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Surviving Christmas
Story: A wealthy marketing high-flyer rents a family to spend Christmas with. Running Time: 1hr 31 minutes. Certificate 12A.
Surviving Christmas stars Ben Affleck as Drew Latham, a loaded Chicago marketing big-shot who usually has a lonely Christmas. This year, he visits the house in which he grew up and offers the currently resident family a quarter of a million dollars to pretend to be his family for the Christmas season. See that, right there? That's the problem. It's a truly awful idea. Someone, somewhere is paid to listen to movie makers' ideas and accept only the very best ones. That person is responsible for this film being bad and unfortunately, Ben Affleck's turkey magnet must have drawn him to the role like a moth to a flamethrower.
It's times like this that I feel guilty writing bad reviews. Ben Affleck is not a bad actor, he seems to work hard and his screen demeanour is perfectly adequate - but for one reason or another, his stinker quota is up there with the worst of them. Jersey Girl, Paycheck, Gigli - he's made five films in the past two years and only one of them - Daredevil - has been passable. And let's not forget Pearl Harbor - as if we could. In Surviving Christmas, we are expected to like the eccentric nutcase who rents a family, but the character is so dismissive of the family, using his money to control them like puppets, that we end up resenting him and wanting him to fail. Had he been portrayed as a vulnerable, lonely man seeking solace in the company of these people, rather than an unhinged would-be director of his own private play, then we would have been more sympathetic and involved in the story. Alternatively, if he'd been as funny as Dudley Moore in Arthur, we would have forgiven any amount of ridiculous plot. Ben Affleck's energetic performance is, unfortunately, as funny as a bollock in a burrito and slightly less palatable.
In summary then, Surviving Christmas is a spectacular waste of talent. It's amusing in places, but the humour is more than offset by Ben Affleck's hugely dislikeable character and the massive implausibility of the whole thing. It's just possible that this could be enjoyed as a family after a bellyful of turkey (to set the mood) and an eggnog or seventeen - and you won't have long to wait, as Surviving Christmas broke the record for the speed of its passage from cinema to video when it was released in America. I think that tells you all you need to know. I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: You relate to the Dad when he smacks Ben Affleck with a spade, that's about it though. To enjoy this film you should: really, really like Ben Affleck.
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Cast: Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, Christina Applegate, Catherine O'Hara.
Directed by Mike Mitchell.
There are some universal truths that shouldn't be true, but somehow just seem to always hold:
James Gandolfini (from the Sopranos), Catherine O'Hara and Christina Applegate are all superb as the Valco family
subjected to Affleckness. All of them show great skill in drawing out the mean morsels of comedy that the script
offers and the scenes involving the husband and wife together are genuinely touching - however it's not long before
Affleck comes bumbling back into the proceedings and farts in the spacesuit of entertainment again. James Gandolfini
has stated in interviews that much of the film was improvised, as the script wasn't finished when they started filming
(I'm not making this up) and it shows. The only times I chuckled were with throwaway lines that were inconsistent with
the surrounding lines and thus sounded unplanned. "I'm not going to be a good sport about this," says Christina Applegate.
"That's OK darling, we would never expect you to be," replies the mother - if this kind of light cynicism had pervaded
the whole hour and a half then they might
have scraped a watchable film. As it is, the funniest planned moment is in the opening credits, when an elderly lady
removes her gingerbread men from the oven and replaces them with her head - all while Andy Williams sings
"The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Must have been a leftover from
