Surviving Christmas (2004)

Surviving Christmas arrives in 2004 with a premise that would have been serviceable in a sharper decade and a cast that is, to a person, white. There is no representation initiative at work here, no ensemble assembled with an eye toward demographic accounting, no queer subtext to excavate. What we have instead is Ben Affleck being struck with a shovel and a family rented for two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The film is not interested in race, not interested in climate, not interested in the inner lives of anyone outside the four walls of a suburban colonial. It is interested in salami. Tom's salami, specifically, which Drew eats.

The gender politics are of the softest, most glancing sort. Alicia pushes back on Drew's behavior and holds some measure of independence, which registers as a faint pulse of contemporary sensibility in a genre that had already calcified by 2004. Christine gets a glamour-photography subplot that gestures at middle-aged desire before it curdles into a punchline about pornography on Brian's laptop. Nobody here is making a case about bodies, and nobody is making a case about anything else either. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus lands on a hollow anti-consumerist message, and it is correct, though hollow is generous. The film suggests money cannot buy a family and then spends ninety minutes demonstrating that money can, in fact, rent one.

There is no history to revise, no neurodivergence to accommodate, no sermon to sit through. The moral, that family beats materialism, is administered through a final-act resolution and a diner scene, softly enough that it never becomes a lecture. This is a film nominated for three Razzie Awards and winning none. Rare distinction. It loses gracefully to Catwoman.