If you’ve already over-indulged in Netflix’s brand of cheap and, overwhelmingly, cheerless Christmas movies this season, then Amazon has something a little meatier to add to your plate. Like Netflix, it also has more than enough tinnily made Hallmark ripoffs (step forward, Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy), but it’s also aiming a little higher with Oh. What. Fun. It’s a more robustly made attempt to recall something we used to see on the big rather than small screen with a cast to match, a starry cross between Home Alone and The Family Stone with an all-new soundtrack from some unusually upper-tier artists.
Given the low budget and even lower ambition of the genre, it’s easy to be blinded by the names attached. The film is directed by Michael Showalter, the trusted hand behind films like The Big Sick, Wet Hot American Summer and The Idea of You! It stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Felicity Jones, Jason Schwartzman, Danielle Brooks and Chloë Grace Moretz! There are new songs from Fleet Foxes, Gwen Stefani and Sharon Van Etten, among others! Enough experience might have shown us that even the most talented people do not tend to make the greatest films, but there’s something about the sheer effort being poured into this one that feels notable as others have seemingly given up trying. Could actual fun be on the Christmas cards?
Well … no is the short answer. It doesn’t take long to realise that the packaging of Oh. What. Fun. is ultimately less about the creation of an even mildly entertaining festive film and more about the marketing of a soulless Q4 Amazon product. The film, with its easily recognisable cast and easily explainable setup (what if a family at Christmas), seems to exist mostly to promote the retail side of the business (hard-to-escape ads are already pushing the film alongside adjacent seasonal products). Maybe it will help sell some extra tinsel because it’s otherwise a non-starter as a movie.
It’s a shame, as the core idea at its centre is a nifty one. As explained by Pfeiffer’s matriarch Claire, mums get shortchanged at Christmas, both in real life and on film. It’s the aim of both her character and writer Chandler Baker to try to fix this, but the ways they both go about it take a resonant idea and hammer it into mush. Claire is obsessed with daytime TV personality Zazzi Tims (Eva Longoria) and fixated on her annual contest for the best Christmas mum, pleading with her demanding yet ungrateful children (played by Jones, Moretz and The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa) to nominate her. When she starts to realise that they haven’t and after they accidentally leave her behind while heading to a Christmas Eve concert she booked tickets for, she decides to make a run for it, heading to a place where she will be treated more like, as a character says later on, “a boss bitch” rather than “everybody’s bitch”.
The anger of a mother unfairly undervalued during the holiday season is enough to fuel a violent action thriller, let alone a sparky comedy, but Baker and Showalter, who co-writes, waste it all on an unravelling premise of mounting, and increasingly alienating, silliness. Claire’s feelings of injustice are substantial and relatable enough without her bizarre insistence on winning a TV contest, a strange obsession that quickly turns her into an oddball of the size the film never really wants to reckon with (at one point, someone says, “I can’t decide if she’s an icon or a train wreck,” and, well, neither can the film). There’s a darker, more interestingly deranged story about the realities of who that character really is but, here, she’s totally out of place in a comedy that tries, and considerably fails, to go for more earnest sentimentality (I was reminded of a far briefer, and far more successful, SNL sketch that stars Kristen Wiig as a mother given a discounted robe while her family, including the dog, receive more and more gifts).
It also makes it hard for Pfeiffer to really know how to play her, leaving the actor a little lost as she tries to add gravitas to her baffling request (a mother expecting her children to respect and assist her during the busiest time of the year would be more than enough for us to care). Her quest is thin and uninvolving and, unlike, say, Planes, Trains and Automobiles (a film she references early on), devoid of much in the way of humour and conflict. Along the way she meets an underused Brooks, who plays a delivery driver working on Christmas who, get this, loves her job and the opportunities it gives her to travel! (See, Amazon isn’t all that bad after all!) Distractions come in the shape of an Andy Cohen cameo, an obligatory dance-in-a-bar number (like many things in The Family Stone it copies, it is a pale imitation), Jones awkwardly struggling with an American accent and a welcome yet one-note role for Joan Chen.
But nothing can distract us from a script that just doesn’t work, family dynamics we don’t believe, jokes we don’t laugh at and characters we don’t care about. Oh. What. Fun. is anything but.
