Don’t come home for this holiday

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This article was published 13/11/2015 (3894 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Christmas comes to the multiplex early this year, but don’t expect holiday miracles from this snow-covered, Santa-crowded ensemble dramedy. As four generations of the dysfunctional Cooper clan gather for Christmas Eve, the festive cheer feels a bit forced.

The title references the sign-off on Charlotte Cooper’s holiday cards, in which case it needs a comma. It could also be interpreted as a bossy instruction to the audience — love the Coopers! — in which case it’s overly optimistic. They’re not a particularly lovable bunch.

Long-married Sam (John Goodman) and Charlotte (Diane Keaton) are secretly planning to separate, but Charlotte is determined to give everybody one final Christmas of stunning, Martha Stewart-style perfection. She’s got the holiday-themed snow globes and the colour-co-ordinated decorations.

Meanwhile, scripter Steven Rogers (Stepmom, P.S. I Love You) and director Jessie Nelson (I Am Sam) have wrapped up the characters’ emotional baggage with big red and green bows.

Charlotte and Sam’s son Hank (Ed Helms) has just lost his job. He bickers with his ex-wife and worries about his confused, angry kids. His sister Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) has mixed emotions about going home for Christmas — she calls the feeling “anticippointment.” Tired of letting down her parents, she snags presentable young soldier Joe (Jake Lacy) at an airport bar and convinces him to pretend to be her boyfriend.

Meanwhile, Charlotte’s unmarried sister Emma (Marisa Tomei, squandered) is stubbornly resentful of Charlotte and her seemingly ideal life. (“I love you,” she tells Charlotte at one point. “I just love you more when I’m not with you.”) Caught shoplifting at the mall, Emma ends up in an impromptu — and unlikely — therapy session with a buttoned-up cop, Officer Williams (Anthony Mackie, also wasted).

Charlotte and Emma’s father, Bucky (the always reliable Alan Arkin), distrusts Christmas and its idea of “scheduled happiness.” He has a stronger connection with a diner waitress, Ruby (Amanda Seyfried), than with either of his daughters.

All of these wandering subplots are held together, sort of, by the words of a mysterious narrator and set against a sparkly urban background of holiday lights and mall Santas and people kissing at airports. Love the Coopers is clearly hoping to become the updated American version of Love Actually, another dubiously punctuated multi-character holiday pic. But even Love Actually’s inconsistent Christmas charms remain beyond Love the Coopers’ scope.

The drama isn’t given enough room to breathe and the comedy often falls flat. The tone is uncertain. At times, the film strives to seem smarter and more cynical than the usual yuletide fare (though it’s not quite up to Seth Rogen doing magic mushrooms in church in the upcoming The Night Before). The next moment it relies on the kind of sentimentality that would make an elf blush.

Some stories manage to find their moments. Doing a Pride and Prejudice-lite thing, Wilde and Lacy generate some funny back-and-forth chemistry.

But ultimately the characters in Love the Coopers don’t feel like a family. And yes, you could argue that’s kind of the point. But they don’t even feel like a dysfunctional family. They feel like a group of actors — some talented, some not so much — who fail to convince when standing next to each other as fathers and sons, daughters and sisters.

That’s a Christmas-movie problem that even Clarence, the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, couldn’t solve.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca