2015’s Christmas With the Coopers, a Love Actually style multi-strand narrative tale with an all-star cast that tries entirely too hard to be the best holiday movie you’ve ever seen and in doing so ends up a noble, curious mess. This one follows the interweaving stories of four generations of the Cooper family as they all come together to celebrate Christmas at the family home, not realising that mum Charlotte (Diane Keaton) and dad Sam (John Goodman) are planning to divorce after more than three decades together.
The cast list for this one readslike a who’s who of Hollywood talent, and it all looks wonderful and festive as hell but helmer Jessie Nelson’s film is seriously flawed, straining to be deep and impactful. The plot tries really hard to tug your heartstrings in a million different directions but none of it remotely rings true. It is, pardon my French, all just a big old bunch of contrived Hollywood Bullshit. Oh, and it’s all mawkishly narrated by the family dog who happens to be voiced by Steve Martin.
So, Sam and Charlotte are determined to have one last amazing family Christmas before they break the news to everyone but it turns out all their kids, grandkids and so on have heaps of trivial, clichéd First World Problems of their own. Son Hank (Ed Helms) is divorced and just lost his job, but is hiding this news from everyone, including his 4-year-old daughter who’s decided to start swearing at everyone.
Daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) is perpetually anxious about disappointing everyone and is currently dating a married man. So, after a chance meet cute in the airport, she strikes a deal with handsome soldier Joe (Jake Lacey) to pretend to be her boyfriend for a few days. They seem like total opposites and annoy each other. Will they fall in love for real? Who can say?
Emma (Marisa Tomei) is stuck in successful sister Charlotte’s shadow and gets caught shoplifting, to try and get attention, I think? Arrested by Anthony Mackie’s closeted police officer, she spends what seems like the longest journey ever attempting to psychoanalyse him from the back seat of his cop car. Will they learn important life lessons from each other? Will he let her off in time for the family gathering? I’ll never tell.
Great grandfather Bucky (Alan Arkin) is distraught that the manic pixie dream girl waitress (Amanda Seyfried) at the diner he hangs about all the time is quitting and leaving town forever. They have some sort of cute/borderline creepy platonic love thing going on and he goes there every day purely to see her and she’s totally fine with that.
Elsewhere, future dreamboat heartthrob Timothee Chalamet is an awkward, geeky, shy teenager hoping to finally score with his crush, while there’s a great aunt called ‘Fishy’ (June Squibb) who’s suffering the onset of dementia, but is totally cute with it and not at all upsetting.
Will family bonds conquer all? Urgh. It’s the sort of overwritten film where the narrator (a dog, remember) has to tell you exactly how everyone is feeling at every dramatic moment, as if we can’t be trusted to work this out for ourselves. To its credit, the heavyweight cast do some serious lifting to wring some charm out of a pretty duff script and there are a few enjoyable moments as long as you can force yourself to believe that any of these characters are behaving like normal people. By the end, my eyes are a bit sore with all the rolling they’ve done.
It's a film with no surprises and where nobody has to work particularly hard for everything to work out fine because……family, I guess? There is some interesting stuff in there about a daughter who died that catches my attention, but the film doesn’t linger on it and leaves that plot thread carelessly dangling. It might have been a more compelling tale if they explored that dark alley a little more. Instead, a major character must suffer a stroke for everyone to realise how insignificant their worries are and how much they love each other. Thanks, Hollywood. Thanks, Christmas. Thanks, Dog!
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