Pedestrian Family a Gathering to Avoid
The Rodriguez family is coming home to Chicago for Christmas. Patriarch Edy (Alfred Molina) can’t wait, positive he and his wife Anna (Elizabeth Peña) are in store for a holiday they’ll always remember. Because, not only is eldest boy Mauricio (John Leguizamo) going to be there with his wife Sarah (Debra Messing), Hollywood actress Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito) is flying in for the festivities for the first time in years.
Debra Messing, John Leguizamo, Elizabeth Peña and Freddy Rodriguez in Overture Films' Nothing Like the Holidays
The reason for all this reverie is the return of Jesse (Freddy Rodríguez), finally coming home after three tours of duty in Iraq. He’s a little worse for wear, but it is the hidden emotional scars that are far worse then the literal ones carved into the lines of his face. But that’s okay. Family will be good for the boy, and even if it gets chaotic and out of sorts there’s nothing the Rodriguez clan can’t accomplish when all of them decide to do it together.
The opening twenty minutes of the new family drama Nothing Like the Holidays is like listening to nails grind their way down a chalkboard. Horrible doesn’t even come close to describing the experience, all the noise generated by the overlapping conversations a cacophony of tedium so obnoxiously unsettling it’s enough to give the viewer an immediate migraine.
Strangely enough, almost on a dime all this annoying strum and drag comes to a screeching halt, a dinner table exclamation spinning both the film and the family’s relationships right on their head. It’s a virtual 180, and for a bright, shinning, almost effervescent moment it quickly started looking like the movie was going to by far more than any of the earlier moments ever would have led me to believe.
It’s all a cruel joke, however, director Alfredo De Villa (Washington Heights) and screenwriters Alison Swan and Rick Najera only glossing the surface as to unleashing the potential greatness hidden within its core. The movie reeks of sitcom level platitudes and stiltedly saccharine melodrama so trite and familiar it’s almost insulting. More than that, it has the temerity to tie its myriad of complex emotional subplots in bright shiny bows of glossy cliché, the darn thing taking forever to come to a conclusion as forgone as the sun rising in the east and bacon being served with eggs when eating a downhome Southern-style breakfast.
Pity, because it is sadly rare that we get to see a Hispanic cast of this caliber together in one motion picture. All of them, including supporting actors Luis Guzmán, Jay Hernandez and Melonie Diaz, invest so much into their respective performances they almost can’t help but rise far above the maudlin nature of the material. Molina and Peña, in particular, make so very much out of so very little I almost couldn’t help but be moved by the both of them, the full magnitude of their relationship’s meaning showing so clearly upon their faces it’s almost painted in bright shiny neon.
Be that as it may, the film itself feels like nothing more than a disappointing disaster. The pieces concerning Rodríguez and his Army service are particularly leaden, especially in relation to just how wonderfully the same material was covered in Neil Berger’s The Lucky Ones. In that film, the actor seemed to connect to his character in ways he never does here, the hurt in his eyes and the pain on his brow not having the same emotional resonance I felt while watching that fellow 2008 release.
But that is only one instance of many. Large portions of Nothing Like the Holidays feel ham-fisted and trite, almost as if the filmmakers decided that if they stuffed everything they could think of into the narrative people might not notice just how thinly superficial and obviously pedestrian the majority of it really is. There is no heart, there is no soul, instead there is only the coldly calculated mechanics of a familiar tale told far too many times before. As gatherings go, this is unfortunately one I’d rather have avoided.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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