Last Christmas, you didn’t watch Last Christmas. And that was probably the same the Christmas before that and the Christmas before that. Immediately after the holiday rom-com released in 2019, it was mocked by moviegoers, who derided star Emilia Clarke‘s decidedly non-Daenerys role as a messy Englishwoman with a bad heart and mocked the film’s absurd twist, a reach even by rom-com standards.
Yet, the further we get from Game of Thrones and the more that merely the title Hot Frosty can win the internet’s favor, Last Christmas ages better and better. The very things that made the movie a laughingstock to its first viewers have proven to be its strengths. Last Christmas belongs in your regular holiday viewing because it is so aggressively odd.
Christmas is Corny
Last Christmas lays out its central appeals in the first scene of a subplot running throughout the movie, involving a romance between Santa (Michelle Yeoh), who runs the Christmas shop where Clarke’s character works, and an awkward Danish man (Peter Mygind) who adores the holidays. The man stumbles in and holds up a gaudy Santa Claus tchotchke and asks if the store has anything “dissimilar.” Santa, just as smitten with him as he is with her, stutters out a response, affirming that they have many things that are dissimilar. By way of example, she produces a Christmas gibbon, a horrendous ornament featuring a glowing red primate.
Why would anyone want to buy those ugly things? Who in real life would misuse the word “dissimilar” like that, let alone find it charming? Who would use such a clumsy misunderstanding to start a relationship?
Last Christmas answers those questions by saying, “People in a Christmas rom-com.” Directed by Paul Feig and written by Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings, Last Christmas stars Clarke as Kate, the daughter of Yugoslavian immigrants who holds to her dream of being a professional singer, despite no sign of success. We meet her as she’s booted from friend’s apartment after friend’s apartment, kicked out each time her carelessness crosses a line, until she finally agrees to move back in with her worrying mother Petra (Thompson) and father Ivan (Boris Isaković, in a complete 180 from his acclaimed role in Quo Vadis, Aida?).
Petra worries so much because Kate suffers from a deadly heart condition that threatened to kill her at a young age. Even though she received a heart transplant year before the movie’s main events, the constant doting has left Kate unable to commit and in a tense relationship with not just her parents, but also her sister Marta (Lydia Leonard), a successful lawyer.
Into this situation comes Tom (Henry Golding), a seemingly care-free man who appears around the Christmas shop in Central London and takes her on all sorts of low-key adventures, including a walk in the park or breaking into an ice rink to learn to skate. Through Tom’s stress-free spotting, Kate learns to stop worrying, to show compassion for other people, and, yes, fall in love, all during Christmas time.
Contrived? Yes. Implausible? Certainly. But that’s what makes Last Christmas so wonderful.
Last Christmas’s First Principles
Last Christmas has a lot going on and, to its credit, it embraces it with the enthusiasm of a kid on Christmas morning.
That enthusiasm is most pronounced in the qualities one would expect of its chief creatives. Clarke gives her famously expressive face a full work out in the movie, pushing her eyebrows down to underscore Kate’s latest disappointment and letting her countenance beam as Kate begins to open up to others. Clarke’s performance lacks any of the weight increasingly piled upon her Game of Thrones character, and she embraces that lightness with an energetic take that could be annoying, were she not so charming. Even when Kate’s accidentally setting ablaze a friend’s model ship or mocking a customer at the shop, we remain on her side because Clarke gives herself over to the role.
As a Paul Feig movie, Last Christmas does have some of the improvisation that sometimes results in classics (Freaks and Geeks) and sometimes disasters (Another Simple Favor). Here, it usually involves Clarke and Thompson, who settle into an immigrant mother and naturalized daughter schtick that works despite its familiarity. It works not just because Thompson’s a seasoned enough actor to keep her character grounded, even with a broad Eastern European accent, but also because Feig exercises rare restraint, not letting any of the improvised scenes go on for too long.
Most of all, Last Christmas works because it understands its genre, a point best illustrated by the love interest Tom. Tom is, of course, perfect. He’s impossibly handsome, impossibly charming, and impossibly supportive. The film displays these qualities in Kate and Tom’s first conversation after their meet-cute.
As they decorate a tree in Santa’s shop, Kate dumps all sorts of backstory about her family and her tense relationship with them. Tom navigates the potential emotional minefield with uncanny nimbleness. He asks follow-up questions when needed, he keeps quiet for as long as she needs, and when he follows her confession with a witty observation about an ugly ornament, it works to cut the tension and doesn’t make her feel like he’s diminished what she’s shared.
No such combination exists in real life. But Last Christmas isn’t real life. It’s a rom-com set a Christmas, and thus exists to deliver warm feelings and a relationship fantasy. One must keep that fact in mind when getting to the most infamous part of the movie, its twist ending.
Note: The following contains spoilers for the ending of Last Christmas. Yes, really.
The Ghost of Christmas Past
Remember the first line of the Wham! song “Last Christmas”? Well, it’s literal in the movie. While searching in a park for Tom, who does not have a phone that she can call and who only appears around this area, Kate discovers a bench with a plaque on it. The plaque commemorates Thomas Webster, a man so devoted to helping others that he even donated his organs at death, including a heart that went to a would-be singer with a heart condition.
Yes, Kate has fallen in love with the ghost of the man who donated his heart to her.
There are lots of reasons to roll your eyes and scoff at this reveal. But if you do, you’ve missed the entire point of the film’s whimsy and you should just go watch Black Christmas—but not the classic one or even the socially-conscious remake from a few years ago; no, you’ve got to watch the mean one from the mid-2000s with all the eyeball stuff because you have no happiness within you and you only deserve nastiness.
Look, the twist of Last Christmas is silly and contrived, but no more so than the rest of the film. And it should be contrived, because Christmas movies are often about contrived affirmations, such as God stopping the entire flow of time to tell George Bailey that he matters or Santa buying a little girl a house. And rom-coms are often contrived, which is how Sam and Annie ended up on the Empire State Building’s observation deck
Last Christmas understands and embraces both of its genres, and it executes them with such aplomb and charm that its oddities become positives. It demands that you accept it on its own terms, aligning those who refuse with pre-fall-in-love Kate.
Give it Your Heart
If you’re looking for raw relationship drama, go watch a John Cassavetes movie. If you’re looking for a film that takes health problems seriously, you can still watch Lorenzo’s Oil. And if you want a great movie with holiday ghosts, you have plenty of A Christmas Carol adaptations to choose from.
But if you want a movie that’s going to take yuletide optimism to its furthest extreme and be endlessly charming in the process, then Last Christmas should be on your must watch list every Christmas.
The post Last Christmas Deserves to Be a Holiday Favorite appeared first on Den of Geek.
0 Commentaires