Margaux and I continue to ring in the holidays with the surprisingly funny Surviving Christmas.
Trevor: Okay, let’s get this out of the way: we both kind of liked Surviving Christmas. It’s not some hidden gem, but it was weirdly, surprisingly enjoyable at times. I’m not gonna lie, after the rough start, there were some parts of this movie that made me crack up pretty hard.
Trevor: Surviving Christmas was unironically enjoyable! Nothing about it should work; a man-child (Ben Affleck) goes back to his childhood home to relive what he thinks are his best holiday memories and pays the family that currently lives there to play along with him. Against all odds, it’s actually funny by being full-throttle ridiculous any chance it gets, there’s a lot solid physical comedy and insane gags – shove shovel to the head notwithstanding. Mainly, I think it’s helped out a lot by the cast of James Gandolfini, Christina Applegate, and Catherine O’Hara. Ben Affleck starts the movie at an 8 and a half-an-hour into it is at a 12. I have a theory that this movie is really about a man becoming unglued by the pressure to be “happy” at Christmas, and also, unchecked white male privilege.
Trevor: Oh definitely, there’s a lot to be said here about the commodification of people, and the economic subjugation of the middle class by the upper class. It’s strangely nuanced, and doesn’t collapse under the weight of its high concept.
But yes, Affleck goes very big here, and at first I found it grating, then I realized “Oh, he’s absolutely going for it,” and at that point the movie started growing on me. It doesn’t hurt that Gandolfini’s irascibility makes him a nice foil for Affleck here. There are times when it seems that Drew (Affleck) is legitimately insane, which led me to reimagine this as a psychological horror film, which I’ll probably pitch later.
Margaux: Later like in this write-up? Or later in a metaphorical sense? Cause I am curious to hear it. I feel you could totally re-edit the trailer to make it a horror, similar to The Shining trailer getting a buddy comedy edit.
Trevor: I think it could be the same basic plot: young, lonely millionaire rents a family for Christmas. He gives them scripts, he dresses them, he calls them by new names. Over time, he starts to recreate his childhood, buying all the houses on the block and hiring actors to live in them (I picture Jesse Eisenberg in the lead). Eventually the whole block is living in a scripted loop, living a fake Christmas over and over. I think of it like Vertigo meets Synecdoche, New York meets, well, Surviving Christmas.
Margaux: I was gonna say it’s like Krampus meets The Truman Show. Well, I like it, go ahead and send it off to wherever people make scripts into movies!
Trevor: Hollyweird, here I come!
I will say I have one somewhat major issue with this movie, and that’s that it under-uses its actresses. Catherine O’Hara and Christina Applegate are both funny women who aren’t given much to do here. Applegate in particular has a very reactionary role. But O’Hara does a lot with a little, and I did like how quickly she bought into Drew’s fiction, treating him like a son and letting him call her “Mom” (Drew calling Tom and Chrstine “Dad” and “Mom” was always funny to me).
Margaux: The movie tries to give Catherine O’Hara something to do, but the photoshoot aside, it was a flimsy excuse for a sidebar and the subsequent fall out was kind of brought up and resolved too quickly. Just because we liked Surviving Christmas doesn’t mean it’s without fault. I think it starts to lose steam when Christina Applegate and Ben Affleck start to like each other, at that point, it begins to feel like it’s all in service of making one big “kissing your sister” joke. I also think the little brother, Brian, was underused too. He makes a very funny, self-deprecating joke about how this whole experience might turn him into a serial killer, and honestly, I was thinking the same thing about him.
Trevor: I liked the running joke about his mental breakdown, and the movie was smart not to dwell on it too much. And yes, I agree that the romance kind of bogs things down; it happens too quickly, and to be honest I’ve never found Applegate to be a very compelling actor. The incest jokes kind of comes out of nowhere, but I liked that Affleck’s girlfriend’s father was so accepting of what he thought was an unconventional lifestyle. Very odd characterization. This movie puts emphasis on the weirdest things!
Margaux: Right, like when aforementioned father just casually drops the Maury Povich-sized bomb that he’s in fact NOT Missy’s father. I mean, what I am supposed to do with that? We just met these people.
Trevor: Such a weird moment! At times like that you can really tell that Surviving Christmas had four screenwriters, who were most likely never in the same room. Which explains unexplored subplots like the one you mentioned, and Tom and Christine’s respective midlife crises. Tom’s Mustang was not made a big deal of.
Margaux: I mean, it was, and then suddenly never to be spoken of again. Just like the photoshoot with O’Hara earlier. Just like Brian and Doodaw finding those photoshoot picture on a soft-core site under the sub-header, “middle aged hotties.” Or that Doodaw’s stand-in at Christmas spends most of the night hitting on O’Hara. And can we talk about how when Applegate first shows up and shatters Affleck’s illusion of a picture perfect Christmas, his solution is to make her a maid possibly named Consuela?
Trevor: I feel like Drew is a much bigger weirdo than the movie lets on. What he does is weird on its surface, but Tom and Christine go along so readily that the movie kind of glosses over it. It’s mainly through Brian that we see how close Drew is to becoming truly unhinged (I cracked up when Drew wakes up Brian by shouting, “It’s your brother, kind of!”).
Margaux: He’s so fucking weird, HE DOESN’T HAVE FURNITURE IN HIS CAVERNOUS APARTMENT. Now that’s some serial killer shit. He has a lawyer on call for draw up contracts to rent out families. He can’t possibly afford to pay nearly 30 some odd thousand dollars to rent a family on just a creative directors (or however he makes his marketing money) salary. What are you not telling us, Affleck? And, this might sound dumb, but was that house even his childhood home? When Affleck finally comes cleans about what his Christmas growing up was like, I don’t recall a shout out to the house, just sad diner pancakes.
Trevor: Oh gosh, I didn’t even consider that, but it would be such a funny twist if he just randomly decided upon that house. I’m just going to accept that; it’s canon now. This is exactly why I want to remake this as a deeply unsettling psychological horror film.
Margaux: When he took Applegate to the ice palace he recreates from her story, I thought he might have a total meltdown that she didn’t immediately love it or try to bribe her into liking it since that’s how to solved most of his issues for 88% of the movie.
Trevor: There are so many ways this movie could have become really uncomfortable to watch. It’s actually kind of a Christmas miracle that we enjoyed Surviving Christmas as much as we did. I fully expected to loathe this movie.
Margaux: Me too. Oddly enough, I thought Jingle All The Way 2 was going to be the one I secretly liked. Boy was I wrong about that.
All things considered though, I’m glad there’s a happy enough ending for everyone, but Drew really needs to continue to seek therapy from Stephen Root’s character in the future because he hanging on by a thread, mentally.
Trevor: Yes, he is not okay; he just fell in love with a woman who he spent about a week pretending he was related to, all while he was renting her family for Christmas. God, on paper this movie is so goddamn weird. Do you want to talk coal?
Margaux: Let’s. Surviving Christmas might just be the best (and only) good-bad movie about the unrelenting pressure of pretending to be perfect during the holiday.
2/5 lumps of coal
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