if for no other reason than to give them all a little break from my presence. This is particularly true now that winter has socked us in and the Christmas season has frayed my sisters' nerves a bit.
The cleanup from the big snowstorm went fairly smoothly, and by Saturday morning the roads were cleared up. This seemed like my cue to get out into the world for the afternoon. The upcoming Christmas avalanche of new releases was staring me in the face. I was determined to knock at least two movies off my to-see list, to make a dent in what remained. So I revved up the car and headed to the well-heated Showcase multiplex in Lowell, where I had been just before the storm set in.
Nothing Like the Holidays, a family comedy, seemed like an obvious choice to get under my belt before Thursday. I had a pretty good idea of it from the trailer. A Puerto Rican family in Chicago gathers for Christmas, with the grown sons and daughters returning home for the occasion. All hell breaks loose when the mother announces over dinner that she is going to divorce her husband.
I was a little suspicious of the title, which could have several meanings, one of which could be the completion of the phrase "This holiday movie is ironically..." But it seemed like lightweight fun fare, and came in under ninety minutes, so I figured it was harmless at worst.
The story is a hodge-podge of many separate subplots involving the separate characters, overlain against the main narrative. The usual way to handle this type of comedy is to place the characters in various scene combinations with each other, mixing and matching them to drive the various story lines. Often they will talk about characters who are not in the scene. From time to time, you gather all the characters into one scene together. There also must be at least one outsider among the group,to give perspective. In this case, the outsider is a Jewish daughter-in-law played by Debra Messing, who turns out to be the hinge of the story.
The movie started to win me over from the first shot, which has the father attempting to hang a banner over the porch of his house. The wife, who has not yet announced she is leaving him, is standing at the foot of the sidewalk looking up at him, and disapproving him with a frown. The banner is a "Welcome Home" sign for their youngest son, who is returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. When we meet him, we find that he has been injured, and has a secret trauma that torments him.
The opening shot thus frames the two "crossing" stories upon which the rest of the minor stories hang: the conflict between husband and wife (on the axis perpendicular to the street), and the war trauma of the returning son (on the axis parallel to the street). That's what I call good directing!
The crossed axes of these conflicts are symbolized in a gnarly tree in the front yard, which the family is determined to cut down. The symbolism is made explicit by a line from one of the characters, who suggests that the tree is so old, its wood was used for Jesus' cross. Of course we know what the fate of the tree will be.
So we essentially have a looming subtext about the effects of war, which touches everything else in the story. Eventually we will also learn what is really bugging the mother: none of her adult children have produced offspring. Thus we have death (the war) coupled with the stoppage of the life flow (no grandchildren). The resolution of all the conflicts in the narrative inevitably depends not only on the healing of the war trauma, but on the pregnancy of one of the females to produce new life. Since it's a comedy we know both things will eventually happen, and they do.
There is no original concept at work here, but that's not the point for this type of movie. Rather the collection of vignettes allows a narrative that is topical for our time. The challenges facing the various children speak of 2008 in a highly specific way. That the story is about Puerto Ricans in Chicago is somewhat of a misdirection. In 2008, the best way to speak about all of America is to choose a specific ethnicity and dig deep into it.
By the end of the movie, however, I began to notice something really weird about it, having to do with the depiction of religion. The family's Catholicism is treated with a comic heavy-handedness that is absent in the rest of the movie, which tends towards sympathy all around. The parish priest, called in by the children to save the parents' marriage, is depicted as a clueless oaf. When he rises to offer a prayer at the dinner table, he is literally shouted back into his seat. On Christmas Eve, the father decides he will go to midnight mass for the first time in years. In a classical narrative, we would see his attendance with the wife, and this would become a spiritual turning point of the movie. Not so here. Not only do we not see them at church, but in the aftermath, absolutely nothing has changed. God is truly dead, it seems.
But the best was yet to come. On Christmas Day, the family takes part in a Puerto Rican tradition by which people come out of their houses to make an ever-growing parade singing Christmas carols as they walk down the street. At first, they are singing "The First Noel." So far, so good. But I noticed that the soundtrack sort of faded out when they got to the line "Born is the King of Israel." I wondered at the time if it was too politically incorrect to say the phrase "the King of Israel."
Then it got really weird. The crowd grows and grows and spills out into the park. Everyone is singing. But what are they singing? They are singing "O come all ye faithful." But they are not really singing it. They are seemingly chanting the first line over and over in braindead fashion, as if nobody knows the words. WTF? What's wrong with "Oh come ye, oh come ye to Bethlehem"? Why were the lyrics being sabotaged in what was supposed to be Christmas movie?
Finally at the end of the movie, when all is well again, Debra Messing's character is unwrapping a gift from her husband, played by John Leguizamo. The gift turns out to be a christening gown for the infant they are now determined to have, despite the fact that the daughter-in-law is still determined to pursue her dream job offer of running a hedge fund. Hedge fund!? HA HA HA! Now that's so 2008!
Opening up the package, she protests that they haven't yet decided in what faith they will raise their intended child. The husbands says, "Who's ever heard of a Puerto Rican Jew?" (Hasn't everyone?)
She asserts that Puerto Rican Jews are quite common, and the rest of the family, including the mother, chime in to agree heartily, giving several examples. It is almost as if they all want the child to be raised Jewish.
Cumulatively the movie felt like an unequivocal attack on the family's Christianity, and like two other movies I've seen this year (Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist and Religulous), it came across as a not-so-subtle advertisement for Judaism.
It all left me scratching my head in puzzlement. What was this movie trying to say? As I drove home, I realized that my hunch about the irony of the title was probably right on the mark.
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