...
I've already said too much.
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This is your last chance
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I mean it.
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OK
...
Here I go.
...
Last Christmas is exactly what you are thinking it is about. Or, at
least close enough to what you are thinking. If you don't know what I mean,
watch the trailer again. If you still don't know what I mean, then I don't know
what to tell you. Think about the song. I plan to be thinly coy for the rest of
this, so be warned.
This is a movie about a young woman named Kate or
Katarina (Emilia Clarke). Kate is a mess. She drinks too much. She isn't very
considerate of people. She crashes at friends' houses because she's been
evicted without a back up plan. But, everyone agrees that she can be very
charming and likable in between her moments of self-sabotage. She works at a
year-round Christmas shop run by a woman she calls Santa (Michelle Yoeh). Her
life is a mess until one day, she chances upon a mysterious man named Tom
(Henry Golding). She keeps meeting him by some mix of chance and intent, and
each time, her life gets a little better. I'd like to say there's more to it
than that, but this is a Christmas movie, and its only concern is to make you
happy. Which it did, for me.So, success.
I'm very excited for what Emilia Clarke's post-Game
of Thrones career has in store. She was excellent on that show, but I get
the feeling she's going to be good in a lot of things. I still think she was
the best part of Terminator Genisys by a significant margin. Her charm
nearly made Me After You work. Last Christmas is Me After You
but without most of the sad stuff, and Clarke is great in it. I came out of
this movie wanting her to be my frustrating friend who is also one of my
favorite people. Henry Golding is the manifestation of the Manic Pixie Dream
Boy. It's written into his role, almost literally. His entire Hollywood output
so far has been "the perfect, most handsome guy" and he's good at it.
I swooned. You will too. That's just what he stirs in people. He and Clarke
work nicely together, because they are too pretty people who are being asked to
light up a room. I don't see Michelle Yeoh as often as I'd like to, so my last
memory of her was as the buttoned up, devious mother of Golding in Crazy
Rich Asians. That's not her at all in this. She is just delightful
throughout the movie. She tries to be stern, but it doesn't work. After all,
this is a woman who runs a Christmas shop because she loves Christmas so much.
It's not a deep character, but this isn't a movie for deep characters. Speaking
of thin characters, Emma Thompson plays Clarke's mother: a Yugoslavian
immigrant who is desperate for attention. Thompson also co-wrote the
screenplay, so I can't be too bothered by her writing in a comedic side
character that allows her to use a fun accent.
So, do you remember when I said Last Christmas
is exactly what you think it is? That thing that you noticed about it that
seemed off? Again, you are correct about that. And I don't think the movie is
trying to hide it. The trailer invites you to ask it. The way Henry Golding
moves around screams it. The way that his favorite saying sounds like advice
from a fable begs you to wonder about it. The movie is not trying to be more
clever than you, but the problem is, I don't understand its endgame. The movie
is being obvious about all the clues, which got me excited. I figured there was
a reason for it. Like, that wasn't the actual reveal the movie had waiting.
There wasn't more to it though, and it's not really even explained. OK. Let me
close this up, then we can talk after the credits.
I enjoyed Last Christmas a lot on the
surface. The cast is full of lovely people being lovely and doing lovely
things. It has a couple ill-fitting diversions in it that, I guess I agree with
the point they are making, but I don't understand why they are in the movie
(the word "Brexit" has no place in this movie. It doesn't belong).
Otherwise, it's the standard Christmas movie that's about how Christmas time
brings out the best in everyone. It's hokey, and I'm fine with that. I just
wish I didn't spend so much of the movie distracted by the elephant in the
room.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
After the Credits
I'm someone who is fooled easily by twists. I am
never looking for them. That's not how I enjoy movies. I welcome a narrative
trick. And still, I went into this movie certain that Henry Golding didn't
exist. So, I'm assuming that virtually everyone else figured this out
immediately. The trailer begs you to figure it out and early on, the movie
itself does too.
I wasn't sure the exact logistics. Was Golding an
Angel? Was this an out-of-time thing? Perhpas Golding was a manifestation of
her alcoholism? I ever briefly wondered if multiple characters didn't exists.
My favorite theory was that Kate killed her parents and sister in a car crash
because she was drunk at the time, and that she's homeless now, and Golding is
a reinterpretation of her therapist or something. I kept looking for something
more complex, because him just being the ghost of the man whose heart she
received didn't explain enough. Why was he appearing? How does she just happen
to be sitting at his bench? And, I'm stupefied trying to come up with how she
knew about the phone in the cupboard, or, more importantly, why that was a plot
point at all. I kept waiting for more explanation. Maybe there was something
on his phone that he wanted her to see (Nope). Maybe it turns out that she'd
researched the man whose heart she received, and her guilt and depression
literalized him to help her work through it (Nope). However, it's nothing like that. He's just a
ghost she sort of falls in love with. And he told her such specific stuff that
I have to believe that he really existed. There's no wiggle room about the
meaning of it all, which is the kind of ambiguity this kind of movie normally
loves. So, this movie just casually confirms the existence of ghosts with the
end purpose of...feeding the homeless, I guess. Emma Thompson is an Oscar
winning screenwriter. It baffles me that this is the screenplay she settled on.
She (and her co-screenwriter) got 70% of the way through an idea, then just
stopped there, right before she got to the part where she ties it all back
together. I came out of the movie feeling like someone told me to hold my
breath then didn't get around to telling me I could breathe again. Like, I know
I could start breathing again anytime I wanted, but I thought the game we were
playing was that you would tell me to hold my breath then tell me to start
again. Last Christmas is one of the odder anti-climaxes I've ever seen
in a movie.
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