‘Love the Coopers’ is a moving, starry holiday pic

Before “Love the Coopers” ventures down that misbegotten path, however, it first delineates the problems of its various interconnected players. And when you pull them, the sleeve falls off.

“Love the Coopers”, which is known as “Christmas With the Coopers” in the United Kingdom (!), is the new worst Christmas season movie.

Sam and Charlotte’s unemployed mall-photographer son Hank is keeping his lack-of-job status on the downlow from his kids and soon-to-be ex (Alex Borstein).

Emma (Marisa Tomei) gets caught shoplifting a gift and bonds with her arresting officer (Anthony Mackie). I think she should have gotten a lot more out of this talented cast than she did. He’s kind of a surrogate father figure to her, and they’d feel like the movie’s high point if their scenes didn’t suffer from a few of the same clunky humor as everyone else. (The voice is Steve Martin’s.) It explains everybody’s eccentricities and baggage (“Aware of the growing distance between her parents …”) at the same time the actors are frantically trying to show us. So there’s that, too. Director Jessie Nelson’s dramedy follows a familiar family-reunion template in detailing the Yuletide get-together of the Coopers, a clan fracturing under the weight of divorces, unemployment, unrealized dreams and loneliness – as well as past joys that all its members desperately want to reclaim.

She comes up with the idea of pretending that this couple is really a couple.

It’s hard to point at just one thing that’s going wrong here. When coupled with Charlotte and Sam’s ongoing discussion-cum-argument over how they drifted apart, “Love the Coopers” occasionally appears on the verge of ditching its more cloying tendencies and transforming into a thoughtful meditation on how the holidays serve as a time to reflect on and reconnect with family, love and those cherished people and moments (big and small) that once brought such happiness. You might also cite a lack of chemistry, or the uneven comedy. Better to stick to the Christmas classics. “Love the Coopers” just drags on and on through the misery until it finally decides to cobble together a happy ending. With the awards season approaching fast, studios rush to release their best movies of the year around this time, putting myself in what I like to call “positivity limbo”, the time in which I give far more positive reviews than I normally would, always making me doubt my critical eye for film.

Like the sweater I wore to my screening tonight, “Love the Coopers” is a warm, fuzzy, comfortable holiday pic.

Written by Steven Rogers (“Hope Floats”, “Stepmom”), the script is filled with acute character observations and hard-won wisdom: An old lady remembers “never considering she would ever be anything but young”; someone excuses an untruth by saying, “It wasn’t a lie, it was a wish”.