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That Christmas You Won't Remember

As he’s gotten older, Richard Curtis seems to have more and more embraced Christmas as his primary theme of choice. Where he used to be the acclaimed British sitcom guy and then the king of the rom-com, he now seems to have decided wholesome holiday fare is what the last act of his career will revolve around. Whether this came about through the holiday classic status of Love, Actually or if Christmas has always been a particularly sentimental subject for him, it’s hard to say. It is however a less interesting, less successful region of his work thus far, though I’m not convinced he much cares. Earnestness is a calling card of Richard Curtis, perhaps to a fault -and it is definitely on display in his new animated film for Netflix, That Christmas, at times cloyingly sentimental and without the balance of sharpness that characterized his earlier movies; yet that is also not without a few certain charms.
It is based on three children’s books by Curtis published between 2012 and 2020: The Empty Stocking, Snow Day, and That Christmas -set in an English coastal town Wellington-on-the-Sea during the holiday season. He and co-writer Peter Souter tie them together for this movie and incorporate a framing device involving Santa Claus, voiced by the least Santa-like actor imaginable, Brian Cox. The sketches mostly revolve around the children of the village: one boy wishing for his absentee father to come visit while his mother is overworked, twin girls with conflicting personalities and expectations for what Santa will bring them, and a group of kids left alone over Christmas when their parents are stranded in the snow.
Santa's part in this film, highlighted emphatically in what marketing the movie has had, is a red herring. He narrates the story and has a couple minor sketches from his framing device alluding to cut costs at the North Pole, and with his one remaining reindeer Dasher voiced by Guz Khan -but none of the story's main action concerns him and he seems to be explicitly a marketing gimmick to make the film feel more like a typical kids Christmas movie.
One perhaps understands the attempt though, given the actual focus of the movie, a collage of family stories linked by a message about community, is not very attractive to young audiences -regardless of whether it is a better idea than yet another exercise in manufactured Santa Claus-themed drivel. But the film isn't much attractive in a general sense either. Its comic tone -historically a strong point for Curtis- is largely tepid. I appreciate the perhaps characteristically British resistance to the kind of obnoxious quippiness and hollow cultural populism so common of animated kids’ movies across the pond, but there's nothing very smart or comedically interesting in its place. A handful of gags, visual beats, or dry observations land -amongst them a self-deprecating joke about Love, Actually- but they are quite stark exceptions amidst a flurry of jokes composed with seemingly little effort.
The bubbly yet stale animation perhaps contributes to this -as generic as a CGI animated movie can look in this day and age: nowhere as vivid and sophisticated as the big guns at Disney and Pixar, yet not quite bad enough to be amateur. What it looks like is one of those animated insurance ads you see, particularly at this time of year, from companies with just enough of a budget for it. Locksmith Animation is the studio, also behind 2021’s forgettable Ron’s Gone Wrong, and the film is directed by How to Train Your Dragon veteran Simon Otto. There’s ambition behind both these parties, and some of it does show through in the work -a Christmas movie is a good and colourful, opportune showcase for animators given the warmth of the subject suits the goal. But the animation here is monotonous and even feels hamstrung at times in things like the pace of character movement or spatial design that could impact a joke. And that reindeer just looks very ugly.
All of this said, there are beats and inclinations to the movie I can respect and that might have in other circumstances, salvaged it. It has a pretty good cast, including U.K. comedy veterans like Lolly Adefope, Sindhu Vee, Katherine Parkinson, and Rhys Darby (a New Zealander admittedly) as the various parents. Bill Nighy, consistently one of Curtis’s favourite actors to work with, has a cameo as a lighthouse keeper. And if there are highlights, they are Fiona Shaw as the stern school headmistress and Jodie Whittaker, who after five years as the Doctor is here to remind us she’s also very good at playing a mum. The kid actors generally aren’t terrible.
And there is something nice to the movie’s aims of emphasizing for kids the importance of community, especially as the climax shows how vital close-knit neighbourliness can be. It’s an idyllic image of the modern British small town certainly, but one that points to some real value Curtis is keen to express. And of course he does so with a characteristic sweetness, nowhere as effective as it once was, but with a twinge of emotional spark. His approach is almost akin to a religious film -entirely secular of course and a little more in touch with reality. The kids maybe are not, but they make for decent enough characters regardless -in their particular witty precociousness, lightly reminiscent of the Peanuts gang from time to time. It may be the one area of the film, which could well have been live-action in its pacing and style, where the animation is beneficial.
Curtis’s last movie effort was the mostly abysmal Genie, and it is slightly comforting that That Christmas (an awful empty title) is a significant improvement. It is not, however, a substantial one; and is perhaps more forgettable than the loud obnoxiousness of Genie -being consigned to a fate of burial in Netflix's slog doesn't help. Curtis is a good writer, and there is every indication by this movie that the books are perfectly nice. But That Christmas doesn't bring them to life in any kind of a dramatic way. Perhaps he should lay off the holiday for a little while, try another rom-com at a time when they are very needed. I'd like to believe he still has it in him.

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