Love The Coopers

Love The Coopers is a nuclear bomb in the War on Christmas.

It’s Christmas Eve in Pittsburgh as members of the Cooper family gird themselves for their annual holiday family get together. Of course, because this is a modern holiday movie, everyone is miserable and the family is dysfunctional to the 10th degree (I guess happiness and joy are old fashioned, 20th Century themes).

Charlotte (Diane Keaton) and Sam (John Goodman) are getting ready to call it quits after 40 years.

Already divorced, Hank (Ed Helms) also finds himself unemployed from a job he truly loved.

Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) still is single, so she has convinced a young GI, Joe (Jake Lacey), to pretend to be her boyfriend.

Bucky (Alan Arkin) just learned his favorite waitress at the diner, Ruby (Amanda Seyfried), is leaving town.

And, everyone else in the family is miserable, too. I just don’t care enough about them or their stories to go into detail.

You probably won’t care for any of the stories I already mentioned.

Director Jessie Nelson and editor Nancy Richardson are so bored by it all they feel the need to keep inserting shots of the adorable dog in a desperate attempt to keep the audience involved and deliver some ounce of warmth and hope. However, this isn’t a YouTube video looking for cheap clicks, so they fail, no matter how much charm that dog radiates.

Love The Coopers is a dreary, depressing film sucking the life out of Christmas and the idea of family. Yet, writer Steven Rogers wants to make the film into a dramedy with the lesson about how family matters and it’s all you need and you can all stick together even when things get rough, etc. ,etc., blah, blah, bah humbug. He has given the audience too much negativity to overcome with a cute ending.

The entire cast is wasted on predictable plots, even when they deliver performances much better than the material. Arkin is masterful as he brings more honest emotion to his story than everything else in the movie combined, while Steve Martin cashes in a big fat check for his appearance as the film’s narrator. Maybe they wanted him to take Goodman’s role as Keaton’s hubby, and Martin thought better of it?

I think the only reason they made Love The Coopers was to score some easy syndication money when the movie is picked up by cable channels desperate for material when they play Christmas movies 24/7 from November 1 until January 1.

Love The Coopers is rated PG - 13 for thematic elements, language and some sexuality.