'Surviving Christmas' lacks gift of black comedy

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

SURVIVING CHRISTMAS (PG-13) One-and-a-Half Stars (Poor-to-Fair) An overly contrived black comedy that must have sounded funnier in the planning than in the execution. Ben Affleck is a rich lonely guy who rents a family for the holidays, but they're more dysfunctional than he is. Mike Mitchell directs, blandly. DreamWorks, 90 minutes.

"Surviving Christmas" is an overly contrived black comedy that must have sounded funnier in the planning than in the execution.

Affleck stars as Drew Latham, a hotshot advertising executive in Chicago who is dumped a few days before Christmas by his shrill, social-climbing girlfriend.

Feeling lonely as the holidays approach, Drew decides to return to his boyhood home and try to rekindle the warm feelings of a family Christmas. Once at the suburban home, he goes a major step further by "renting" the family who now lives there for an outlandish $250,0000, contracting them to join him in all sorts of traditional frivolity.

It's an uphill climb, though, since it's a dysfunctional family with problems galore of their own. Dad, Tom Valco (James Gandolfini), and Mom, Christine (Catherine O'Hara), are on the verge of divorce, and their morose teenage son, Brian (Josh Zuckerman), spends all his time in his bedroom, cruising Internet porn sites. Their twentysomething daughter, Alicia (Christina Applegate), is the only well-balanced member, though Lord knows how that happened.

If that's not enough, Drew also hires a community theatre actor (Bill Macy) to play his grandfather and gives him the silly name of Doo-Dah. Later, an understudy (Sy Richardson) takes over the role, creating an additionally inept joke because he's black.

That's typical of everything in "Surviving Christmas" — it's all so over the top when a bit of subtlety could have made it far funnier. (The family goes sledding, but since the old neighborhood hill isn't as steep as he remembers, they helicopter to mountains that look like alps, even though they're supposedly close enough to Chicago for our heroes to walk home. Huh?)

"Surviving Christmas" frequently stumbles over the great divide between sentimentality and irreverence, trying to have it both ways. We know it's a black comedy from the opening montage, when a sweet grandmother opens an oven door, puts down her tray of cookies, and sticks her head in the oven. But when true holiday feelings arise, we're supposed to forget all that. (For a much more effective, sarcastic and irreverent approach to holiday black comedy, check out "Bad Santa," now on DVD.)

Four credited writers and director Mike Mitchell just couldn't get all the film's clumsy contrivances to jell, and the twist at the end doesn't surprise as much as it simply negates much of what's gone before it.

The talented Gandolfini and O'Hara are wasted in badly written roles. Affleck also seems to know all is lost — he spends most of the film looking like he just ate some especially stale fruitcake.

Rated PG-13, profanity, innuendo.