When the box office bomb Surviving Christmas (2004) came to home video I was working at the local video store. It was a “mom and pop” establishment and the boss chose Surviving Christmas to be the holiday flick we played on a loop. Over the course of a couple of weeks I managed to see all of Ben Affleck’s holiday comedy. I thought it was painfully bad.
The premise of Surviving Christmas is that depressed ad executive Ben Affleck pays a small fortune to the family currently residing in his old childhood home to spend Christmas role playing as the family he never had. It’s ludicrous and absurd, but not beyond being a relevant or hilarious comedy. However, the haphazard plotting and inhuman dialogue conspires to undermine and prohibit the comedic performances of Affleck’s surrogate family played by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Josh Zuckerman, and Christina Applegate. It doesn’t help that every interior set looks like its been stolen from a sitcom.
There are a number of odd choices made by the creatives behind Surviving Christmas, the least of which being the romance between Affleck and Applegate which merely feels like a riff on Christmas In Connecticut (1945). The most bizarre choice in Surviving Christmas was to introduce a subplot wherein Zuckerman’s character over comes his addiction to internet porn by stumbling upon pornographic images of his mother (O’Hara) that he oddly cannot look away from. The writers have also opted to withhold the most dramatic conflict of the film until an hour into this eighty-five minute mess, meaning that the majority of the film is just Affleck manically running around ruining a family’s Christmas.
Despite all of the shortcomings of the production and the screenplay Ben Affleck gives the most inspired performance of his career. I never appreciated before that Affleck, when confronted with this material, decided not to ground his absurd character at all but to embrace the character as a demented man child. Affleck’s work in Surviving Christmas is all grotesque grins, bug-eyed expressions, and high-pitched squeaks. Affleck delivers a character somewhere between Jerry Lewis in The Errand Boy (1961) and Martin Short in Clifford (1994). It’s an inspired and wholly unpredictable choice that actually helps to elevate Surviving Christmas.
What I once considered to be an absolute failure I have come to appreciate as a captivating mess of a movie. Surviving Christmas is no masterpiece, but in the canon of holiday comedies it deserves better. It’s worth seeing just for Udo Kier’s super sexy fashion photographer and Sy Richardson’s horny “Doo-Dah” understudy. Few of the Christmas comedies that have come out in the last twenty-five or thirty years have dared to be half as original or weird as Surviving Christmas.
