Nothing Like the Holidays

Let's get this out into the open: holiday's are pretty rote. They endure as your memory of them endures. Stories play and replay, food always tastes the same. Your crazy aunt gives you crazy aunt gifts: a lobster hat, a used woman's windbreaker. It's all very Pavlovian in that you know what is going to happen each and every year, yet your mouth waters and your heart races a bit at the thought of family. This is half of the joy of the holidays: it is a safe time, a comfortable time, a time when you try to shut out work and whatever seriousness plagues you. Often you fail, but that is alright because that too is expected.

Like the holidays themselves, holiday films are built on formulaic expectations. They explore families, their natural drama, and compound this with stressors that come along with the seasonal spirit. Knowing this, and I feel we all know this, Alfredo de Villa's Nothing Like the Holidays is unsurprising. It is not built to be surprising. It is an honest exploration of a crazy, normal family experiencing a crazy, normal Christmas, Humboldt Park style.

Freddy Rodriguez (Six Feet Under) plays Jesse, the prodigal son of the Rodriguez family returning home to Chicago from a tour of duty in Iraq. He is met at the airport, a patch covering his eye, by his crazy cousin Johnny (Luis Guzman), and his friend Ozzy (Jay Hernandez). It is, at first, the awkward encounter you might expect, but it quickly transforms into a loving, joking reunion. They drive through the neighborhood of Humboldt Park, a predominantly Puerto Rican niche, musing on old times, girls, and how angry Jesse's mother will be at their growing tardiness to dinner. On a hill overlooking the city the guys play baseball in the snow, Guzman fixes his hair, and the sense of being home sets in.

Like any family movie worth its salt, there is a chaotic dinner scene in which the boisterous Puerto Rican family (which could honestly be substituted for any family) talks over one another in escalating voices. This is how you make your point at a holiday dinner when the wine, or rum, or turkey has gotten under you and your vocal inhibitions stop making sense. Eventually, an earth shattering moment comes around and the table is uncomfortably silent.

The matriarch, Anna (Elizabeth Pena) threatens to shatter the tenuous bond of family with an announcement, and the children, seeing each other for the first time in a long while, set out to reevaluate and problem-solve the underlying familial problems. There are moments of heavy sadness, of love reconciled and forgotten, and overwhelming humor—all of which lend their weight to the meaning of the holiday spirit, to the meaning of what it is to be a family. In this sense, Nothing Like the Holidays is quite straightforward. It is a tender and loving production through which the audience is able to see bits and pieces of their own families. They are provided an opportunity to reflect, to ask themselves, "What would I do?" While the film itself plays out from a very definitive cultural perspective, it accomplishes what it originally set out to do.

Films like this are not so concerned with narrative ingenuity or treading new artistic territory but rather on crafting a strong, ever present sense of something. In this case that idea is unity in a time that threatens cohesiveness, love in a time that allows for blame, and earnestness in a time that urges fallacy. Humboldt Park, while a beautiful and vibrant community, could be any borough in any city, in that the problems this family sets out to overcome are wildly universal.

Family is family and one must do whatever it is to retain that bond of community in the face of whatever obstacles might endanger it. This is our expectation, and Nothing Like the Holidays satisfies it as well as it can, lending us a metaphorical blanket in which to wrap ourselves for a few moments and think back on a year or a life marked by those we love and those we should have perhaps loved more.

—Alex Cripe
12.10.08

Everybody has a favorite Christmas carol: a song that if by chance you hear it anytime during the year you'll recall wonderful winter memories of family and friends. Everybody also has a 37th favorite holiday tune: one that they never think about, but don't mind hearing when it comes on the radio some time after Thanksgiving. In that regard, Nothing Like the Holidays is more "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" than "Silent Night." For a while, director Alfredo de Villa whips up a light and enjoyable variation on the traditions of the large dysfunctional-yet-functional-family holiday film. Alfred Molina plays convenience store owner Edy, the father of the rambunctious Rodriguez clan, which includes oldest son Mauricio (John Leguizamo), a successful white-collar professional married to Wall Street warrior Sarah (Debra Messing), a WASP who's never felt totally accepted by her in-laws. Then there's only daughter Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito), a struggling actress in L.A., and youngest son Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez), an Iraq War vet who pines for an old girlfriend, and suffers from guilt for causing the death of a fellow soldier. All the while, matriarch Anna (Elizabeth Peña) cooks a never-ending supply of delicious-looking food, and constantly complains about not having grandchildren. The first half-hour of the movie gets all these people under one roof to celebrate Christmas together, and watching the ensemble is enjoyable -- the playful bickering has a warm familiarity to it. And if the film maintained this breezy tone for the entire time, it would be a low-key charmer, but when resentments and secrets come spilling out of everyone, the film's attempts at drama can't match the comedy. Serious scenes involving infidelity, lost love, and survivor's guilt never feel as natural as the good-natured moments of familial bonding, but instead feel like ham-fisted attempts to inject the characters with some emotional weight. While it is true that nothing all that original happens during the funny parts of the movie either, the family's Puerto Rican heritage gives the movie's comedy a unique spin. For example, Uncle Johnny (a scene-stealing Luis Guzman) kids Mauricio about when he and Sarah will make some "sorta Ricans." If the drama were as culturally specific as the comedy, the movie would be much more memorable. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide