The two great moments in Last
Christmas occur near the beginning and the middle of the movie. They are
respectively the appearance of Patti LuPone in the garish Christmas shop that
forms one of the films’ major settings and Blackadder’s
Christmas Carol playing on T.V. while Emma Thompson sleeps on the couch.
These have nothing to do with the actual plot of Last Christmas, but that’s part of why I love them. Delightful
surprises that remind me of things I like are a rarity in this film.
Last Christmas is a movie that does no favours to
those who would defend the subgenre of holiday rom-coms as more than glorified cable
movie tripe. It’s not easy I’ll grant, given the bad heavily outweighs the good
as far as these are concerned, but there are enough heartwarming Christmas
rom-coms like Love, Actually and The Holiday, to as far back as The Shop Around the Corner, The Bishop’s Wife, and even Christmas in Connecticut, to prove the
genre has legs. Last Christmas trips
over its’ own, but rather than fall outright, it clumsily stumbles over itself,
occasionally finding footing again, trying to look dignified, but inevitably
flailing in the attempt. It’s a bad movie borne out of an incredibly stupid
idea, but it’s so brazenly confident in that idea you can’t help but strangely
admire it a little, transfixed by its choices.
It’s directed by Paul Feig in a regrettable departure after
last years’ A Simple Favor indicated
he was spreading his wings. More depressingly, it’s written by Emma Thompson
(with Bryony Kimmings from a story by Thompson and Greg Wise), who apart from
her outstanding acting career has written the likes of Sense and Sensibility (rightfully earning her an Oscar), Wit, and Nanny McPhee. However this movie, inspired by the George Michael
song of the same name (achingly so as we come to learn) hasn’t any of the
cleverness or charm of any of those works –rather it’s written like the kind of
80s sitcom Thompson used to guest star on before her movie career hit. That’s
not to say those shows were badly written (The
Young Ones and Cheers in fact
were quite clever and funny, not to mention the various television projects
Thompson herself wrote during this period), but the stylings, humour, and conventions
of the format do not aptly translate to film, and certainly not a film in 2019.
And so you have things like a comically tense but ultimately friendly
employee-boss relationship, a mischievous assortment of characters at a
homeless shelter, and an array of disparate types of jokes that against each
other confuse the tone of the film (everything from legitimately clever wit to
hit-or-miss cutaways to lazy poop gags).
Amidst this the film is trying to be something sentimental; but
where its’ attempts aren’t clichéd, they’re neutered. Because of a plot twist
fairly easy to spot from about the fifteen minute mark, the romance between the
cynical and careless homeless shop worker Kate (Emilia Clarke) and the suave
and mysterious Tom (Henry Golding) which drives much of the story and character
growth, has to be chaste and restrained. The actors have decent chemistry but
it doesn’t do them much good with how spotty the relationship is written.
Similarly with the conventional motifs of family togetherness and helping the
less fortunate, thematic holiday staples going as far back as Dickens, the film
isn’t allowed to explore them in meaningful ways. For example, homelessness is
a crisis in Britain, and this film had the opportunity to dig into it, confront
the repercussions of Austerity, the failures of the welfare system and its
effects on the ill and disabled, address the rise in depression brought on by
the current government; but instead decided to ignore such things in favour of
a simplistic portrait of poverty and homelessness as ineffectual and vacuous as
the happy-go-lucky vagrancy of Oliver!
And it all has the cheesiness and relative staleness of a
cheap holiday romance from Hallmark, Lifetime, or Netflix. There’s virtually
none of the sharpness with which Feig characterized his prior comedies –though
it tries to find some expression through Kate, a lazy, selfish, arrogant, and
flagrantly irresponsible young woman drifting from temporary home to temporary
home, burning a bridge at every opportunity before learning to be a better
person under Toms’ wing. But Clarke is terribly miscast in this role. For as
much of an effort as she’s putting into it, she’s not suited to playing such an
unlikeable character, certainly not with the script and direction she’s working
under. She improves later in the film as her character does, but I can’t help
thinking an actress like Karen Gillan would have been much better for this kind
of part. Golding on the other hand, is just as charming and affable as in Crazy Rich Asians, more so even given
his character has the selflessness and consideration of a venerable saint. His
co-star of the aforementioned film, Michelle Yeoh, is also one of the brighter
spots of the movie, cast extremely against type as well, but capable of working
within it.
The crux of what’s wrong with Last Christmas though is in its very inception. This was a movie
made with a very particular yet inexplicable roadmap dictated to an alarmingly
literal degree by the song it’s named after. And once I realized that late in
the film following the reveal of its second twist, every lazy device and plot
beat made sense. A traumatic backstory becomes the set-up for a baffling punchline,
a characters’ entire motivation is cast in a bizarre new light, the thematic goals
(already insubstantial) are rendered even more conspicuously inert. And the
movie is very proud of this –you get the sense Feig and Thompson and Wise think
it’s clever. But unlike other movies convinced they’re much smarter than they
are (Collateral Beauty, Gifted, Life Itself, Joker most
recently), Last Christmas isn’t
obnoxious in its delusion –it so baldly, sincerely believes in itself and the
brilliance of its dumb little concept that you’re charmed just a little by its’
naiveté, and its’ dedication to such unconscionable fluff.
Affecting a Yugoslavian accent, Thompson plays Kate’s overbearing
immigrant mum. She’s a stereotype, but also a metaphor for the film as a whole:
awkward and misunderstanding and set in her ways, with misplaced affection, a confused
romance, and an inability to handle her depression. One joke suggests she lives
in a hideously bedecked house overflowing in excess gaudiness, when she
actually resides in the blank canvas next door. Last Christmas is both houses.
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