Jessica

Vozel

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December 22, 2008

Fulfillment Without Marriage and Children? Hollywood Notwithstanding, Yes You Can

This past week I dragged my significant other to the theater for a Christmas tradition – the Christmastime romantic comedy. I’m a sucker for Christmas movies of all stripes, which means I’m willing to shell out $10 for a movie I would never see if it were set during summertime. This year it was Four Christmases. The premise – a cultured, well-traveled, unmarried and childless couple, Brad and Kate (Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn), are forced to spend Christmas with each of their respective divorced parents (Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenbergen, Jon Voight and Robert Duvall) and their families. 

If you read my post-Thanksgiving column on the obstacles liberals face during the holidays, you’ll understand why I thought I could relate to the couple’s plight – two city-dwellers spending the holidays with their sometimes backward relatives, whose worldviews are quite different from their own. Brad’s dad (Robert Duvall) frowns when he opens the satellite dish his son gave him for Christmas because his old black-and-white set with rabbit ears worked just fine. Witherspoon’s character, Kate, is often teased or questioned for not wanting kids and marriage. In the movie’s preview, she makes faces as her sister-in-law tells her all about breastfeeding and hands over her screaming child whom Kate holds awkwardly, like a sack of potatoes. 

I can’t say I had high hopes for this movie. I knew it would be holiday fluff. But even with those low expectations I was still disappointed. The laughs were there, thanks to Vaughn’s affectation that never gets old for me (although others would disagree, I’m sure) and to great performances by Duvall and Jon Favreau as Brad’s cage-fighting brother. My boyfriend even had an “accidental laugh or two” (his words). Witherspoon was the same sort of charming she always is in her movies. What disappointed me was that Four Christmases ended up not being about an unmarried, childless couple dealing with nosy families who want to see them take the traditional path of wedded bliss and babies, but about Kate deciding, within a 24-hour period, that she did want to be married and pregnant.

Let’s talk plausibility for a second. How in the world does a couple go from childless, unmarried and satisfied to drooling over babies the next? Somehow, spending the day with wacky relatives and babies changed everything for Kate and Brad, as if they’d never been around families or babies before. They went from espousing the benefits of their carefree lifestyle to suddenly realizing how empty they were. It’s like the movie had a specific message for its audience: You are not fulfilled until you have a family.

Especially annoying is that Kate, of course, is the first to experience the urge to marry and procreate, to Brad’s chagrin. Why oh why is it never the man in movies who wants to settle down and have kids while the woman pulls away, satisfied with her life of independence? It’s not like such a scenario doesn’t exist in real life – I’ve seen it. But movies, including Four Christmases, insist the pull of marriage only affects women – that women are crazy over getting a groom and a baby and chase after both like their lives depend on it. 

In the movie, Kate and Brad inevitably fight over Kate’s newfound desire to settle down, and Brad argues, rightly, that he went into the relationship with the expectation that there wouldn’t be marriage or children. But, an hour or two later, he is at Kate’s dad’s doorstep begging forgiveness and listing the benefits of having and raising kids after all. At the close of that scene, the couple decides that they would at least allow kids and marriage to be up for discussion at some point in the future, rather than limiting themselves to childlessness and mere co-habitation. This might have been a plausible enough ending. But where’s the moral lesson in that? The next scene, then, flashes ahead a year to the maternity ward, where a glowing Kate holds a happy pink baby with Brad smiling at her side. 

Sometimes a cheesy holiday movie is just a cheesy holiday movie. But this movie could have been more believable, less cheesy, and a lot less didactic if it would have allowed that marriage and kids is not the only path to happiness. 

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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