Mark Reviews Movies: LAST CHRISTMAS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2019

To its credit, Last Christmas attempts to do a lot. To its detriment, the movie doesn't do any of those things particularly well.

At the movie's heart, it's an examination of a woman who essentially has given up on things. Kate (Emilia Clarke) was ill recently—a fact that's repeated every so often without getting into any specifics. That changed her, and it didn't do so for the better.

She's skipping appointments with her doctor. She's ignoring the medical advice she received. Instead of eating well, she goes for the greasy food. Instead of cutting back on her alcohol consumption, she's going out to a bar almost every night. Instead of lessening her stress, she's basically homeless, after "moving out" from an apartment with a roommate, and calling everyone she knows for a spare bed or a couch upon which to crash every night. She has been kicked out of multiple places for assorted infractions (accidentally killing an expensive fish with a hairdryer, for example).

There's also the matter of Kate's career, which is divided between her day job, working at a year-round Christmas shop in London, and her dream, to be a professional singer/actor in the theater. Auditions are rough, especially when Kate can't keep a schedule, arrives late, and sings as if she just ran across town—because she just did. She's also a bit delusional about her chances. There's an upcoming audition for a show that will be performed on ice. Kate has never skated, but that doesn't matter. She'll just wing it.

Kate should be instantly irritating, and the fact that she just comes across as a blatant combination of two romantic-comedy archetypes—the klutz and the cynic—is entirely thanks to Clarke, who exudes a lot of charm, as well as the right degrees of naïveté and some deep sense of an existential wound. We're never entirely convinced that the character, who either jokes or "jokes" about wanting to be dead at the age of 27 (like so many famous musicians), has any consistent motive or goal, but that's kind of the point. Kate is lost and doesn't want directions.

By the way, as suggested above, this is also a romantic comedy, in that Kate randomly meets Tom (Henry Golding), an impish—in the positive, playful sense—man who really wants to take her on a walk around town. He has a motto for life: "Look up." There are things in this city and the world at large that people don't notice, because they're spending all of their time looking elsewhere.

Tom is here for the semi-romantic banter, obviously, but he's also here to provide Kate with a few, pointed lessons. When the movie reveals what Tom's true purpose is, there's a certain cruel irony to at least one of his lessons, which makes us think that maybe he should think up a new one.

At this point, we have to sidestep the movie's big revelation, although it becomes painfully obvious once we learn the nature of Kate's recent medical issues. There's a good reason that the screenplay by Bryony Kimmings and Emma Thompson (who also plays Kate's overbearing mother) evades the full truth about what happened to Kate. The combination of Tom's odd behavior and the lyrics to the song from which the movie gets its title are much more than hints about the story's big twist. Did that give too much away? Does it really matter? Should song lyrics ever be taken so literally?

The movie does, though, focus on Kate. She transforms from a selfish, self-destructive person to someone who helps others (volunteering at a local homeless shelter), who sees the pain in other people (a couple of references to the xenophobia that propelled Brexit, which only feels like another item for the screenwriters to cross off on their long list of what they want to do with this movie), and who learns to say and show that she's sorry. All of this happens because an attractive stranger gives a monologue about what matters in life.

One wonders if this story would have played better had Kimmings and Thompson just been upfront with their intentions. There's something to be said about wearing one's heart on the sleeve, for everyone to see, especially when the other option is to keep us in the dark for no other reason than a cheap surprise.

After all, the real story of Last Christmas—of someone learning important life lessons from a certain type of person around Christmastime—isn't new. We can accept such fanciful sentimentality. The screenplay and director Paul Feig don't trust that, and the result is cowering schmaltz.

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