Lee’s Review: “Love the Coopers”

Apparently, Hollywood has learned from department stores. At times I smiled in spite of myself, but mostly I was over it before it began and counted the minutes until I was allowed to go home. Or how about one of the “dullest, most cliché-ridden and cloying Christmas movies to hit the screen in a long time”. She’s drawn to displays of emotion, he’s drawn to her, and while the pairing is simple at times it’s also sweetly endearing and frequently amusing.

The Cooper clan is large enough that it would help if you were given a cheat sheet upon entering the theater.

Producer-director Jessie Nelson, whose previous projects include the heart-tugging, high-pedigree gloop of I Am Sam, Stepmom and Corrina, Corrina, remains true to form here, with an all-star cast fumbling around in a deep-dish holiday goo of dumb dialogue, silly shtick and artificial sweetness that feels like a concoction created with ingredients ladled from other, far better cinematic Christmas Crock-Pots-a dollop of It’s a Wonderful Life, splashes of Love, Actually, sprinkles of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. After all, Hank (Ed Helms) has just been laid off and Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) is an easily wounded soul despite her flinty facade. Emma’s an unmarried and childless life-coach who is perpetually late and jealous of her older sister. One major difference between the projects, however, is that Keaton served as an executive producer on “Love the Coopers” and shepherded the project for years until it finally got made. The plot is not a simple line but a journey with many different paths that come together and there is no guarantee things are going to end perfectly. She’s got relationship woes, and rather than heading straight to her parents’, she hangs around the airport bar where she meets the snowed-in Joe (Jake Lacey), a God-fearing Republican in uniform. As executive producer I am certain she had a say in her lighting, and while her acting is flawless her vanity is not. A scene in which the two of them talk out their invented romance is borderline-magical.

Nearly as successful is the storyline involving Bucky and Ruby – again thanks largely to the performers. Arkin (“Argo”) and Seyfried (“Ted 2”) are their usual appealing selves and are very good together. It is not for the younger set although you can’t tell that from the previews.

Other characters and subplots are less successful.

Marisa Tomei is caught shoplifting, and spends the first part of the movie begging the cop (Anthony Mackie) not to take her in. This story thread threatens to become interesting but never quite does.

Worse, the dynamic between Charlotte and Sam doesn’t reach its potential. And Goodman (“The Monuments Men”) and Keaton (“And So It Goes”) are talented actors, but they can do only so much with the two-dimensional characters their given. “He missed his job helping unhappy families look happy”, recurring narrator Steve Martin sighs, with a next-level “Christmas Story” wryness that makes us lament the cutesy touch that he’s also the family dog.

Though Love the Coopers follows the holiday-movie playbook to the letter, right down to the main course sliding across the hardwood floor, it doubles as a distinctly uncomfortable reading of the upper-middle-class American family.

With a cast this big and star-filled, it’s perhaps inevitable that most of the subplots feel woefully underserved, but nothing in Love the Coopers suggests that they’d benefit from the extra attention.