Late in Love the Coopers, a dramatic chase sequence through a busy hospital ends with one character stating to another in grand fashion that “We’re too good for this story.” I chuckled out loud. Was the film finally acknowledging that its sterling cast deserved far better material? That their talents were being squandered before our eyes? Or could it be this dreck is in fact a subversive send up? Maybe we’re not meant to laugh with it, but at it? Alas, no. My mind’s auto-correct rewrote the dialogue. The actual line was, “We’re too good a story.” It wasn’t a joke at all, but a big romantic moment.
What has Love, Actually wrought? That (pretty good) Christmas rom-com has become a genre unto itself. Its blueprint was simple enough. Take a large cast of accomplished actors. Engineer multiple story arcs that don’t, at first, overlap. Have them converge on a single, holiday-themed event. And voila — heartwarming magic. Love the Coopers splices this template with the affluent domesticity of a Nancy Meyers picture. Though it’s smaller in scale — we’re mostly following a family rather than a parade of strangers — its themes are bigger still. All these Coopers are broken in their own way. They’re equally lost in nostalgia and burned by the past. But maybe, just maybe, they will find that despite life’s hardships, something great is standing in front of their noses. That thing may be their own family.
Love the Coopers is set on Christmas Eve in an anonymous city. Mere hours before a major holiday, dozens of men in Santa suits stomp up and down bustling sidewalks, people casually browse shops and some even go on job interviews (hiring, apparently, is a top priority on Christmas Eve). Anyway, Steven Rogers (P.S. I Love You, Stepmom) bothered to write a story, so I should describe it. Charlotte (Diane Keaton, playing a facsimile of herself) and Sam (John Goodman, barely registering as a parody), the heads of the Cooper clan, are on the brink of divorce. Why? Something about a trip to Africa. Love the Coopers doesn’t care much about the particulars of this plot contrivance, and neither should you. So this is to be the final holiday dinner before Charlotte and Sam call it quits. The film follows the rest of the Coopers as they make their way to the one meal everyone clearly wants to skip. And who could blame them? These characters loathe each other. That is, until they don’t.
Parts of Love the Coopers point to a better movie. Eleanor (an acerbic Olivia Wilde), an insufferable left-coast playwright, meets Joe (the charming Jake Lacey), an aw-shucks army man, in an airport bar. She convinces him to join her for family dinner, under the pretense that he’ll play her boyfriend. Their courtship is part convenience (he has nowhere to go due to a blizzard), and part Linklater-style verbal connection (there are direct references to Before Sunrise, only with the roles reversed). Wilde and Lacey seem part of a different movie, probably because they get the best material. Another highlight is Alan Arkin’s wry patriarch Bucky who, as a patron at the local diner, teaches a waitress named Ruby (Amanda Seyfried, a total blank) about the history of film. Unfortunately, she’s planning on moving out of town, leaving him heart stricken. His feelings for her are vaguely creepy and, worse yet, there are suggestions she may hold romantic sentiments for him too (until she doesn’t). Still there’s a certain sweetness to their relationship. Though both these storylines start out promising, they quickly devolve into nonsense (like the scene where Seyfried kisses an ailing Arkin on the lips — what?).
There are other characters and stories too. Marisa Tomei plays a kleptomaniac/pathological liar with a heart of gold, and Ed Helms plays…a dad. June Squibb is trotted out as the crazy old aunt. There are children who occasionally have lines as well. All these threads go nowhere but straight to the film’s final scene, where every complication is thrown out the window and we take part in a figurative group hug.
Director Jessie Nelson (I Am Sam) has a little fun with some magical-realist asides and jokey cutaways, but mostly his effort is workmanlike. He needs to get us to that hospital in act three, cinematic cohesion be damned (Steve Martin’s persistent voiceover does most of the narrative heavy lifting anyhow).
Ultimately, Love the Coopers is the phoniest kind of feel-good picture. It sets up conflicts the characters simply discard like pocket change, when it could have just started out from a place of love. There’s plenty of comedy to mine among family members who enjoy each other’s company (see the Pfeffermans on the excellent show Transparent). In the end, Love the Coopers is the equivalent of a one-gallon tin of popcorn — something to consume over the holidays that will inevitably leave you feeling gross.