Butler's Cinema Scene

Diane Keaton,  farting dog, John Goodman

“LOVE THE COOPERS”  My rating: D+ 

97 minutes  | MPAA rating: PG-13

In “Love the Coopers” the dysfunctional family holiday movie gets big-name treatment. The results are exceedingly unlovely.

It’s not just that director Jessie Nelson’s Christmas-themed comedy tries to shock us with raunch and cynicism before going all squishy soft in the last reel.  Lots of pretty decent films (“Bad Santa,” “Home for the Holidays,” “The Family Stone”) have assumed the same trajectory.

It’s that Steven Rogers’ screenplay is so blatantly unfeeling, cobbling together standard-issue ideas and characters for a sort of Pavlovian-inspired emotional release.

“Love the Coopers” (the title invokes memories of the inexplicably beloved “Love, Actually,” and like that earlier film gives us several interlocking stories) takes place mostly in a picturesque suburb outside Pittsburgh PA.  Here quaint homes, a steady snowfall and lush woodlands evoke a Norman Rockwell atmosphere.

Emotionally, though, there is no peace in the valley.

For starters, after 40-some years of marriage Sam and Charlotte Cooper (John Goodman, Diane Keaton) are calling it quits. They will break the news to their assembled clan after “one last perfect Christmas.”

Happy holidays, everybody.

Several plots eventually meet around the Coopers’ dinner table.

Daughter Eleanor Cooper (Olivia Wilde) is so reluctant to see the rest of her family  that she settles into the airport bar for some fortification. There she meets Joe (Jake Lacy), a soldier on leave who is charming despite being a Republican.

In an agonizing montage Eleanor and soldier boy engage in a comic ballet on an airport moving sidewalk. It is so gosh-awful “cute” theaters should lay in a supply of insulin.

Jake Lacy, Olivia Wilde

After a lot of pre-coital banter, Eleanor proposes that Joe — who is stranded by bad weather — come to the family dinner as her new fiance, thus eliminating all those degrading conversations about how she hasn’t got a life.

(Yes, that’s right. “Love the Coopers” maintains that Olivia Wilde cannot get a date for Christmas.)

Eleanor’s perennially underemployed brother Hank (Ed Helms) has been abandoned by his wife (Alex Borstein). Their pimpled teenage son Charlie (Timothee Chalamet) is dealing with his first case of clumsy puppy love, while Charlie’s little brother Bo (Maxwell Simkins) is a Gandhi-in-training perpetually trying to fix everyone else’s problems.

Ed Helms

Charlotte’s spinster sister Emma (Marisa Tomei) is arrested for shoplifting. On the long (like, interminable) drive to the station house she reveals to the arresting cop (Anthony Mackie) that she’s a life coach.  The officer is having issues with his closeted homosexuality. (Classic example of cynical casting. We need a black face…let’s make him a gay cop.)

Then there’s Grandpa Bucky (Alan Arkin),  a retired teacher whose one joy is breakfast at a diner where he hates the food but hugely enjoys lovely big-eyed waitress Ruby (Amanda Seyfried).  But now Ruby has announced she’s leaving town to find her bliss elsewhere.

Finally there’s Aunt Fishy (June Squibb), who suffers from comic dementia (so as to differentiate it from tragic dementia). She does fun stuff like farting in the car and blaming it on the family dog.

Apparently the filmmakers realized that this was way too much b.s. for a film to handle. So they’ve got Steve Martin as an unseen narrator in an attempt to jam all the pieces together.

The players do what they can with this material…which isn’t much. “Love the Coopers” isn’t particularly funny or romantic or touching. It’s just depressing.

 | Robert W. Butler