The Family Man
dir. Brett Ratner
Warner Bros. / Castle Rock Entertainment

What an of-its-time parable The Family Man is. So compromised it barely exists, it plays two half-realized scenarios against one another into a self-negating stew that evokes none of the emotions to which it aspires.

Between countless “A Christmas Carol” offspring and their antithesis, It’s a Wonderful Life, the Christmas Delusion is practically its own film genre. The common elements are easy to see: spirits helped Scrooge learn that his miserly misery blinded him to everything of value; an angel showed George Bailey his life had worth that far surpassed his comprehension; arbitrage wizard Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) is forced by the angelic Cash (Don Cheadle) to step into the shoes of an alternate-reality self that, 13 years prior, stuck with his college sweetheart Kate (Téa Leoni) rather than going abroad to sharpen his killer business instinct. (Note: If the endings of those two films came as a surprise to you, then so might this one, and so I should offer a spoiler warning because that ending will be discussed.)

Upon hearing Kate’s passionate plea that the couple ditch their prestigious plans — hers entails attending a highfalutin’ law school; his sends him to Barclay’s — and start fresh, the other Jack relented. As a result, he’s set down roots with Kate in a sleepy New Jersey borough in which he has gone from E.F. Hutton trainee to helping Kate’s post-heart attack father run his tire emporium. Two kids later and with Kate doing pro bono social work, the couple is living in a middle-class grotesque that director Brett Ratner grossly misrealizes.

It’s here that the movie runs afoul of its intentions. Ratner and screenwriters David Diamond and David Weissman have an arrogantly monocultural view of the middle class — we also learn that real-world Kate became a high-profile lawyer, with all of the cosmopolitan trappings and tastes that implies, but in the fantasy world her vibrant personality is shoehorned into an awful stereotype typified by ugly paisley comforters, terrible taste in suits and saying “Anywho.” (Your annual viewing of A Christmas Story, one of the all-time great odes to the American proletariat, will only reinforce how infuriating this is.) Leoni is a revelation here; she inhabits Kate fully, portraying her without a whiff of condescension — her previous efforts suggest she’d play right into the movie’s general disdain toward middle-class life, but her Kate fulfills the fantasy-wife aspect of the role with all the earthiness and magnetism the premise demands. The only reason to reduce the character to such broad strokes is because it’s the deepest psychological/sociological insight the filmmakers can generate.

Having half of the picture out of balance is bad enough, but the real-world side is also off-kilter. Real-world Jack is an ace businessman navigating his company through a major acquisition that will require them to work through Christmas but will make them all inconceivably rich — and given that all Christmas ever means in a Hollywood movie is time with the family, Jack forcing his colleagues to make that sacrifice is hardly a Scroogian wrong. Jack’s only real failing seems to be living the high bachelor life and lavishing gifts on short-term girlfriends before rolling onto his next conquest. Say what you will about that; in any case, the filmmakers haven’t given him very far to fall. The weight to Christmas Delusion movies is the chasm between the life lived and the life glimpsed; by only half-charging the real world and insufficiently imagining the alternate one, it all falls apart.

The movie’s one remaining hope — the pure emotion of the journey — is actually the least fulfilling facet yet. Once Jack is transported into his family man role, the movie spends the bulk of its middle act doling out scenes in which Jack stumbles through the haze of his displacement, and the headway he makes is so indiscernible in these scenes that they could be stacked in any order. (It truly wouldn’t matter, since all the subplots it introduces — including Kate’s family, a possible paramour, Jack’s foray back to his old office — are left dangling anyway.) The Family Man suffers mightily from this imploded structure.

And, to the movie’s discredit, neither is it clever. Jack makes no excuses for his functional amnesia, and he doesn’t sleuth his way into determining his place so much as bluntly asking about it — “Do I have a private office? Where is it?” is a typical question from Jack to family, friends and coworkers. The detection through which displaced characters rediscover their lives is the kick of these stories, or, at least, would provide The Family Man with something resembling second-act structure. You taste that pleasure when Jack tries to understand his marriage to Kate by looking at an old videotape, which as a device is not only utile but anthropologically revealing. (Aren’t the home movie collections every family has just attempts at a greatest-hits collection?) But insightful moments like those are so rare in The Family Man that we’re supposed to resort to being impressed by Jack’s epiphany that “I love you,” and not “You make me so hot,” are the words which melt Kate.

At this point, viewers are left hoping for a finale to redeem all that’s come before. No such luck. The Family Man strikes a false note at its climax by suggesting that Jack must scuttle the merger deal his firm has strived toward in order to win his chance with Kate. Forsaking personal gain (of the monetary or prestigious sort) is de rigeur for these redemption tales, but The Family Man inverts that by calling attention to Jack’s personal gain (of the romantic kind) while you’re left to realize that the merger all of his partners have fought for will disintegrate as a result — it plays up the selfish, look-what-I-got undertone of romances that the genre requires we overlook. The Family Man has its cake and eats it, too; to be sure, so did Scrooge and George Bailey, but the world around them was better for it. When Jack and Kate go out for their last-scene coffee date, it just seems like an exercise in mutual narcissism, which is totally unrelated to the introspection The Family Man desperately needs.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)