'Fitzgerald Family' Does Dysfunction A Disservice
There's nothing particularly special about Edward Burns' wry family drama The Fitzgerald Family Christmas –— but that makes it something of a relief amid the avalanche of overlong, big-ticket prestige films that comes tumbling into theaters this time of year.
You've probably seen some version of this story before: A crotchety and unreliable old man, long estranged from most of his family, attempts desperately to reconnect with them on Christmas Day. It's urgent, because he's harboring a Secret with a capital S.
But the familiar plot framework is really just an excuse for Burns to grapple with the complicated, often acrimonious family dynamics among his characters. Particularly for those who come from large, sprawling families, plenty of it is likely to ring true.
Burns himself plays Gerry, one of seven kids in the Irish Catholic working-class Fitzgerald family, and the only one who has never left home. He runs the family business, a well-kept pub with a glossy bar, and serves as the family organizer and peacemaker, which is a harder job than it may sound.
His crisis du jour? He's been contacted by his father (Ed Lauter), who skipped out on the family some 20 years earlier, leaving his wife (Anita Gillette) with those seven children, the youngest of them still in diapers. Dad really wants to be allowed to attend the family's upcoming Christmas gathering; Mom wants nothing to do with Dad, for understandable reasons.
It's left to Gerry to apply salve to all the unhealed wounds, not just between his parents but also among his numerous siblings. The Fitzgeralds all seem to love each other well enough, but they can tolerate being in the same room with one another only in various permutations.
One of the youngest (Kerry Bishe) doesn't really have anything against one of her much older brothers (Michael McGlone); she simply feels he doesn't know her, thanks in part to their age difference, and at one point she challenges him to name the high school she attended. (He gets it wrong.)
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Fitzgerald family patriarch Big Jim (Ed Lauter) comes home for the holiday, hoping for forgiveness from the family he abandoned years before.