It couldn’t be filled with more false sweetness if they dumped a truck’s worth of saccharine on the ground and asked you to make snow angels.
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Lindsey Bahr is a film critic for the Associated Press.
The movie intertwines several different related plotlines, much like the “Valentine’s Day” and “New Year’s Eve”.
The holiday season seems to inspire warmth, goodness and a genuine want for family. He was more than willing to give Love the Coopers a chance to turn the spigot on his waterworks, but its characters sacrifice nothing. The characters feel so generic and unreal, that I thought “there isn’t a family in the world like this”.
Mostly, though, the movie brutally wastes a talented cast. One exasperated boy splats mashed potatoes into his divorced parents’ face to get them to stop yelling at each other over the meal.
Christmas dinner hosts Charlotte (Diane Keaton) and Sam (John Goodman), their senile aunt (June Squibb) in tow, haven’t told their soon-to-be-visiting kids – unloved playwright Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) and out-of-work divorcee Hank (Ed Helms) – that they’re separating. This year’s installment, “Love the Coopers”, promises to deliver on the cinematic cheer, but is more of an airing of grievances than a celebration.
Wilde is at her best suggesting how conflicted her character is.
Ed Helms, Alan Arkin and John Goodman star in a scene from the movie “Love the Coopers”. Why would this be such a stress in the family between these two women that Wilde would resort to a fake boyfriend (Jake Lacey)?
Tomei, who like Keaton has a coolness which somehow manages to transcend her too frequent bad roles, is clearly making an effort to bring a few life to her badly written character, but the majority of the film has her obsessing about being too competitive with Keaton and trying to talk her arresting police officer (Anthony Mackie) to come out of the closet. Plus the likes of Alan Arkin, Amanda Seyfried, Marisa Tomei, and other overqualified players pop up with equally clichéd tragic lives that can only be solved through one magical family Christmas. It’s pretty lacking in action and complications (this is the opposite of jam-packed movies like Love Actually), yet the narrative is somehow still a mess.
It doesn’t help that various Coopers say and do things no thinking human ever would. And his familiar but not always recognizable voice was really distracting. Even the homey narration by Steve Martin wasn’t likable. Truth be told, I had trouble just liking the Coopers. You won’t even like them. At a point, everyone seemed to be smiling and laughing in a scene, but just like the family portraits taken in this movie, there is nothing sincerely motivating that behavior.
The movie was filmed at houses in Sewickley and Edgewood, a diner in Millvale, Butler Memorial Hospital, Boyce Park, Gateway Center subway station, a senior community in South Fayette, grocery and electronics stores, Frick Art & Historical Center, TGI Friday’s at CONSOL Energy Center and the Galleria mall in Mt. Lebanon. Oops. I hope I didn’t spoil it.
5 stars to 4 1/2 stars: Must see on the big screen.
And one of the first is the Diane Keaton/John Goodman-starring “Love the Coopers”, which features a dysfunctional family coming together at holiday time for laughs and discoveries about themselves.
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Lesley Coffin is a NY transplant from the midwest. We are introduced to Tomei’s Emma in a department store, where she unsuccessfully attempts to swipe a broach.
