Sorta Rican take on the Christmas story
The Chicago-based Puerto Rican Christmas picture “Nothing Like the Holidays,” if you are a sentient being on this planet, should strike you as crushingly familiar. Done before, done last week, done every year, it’s the latest holiday film about a varied, dysfunctional everyday family that comes together at Christmas, lugging a 12-car pileup of anxieties, then tidying up every one, in a warm red bow, within 98 minutes.
But director Alfredo De Villa is as interested in the rhythms of these characters and the details of their lovingly worn middle-class homes -- painted metal railing on the stairs, decorations on the kitchen sink -- as with the cliches he’s expected to deliver (and does).
The primary family here is the chaotic, everyone-doing-everything-at-once Rodriguez clan, which hasn’t spent a holiday together in years. Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez) is back from Iraq, nursing survivor’s guilt and a romance with an old flame (Melonie Diaz). Sister Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito) is a struggling actress with modest success in Los Angeles.
Ozzy (Jay Hernandez) is Jesse’s childhood friend, itching to strike at the gang that killed his brother (Ozzy is also smitten with Roxanna, who, in turn, is smitten with him). Alfred Molina plays the mountainous patriarch, unfaithful to his wife (Elizabeth Pena); Luis Guzman drops by as the big, loud family friend.
Who else? Oh, yes: John Leguizamo jets in as the rich New York businessman with a rich, white high-powered wife (Debra Messing), who we know is high-powered because she wears a Bluetooth.
The biggest contribution to the Rodriguezes’ Circus of Complications is they haven’t had grandkids -- or as the family calls their inevitable offspring, “Sorta Ricans.” “Nothing Like the Holidays” is Sorta Rican too -- sorta authentic, when it allows this big, wonderful cast to talk to one another, catch up, laugh, evade. Those hundreds of subplots? Practical ways of throwing actors together, and nothing more.
Watch the way their faces brighten in conversation, the smiles that spread slowly across their faces in moments of genuine warmth, it’s what we need at the holidays. It’s the modest goal of a modest little holiday picture like this to capture something heartfelt and real, finding anyone doing anything and meaning it, regardless of how patently false the situation seems.
Sounds like the holidays to me.
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‘Nothing Like the Holidays’
MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, including some sexual dialogue and brief drug references
Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Playing: In general release
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