Courtesy of Universal.
Friends don’t let friends watch Last Christmas.
Warning: Unlike most of my posts, this article contains SPOILERS. You may not want to read it unless you’ve seen the movie already.
Last weekend, I went to see Last Christmas. It looked like a fun romantic comedy. It’s fairly rare to find a good love story on the screen anymore. And I’ve been in a romantic mood ever since Taylor Swift dropped her new album Lover a few months back. Plus, I have a crush on Mother of Dragons Emilia Clarke. So I bought my ticket a few days in advance. Then I started getting bad vibes. I noticed a headline on IMDB about Clarke getting upset that people were spoiling the movie. One online review for the film was titled, “When Christmas Movies Go Very, Very Wrong.” I tried to put these things out of my head. I’ve enjoyed plenty of movies the critics hated.
I went to see the movie and Clarke was good in it. I was mostly enjoying it. I was digging the love story and the vibe between Clarke and Henry Golding. Then things took a turn and he gave her the “Don’t come to depend on me” speech. And I started trying to put pieces together Sixth Sense style. I’d already played this game a little bit before the movie, trying to figure out what plot point was so awful that people felt like spoiling it for others. Was the title literal? Was this THE last Christmas for one of the two main characters? Surely the movie wouldn’t go that dark. What my brain did put together was that Clarke’s character was the only person who we’d ever seen interact with Golding’s manic pixie dream boy. So something was up. He was definitely a ghost or a figment of her imagination. Or else supernatural in some other way.
So I wasn’t completely surprised when it turned out that he was the ghost of her heart donor. But I was greatly disappointed. This movie was sold as a romantic comedy. But it isn’t. It’s a redemption story about Clarke’s character. Which is all well and good. But there’s another way to tell that story without being emotionally manipulative. By saving the secret about Golding’s character until the final act, this rom-com becomes a non-rom. There is no longer a love story because she can’t be with the guy she was falling in love with. Andshe seems to accept that rather quickly. The entire romantic aspect of the film just falls away with the reveal of Golding’ s identity. Clarke isn’t even given a romantic subplot with the other shelter worker who shows an interest in her and seems to have some chemistry with her. The movie simply stops being a love story at all. Clarke never really grieves or processes the loss of Golding. She just continues her redemption arc a la Bill Murry in Groundhogs Day until the final group singalong of the title song.
Here’s the thing: This movie didn’t need a twist. Dream boy helps girl become a better person as they fall in love is a perfectly good plot. It doesn’t need to be tweaked. Was Last Christmas the best movie ever before the plot twist? No. But it was pretty decent. Clarke is a lot of fun spouting sarcastic dialogue in her elf costume. The movie was well on its way to a place in the second tier of Christmas semi-classics if it could have just stuck the landing. Which it failed to do on all accounts. It is now a movie I never want to sit through again. Unless Rifftrax gets their hands on it.
Don’t get me wrong. I grew up on Twilight Zone re-runs. So I love a good plot twist. But I can’t stand manipulation dressed up like a plot twist.
The other thing that troubles me is that this is the second depressing romance that Emilia Clarke has starred in. While she certainly had no knowledge of where Daenerys’ story arc would go in Game of Thrones or how the show would end, one presumes she had a chance to read completed scripts for Last Christmas and Me Before You. I just realized I’m forgetting Solo. You know what? Shame on me for walking into this movie expecting a typical romance. Emilia Clarke is obviously the kiss of death to a romantic plotline. All kidding aside, though. This was her first project after Game of Thrones which is another reason I was excited for it and all the more reason I was let down by it. Clarke deserves better material than this. I know there isn’t necessarily a great wealth of quality roles for actresses to choose from these days. Still, I hope she’ll be more discerning in the future. She deserves better and so do we.
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