What used to be, what is now, and what the future potentially holds are the main framing points screenwriter Steven Rogers (Kate & Leopold, P.S. I Love You) strands together in Love The Coopers, a deliriously schmaltzy and often contrived dramedy that’s a particularly mixed stocking when it comes to its individual characters chapters. There’s plenty of sugar-coated comfort and joy in that predictable Hollywood kind of way to be found here, and if you don’t expect too much from it, there’s potential for mild enjoyment in a film we’re all too familiar with.
As their annual Christmas dinner rears its head once more, the festive season appears as anything but for the Coopers who are all individually on the verge of falling apart. Cooper matriarch Charlotte (Diane Keaton) fears her 40-year long marriage to Sam (John Goodman) has come to a close as the wedge driven between them over an abandoned holiday to Africa has only grown wider as the years progressed; their children Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) and Hank (Ed Helms) are dreading the thought of visiting, unable to face possible disappointment from their parents due to their current predicaments – she being single for yet another year, he tirelessly searching for work due to recent unemployment; and then there’s grandpa Bucky (Alan Arkin) whose platonic relationship with the young waitress (Amanda Seyfried) at his local diner evokes both a sadness and an elation within him as she’s the only person he’s been able to connect with after all these years.
Rogers’ script offers very little in terms of both originality and plausibility as it seems evident he’s hoping to coax on the holiday spirit with his ever-shifting story which frustratingly both engages and disappoints. The arcs focused on Keaton and Goodman’s ailing marriage and Wilde’s “pretend” relationship with republican soldier Joe (Jake Lacy) are the film’s strongest; the push-pull flirting between Eleanor and Joe is particularly good, allowing the immensely underrated Wilde to shine in a snappy yet vulnerable role that ultimately belongs in a better film.
Helms’ Hank is left with very little to do with his rather ho-hum story, Arkin is suitably likeable and his relationship with the soft Seyfried is equal parts entertaining and hard-to-swallow, and it all comes off as deja-vu for Keaton who basically recreates her character from The Family Stone just with a dialled-back neuroticism. If there’s one storyline that wastes its talent it’s that of Charlotte’s sister Emma (Marisa Tomei, somehow playing the only-slightly-younger sister to Keaton, despite a 19-year age gap in reality) whose shoplifting offence pops her in the back of a police car for the duration of the film, allowing her ample time to converse with the robotic Officer Williams (the criminally underused Anthony Mackie). It’s a back-and-forth that thankfully doesn’t result in a meet-cute situation but it’s a strand that goes absolutely nowhere and seems designed purely to humanise the rather whiny Emma.
Features like Love The Coopers are critic-proof, and I suspect an older audience could find harmless amusement in this tale that sadly is nowhere near as funny as the advertising would have you believe. With such a reliable cast on board it’s a shame the film can’t rise above its mediocrity but for all its generic shortcomings there are occasional glimpses of material that the calibre of talent on board deserves.
TWO AND HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
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