The Fitzgerald Family Christmas

Directed by Edward Burns

(not rated)

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This robust family drama puts Edward Burns “back on home turf,” said Rafer Guzmán in Newsday. The writer/director of 1995’s The Brothers McMullen has crafted a “genuine charmer” about a large Irish-American clan planning a holiday dinner that dredges up years of buried resentments. Burns stars as Gerry, the eldest of seven siblings, who is trying to grant the request of their wayward, dying father (Ed Lauter) that he reunite with his children for his last Christmas. But by the time infidelity, pregnancy, domestic violence, and drug abuse join the party, the proceedings feel like the desperately overreaching finale of a failed television series, said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. The seasoned actors can only do so much to overcome the busy script. But Burns still has a keen eye for family dynamics, said Stephanie Zacharek in NPR.org. It’s easy to see why Lauter’s grouchy patriarch would be hard to forgive, or why a peacemaker like Gerry would try to mend tribal ties. For a family like this one, Christmas is “hardly a day of rest.”