Holiday entertainment falls into two camps: life-affirming (“Miracle on 34th Street,” “Elf”) and stress-affirming (“Bad Santa,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas”). Writer/director Ed Burns leans toward the latter — his tinsel-decorated “Fitzgerald Family Christmas” puts a magnifying glass on the homefront dysfunction that tends to come into sharp relief around this time of year.
Regrettably, none of the Fitzgeralds are people you’d much want to come home to for the holidays — or ever. As Gerry, the proxy patriarch for his six siblings and bitter single mom (Anita Gillette), Burns is a good-hearted but tedious martyr who runs the family restaurant and frequently guilt-trips his brothers and sisters into visiting their mother, with whom he lives.
None of the sibs are faring much better in their own lives, though. Quinn (Michael McGlone of Burns’ first movie “The Brothers McMullen,” though you probably know him as the Geico guy) is about to propose to a much younger woman who’s clearly wrong for him, while Sharon (Kerry Bishé) is involved with a questionable man twice her age. Erin (Heather Burns) appears to have some serious postpartum blues. Connie (Caitlin Fitzgerald) is married to an abusive man. Dottie (Marsha Dietlein) has just broken up her own marriage by cheating with the gardener kid who “cuts her grass.” And Cyril (Tom Guiry) is fresh out of drug rehab.
The kicker is that Dad (Ed Lauter), who abandoned his family two decades earlier, wants back in for Christmas, and he’s got a gut-wrenching reason why. Do they believe him? Can they forgive him? How many times will they re-exposition to one another that he “walked out on us”?
Burns, who spent his early career in similar Irish-American cultural terrain, hits a few resounding notes, as in his heart-to-hearts with a hot home-nurse love interest (Connie Britton, another “McMullen” alum) who gives him permission to openly rail against his loved ones, and in his mother’s faux-cheery resignation to her children blithely bowing out, one by one, of her pre-Christmas birthday party.
But too much of the film is taken up by creaky plot devices and one sibling vowing to track down and talk to another one to resolve a problem. Really, what the Fitzgeralds need for Christmas is a good multiparty cellphone plan.