Producer puts Latino edge on the holidays

The description "holiday movie" usually just means it comes out around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Some films, however, take that designation literally. This season there is "Four Christmases," in which Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn are forced to spend Dec. 25 with each of their divorced parents after the flight the couple had booked to Fiji is canceled.

From France comes "A Christmas Tale" starring Catherine Deneuve as the matriarch of a dysfunctional family, all of whom descend on her house for the holidays.

"Nothing Like the Holidays" falls somewhere between classic warmhearted fare and these modern-day tales of dreaded relatives.

A Puerto Rican family gathers for Christmas dinner in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood. Around the table are Alfred Molina and Elizabeth Pena as the parents, Vanessa Ferlito as their actress daughter, John Leguizamo as their stockbroker son and Debra Messing as his driven executive wife. It's Freddy Rodriguez, as an Iraq war veteran and the family's youngest, who is getting all the early attention. The New York Times cited his performance as one of "Five Attention-Getting Turns."

Rodriguez, 33, a standout as a mortician in HBO's "Six Feet Under" and America Ferrera's deli friend in ABC's "Ugly Betty," is as pleased to be one of the producers of "Nothing Like the Holidays" as he is to be one of its stars. This all came about because of his acquaintance with the producers behind State Street Pictures.

"They're all Chicago guys," said

Rodriguez, who grew up in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago. "They knew I was interested in producing, so we started throwing ideas around." They finally hit on the notion of "taking an American film with all the elements of an American film and have it revolve around a Latino family. That is something you don't usually see, so we wanted to give it a try.

"We hope audiences can relate it to their own families. That is why we designated it an 'American film' that happens to revolve around a Latin-American family. We want anyone of any ethnicity to be able to relate to it, to be able to say, 'That's my father' or 'That's my uncle.' We want to keep the film universal."

The couple played by Leguizamo and Messing could be any ethnic mix. "Whenever you marry out of your race, it is always a big issue in the family," Rodriguez said. "It is always a point of conversation. So we poke fun at that in this film."

Rodriguez's own favorite holiday movies as a kid were "Home Alone," "Miracle on 34th Street" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas." He plays the latter for his two sons every Christmas.