Text size:

'This Christmas'

Rating:

BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

November 21, 2007

Anyone old enough to remember vintage TV game shows such as "I've Got a Secret" or "What's My Line?" may recognize some of the behavioral patterns exhibited in "This Christmas," a teeming, warm-hearted family melodrama whose characters may need to familiarize themselves with the title of another old game show: "To Tell the Truth."

The deceptions start at the very core of the Whitfield clan, whose pious matriarch, Ma'Dere (Loretta Devine) owns a Los Angeles dry-cleaning business. Abandoned long ago by her musician husband, Ma'Dere's been playing house with a stolid fellow named Joe Black (Delroy Lindo). But she's been keeping the true nature of their relationship a secret from her grown-up-and-long-gone children, and with a Christmas family reunion on the horizon, she and Joe agree to live separately until New Year's - or until they can find a way to tell everyone.

Other secrets begin drifting in with the rest of the wayward offspring. Eldest daughter Lisa (Regina King), married to upwardly mobile control freak Malcolm (Laz Alonzo), meekly goes along with his plan to convince Ma'Dere to sell her business so he can close a lucrative deal. What she doesn't know, but her savvy sister Kelli (Sharon Leal) suspects, is that the haughty Malcolm's got other sleazy business going on the side.

Meanwhile, eldest son Quentin (Idris Elba), a jazz musician like his father, thinks coming home for Christmas would provide a timely escape from vicious loan sharks. His younger brother Claude (Columbus Short), on leave from the Marines, arrives with a couple of secrets of his own, one of whom is stuck at a nearby hotel. And we won't even talk about the baby of the family, named, of course, Baby (Chris Brown), except that his little secret, improbably, may make his mother angrier than anyone else's.

Part of you waits impatiently for these and other secrets to be unraveled. But the company's so pleasant, attractive and disarming that you don't mind. Writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II could be accused of serving up an overstuffed holiday buffet. But there are no gratuitous drug problems and nobody you won't recognize, more or less, from your own family. So stop griping and say grace.

THIS CHRISTMAS (PG-13). When the Whitfield family convenes in Los Angeles for its first holiday reunion in four years, its members seem to bring more secrets with them than gifts. Writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II serves up an overstuffed but satisfying Yuletide comedy-drama with a fine cast that includes Delroy Lindo, Idris Elba, Loretta Devine, Regina King, Sharon Leal, Laz Alonzo, Mekhi Phifer and Chris Brown. 1:57 (vulgarities, sexual material, violence). At area theaters.