Love The Coopers – Movie Review

Love The Coopers – PG-13
Release Date: Fri 13 Nov 2015

Love The Coopers is an ensemble Christmas comedy that centers around The Coopers. The parental couple of Charlotte and Sam (Diane Keaton and John Goodman) are potentially ending their marriage after one last family Christmas. Sam’s father Bucky (Alan Arkin) has a mostly platonic relationship with younger waitress Ruby (Amanda Seyfried.) Their children Hank and Eleanor (Ed Helms and Olivia Wilde) are also in crisis. Hank’s wife has left him and he’s been hiding his joblessness from everyone for quite some time. Ruby can’t face her parents nagging at her to find a man, so she enlists a soldier she meets at an airport bar to come to dinner with her and pretend to be her boyfriend.

While those aren’t all of the characters, they are the ones that come closest to complete arcs. Marisa Tomei’s Emma, Charlotte’s sister is relegated to a minor subplot along with Hank’s children. There’s so little actually happening that the movie regularly uses narration to explain motivations and reactions because the actors aren’t given time to show them to you. On top of this, almost none of the characters are particularly likable. The plot between Bucky and Ruby comes off as fairly sweet when it’s not playing up the idea that Bucky wishes he were a younger man so he could have a romantic relationship with her.

The ending is exactly what you predict, except it feels rushed and sloppy with the characters not being fleshed out enough. Again, the narrator has to tell you what all of this means to ensure you don’t miss the intent of the scene. The movie has neither the heart or the humor to prop up its cliched plot and stereotypical characters. I left the theater thinking that even at 107 minutes this was a complete waste of time. I did not “love the Coopers.”

Aaron and I saw it in the theater and had a discussion in the car: