Four Christmases / Forbes earlier this year ranked Vince Vaughn “the Best Star for your Buck.” Apparently, his films garner more than $14 in box office revenue for every dollar he earns. Not only is Vaughn big in the biz, he’s a giant, tall enough to have an asymmetrical effect on any parade, or in any movie scene he’s in. In the clever Four Christmases, he’s paired with tiny Reese Witherspoon, and in the movie’s inventive first two scenes, the comedy begins with the couple merely walking together (those first scenes tells us everything we need to know about the pair’s characters. That’s good writing).

Here’s the deal: Brad and Kate have been a terrifically compatible (unmarried) couple for three near-perfect years, mainly because they have a mutually-created game plan. No fussy marriage complications, of course, but they have conspired a way (lying through their teeth) of not visiting their families for holidays. When we first meet them, they’re just about to depart for Christmas in Fiji. Their backstories? Both are children of divorced parents, meaning that they’d have four families to visit–and the complexities those sojourns would offer.

When, however, their flight is delayed and TV reporters ambush them, their families see the interview and insist that the couple come for short Christmas visits. So they must, and they do.

Each visit is told as a separate episode, and the movie’s four writers emphasize a different kind of comedy for each. The first visit (to Brad’s father and brothers) is almost pure slapstick. Dad is played by Robert Duvall (a triumph of vulgarity) and the bros by Tim McGraw and Jon Favreau, Vaughn’s oldest movie friend and the director of Iron Man. Those brothers are amateur cage-wrestlers and behave accordingly (of course slapstick is a Vaughn specialty: he’s knows that slapstick is not simply awkwardness–see Role Models–a kind of beauty is part of the deal).

The second visit is domestic/social satire with Dwight Yoakam as the new man in the life of Kate’s mom. Mom has now discovered The Lord and makes her daughter and beau attend Christmas church service in Yoakam’s new “now” church (disco lighting, live music and a playlet, in which Brad and Kate are forced to play Joseph and Mary). It’s here we see how good a farceur Vaughn has become.

Episode three features a visit to Brad’s mom (Sissy Spacek), who has gone cougar and now cohabits with Brad’s one-time best friend, a guy Brad’s age. And Kate is, one episode after another, beginning to see a different Brad from the one she knows. Uh-oh.

As tension (spoken and otherwise) begins to mount because of what the couple has learned about the “secrets” of each other’s pasts, the perfect couple splits apart, and Kate chooses to visit her father (Jon Voight), while Brad drives home to San Francisco. This is the inevitable “poignant” scene (Witherspoon’s specialty), which means much consternation before the alleged happy ending (we are reminded that the comedy genre originally meant that which ends in marriage).

One final note: This is the first narrative directed by Seth Daniel, whose The King of Kong made everyone sit up and take notice. If this project weathers the recession’s effect on the box office, Daniel should have a long and interesting career.