'Love the Coopers' a holiday snow job
The original title for this holiday family comedy had been "Let It Snow," a fitting one, considering that practically every scene is filled with big white flakes.
Some of them are even precipitation.
An astute marketing exec no doubt recognized that this superficial, cinematic white elephant needed a better, more meaningful title.
The exec could have capitalized on seasonal good will by re-christening the movie "Please Love the Coopers, Please!" But that probably sounded too desperate and pleading. So, we get the demanding imperative to "Love the Coopers."
You'd think that as many times as Hollywood has concocted bad holiday comedies about family reunions - "The Family Stone," "Christmas With the Kranks" and "Four Christmases" painfully come to mind - one would eventually be good.
Nope.
"Love the Coopers" takes place in Pittsburgh, the official birthplace of modern zombies thanks to George Romero. Four generations of the Cooper family come together for holiday cheer, with each member carrying more baggage than a skycap at O'Hare Airport.
Sam and Charlotte (John Goodman and Diane Keaton) scurry around prepping for the big dinner. She wants things to be just perfect.
They are not. We discover that after 40 years of marriage (not "wedded bliss"), the two are splitsville, apparently because they never took that special trip to Africa planned so long ago.
Their divorced son Hank (Ed Helms) lost his photographer's job at a department store, but he pretends to go to work anyway while looking for employment to support his three kids.
His sister Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) is in free fall, a libertine playwright who peaked too early then fell into bad life choices and remains single. To avoid frowns of disappointment, she persuades a soldier she meets at the airport to pretend to be her fiance for a night.
"All we have to do is figure out how long we've been together," she burbles. "And what your name is."
He's Joe (Jake Lacy), a super conservative who doesn't really buy into Darwin or Eleanor's lifestyle. But he goes along with the charade.
Charlotte's sister Emma (Marisa Tomei), suffering from self-worth issues, shoplifts a pendant and winds up in the squad car of Officer Williams (Anthony Mackie), who hates being called "a robot."
Meanwhile, Bucky (Alan Arkin), dad to Charlotte and Emma, suffers an emotional implosion when his favorite waitress Rudy (Amanda Seyfried) announces she's leaving and won't be serving him coffee and whatever fantasy infatuation he holds for her.
There's one more main Cooper, Aunt Fishy (June Squibb), who plays dementia for comic relief and supplies the obligatory "elderly flatulence" gag, never done better than in Blake Edwards' 1979 comedy "10."
"Love the Coopers" comes from director Jessie Nelson, also a writer and producer who gave us "Fred Claus" and another annoying Keaton comedy, "Because I Said So."
Nelson can't quite decide on a "remembering the past" format for this new movie. She frequently lapses into childhood flashbacks as characters reminisce for a moment.
She also employs a better, more dramatic device in which mentioned characters or younger versions of them appear on screen for a moment, then dissipate like memory ghosts.
Family comedies like "Love the Coopers" can only work if the characters emotionally connect with each other as well as with us.
Here, the Coopers go through the motions of saying lines and emoting feelings, but they come off as authentic as a tinsel Christmas tree.
Hmmm. Maybe that's why the Coopers live in Pittsburgh.
It's the birthplace of zombies.
“Love the Coopers”
★
Starring: Diane Keaton, John Goodman, Amanda Seyfried, Marisa Tomei, Olivia Wilde, Jake Lacy, Alan Arkin, Ed Helms
Directed by: Jessie Nelson
Other: A Groundswell release. Rated PG-13 for language, sexual situations. 105 minutes