"Surviving Christmas" succeeds despite Ben Affleck's playing the lead character as if he were a tipsy partygoer. You know the type -- the person who talks too loudly, smiles too broadly and generally makes a jackass of himself.

		'Surviving Christmas' Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, language and brief drug reference Starring: Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, Christina Applegate Director: Mike Mitchell

Luckily for him and the audience, though, he's surrounded by some actors with impeccable comic timing or another signature role that resonates here. So, while watching James Gandolfini as a blue-collar Illinois guy named Tom Valco, you keep thinking of him as mob boss Tony Soprano. It works, even if Tom/Tony doesn't summon Silvio to take Affleck into the woods and dump his car in the long-term parking lot at the airport.

And darned if Tom's wife isn't played by Catherine O'Hara, who lost Macaulay Culkin a couple of times in the "Home Alone" comedies.

"Surviving Christmas" is about a millionaire bachelor from Chicago named Drew Latham (Affleck) who faces the prospect of spending Christmas alone. He's quarreling with his girlfriend, who vetoes a trip to Fiji, and he can't beg a holiday invite from a single acquaintance. He gets the idea to revisit his childhood home, burn a list of his grievances there and move on with his life.

But when he arrives at the Valco house in the Illinois suburbs, he's enchanted with the idea of actually living in his old room and recapturing his childhood. He offers the family $250,000, and the stage is set for yuletide glee and merriment, or at least that's what the contract stipulates. As O'Hara's character says of the deal: "Faking it anyway, might as well get paid."

Of course, things don't go as planned, especially once an adult daughter (Christina Applegate) returns home and joins her parents and brother (Josh Zuckerman). Other unexpected developments send the Christmas charade into overdrive.

"Surviving Christmas" is occasionally funny, in spite of Affleck's performance. Or maybe he's just a victim of the Jessica Rabbit syndrome -- he's not really bad, he's just drawn that way by the four screenwriters and director, Mike Mitchell, whose credits include (shudder) "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo."

Also, it's awfully early to start singing "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." Even "Elf," last year's holiday hit, waited until Nov. 7 to open, and, in 2002, "The Santa Clause" came down the chimney on Nov. 1.

"Surviving Christmas," not to be confused with "Christmas With the Kranks" arriving a month from now, sometimes seems like an artificial Christmas tree or eggnog spiked with imitation flavors. It's no "Elf," but in a pinch it will do for a drop of (premature) holiday cheer.