Four Christmases

About halfway through Four Christmases, there is a scene where Reese Witherspoon is sitting on the crapper, having played with her sister's breast pump and taken a home pregnancy test, when a little girl walks in nonchalantly, steals said pregnancy test and runs away with it, sticking it in her mouth. While there is a certain amusement in seeing a little girl in a ballerina costume ingest Reese Witherspoon's piss, it isn't exactly the sort of thing one would expect, or even want, from a preachy Republican family Christmas movie. In fact, almost everything about this commercial holiday tale is somewhat contradictory, annoying and/or offensive. It starts out well enough, with Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon), a happily unmarried couple, planning a holiday getaway during the Christmas season, skipping out on forced familial holiday cheer with the parents, siblings, nieces and so on. When their flight is delayed, an unexpected television news interview clues their families on in their availability, forcing them to attend four separate Christmases with their universally divorced, idiosyncratic parents. In between takes of Jon Favreau eating chicken wings, Witherspoon smacking the head of an infant off a door and an elderly woman making a holiday vow to perform more oral sex, the couple learn of the many childhood secrets kept from each other, so as to create an unlikely and wholly contrived divide between them. There are some mildly amusing moments but more so there are extended awkward sequences that make little sense and an overall tone of moral superiority. The lesson learned is this: being different is crazy; you can only be happy by following the rules and being as much like everyone else as humanly possible, even if it means secretly cutting your inner-thigh to focus on the pain, as it is the only thing that's real. Happy holidays, indeed. No supplements are included with the DVD, which means mainly that next Christmas a two-disc special edition of the film is on its way.