Film Review: ‘Oh. What. Fun.’ Isn’t Destined to be a Future Christmas Classic

In my personal view, Christmas films don’t necessarily need to reinvent the storytelling wheel for me to feel something. Because so many of my childhood memories are intrinsically tied to family traditions around the holiday season, the only thing a Christmas-themed film should do is capture a specific mood that immediately reminds us of the time we spent excited about what should be a magical time for ourselves and the families we’re with. Last year, Tyler Thomas Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point captured a mood we hadn’t seen since Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (always touted as the greatest Christmas film ever made), especially in its first half, and there may not be a modern-day producition centering on the holiday that will achieve what Taromina accomplishes through simple – but incredibly powerful – gestures.

This year, Michael Showalter returns with another direct-to-streaming effort, this time attempting to bring back some positive (and often chaotic) memories to the audience’s forefront with Oh. What. Fun. In the movie’s opening section, where protagonist Claire Clauster (Michelle Pfeiffer) recounts how Christmas movies are usually male-dominated, Showalter shows a VHS collection of holiday classics that immediately took me back to my childhood. I owned all of the tapes present in the opening scene, and some are still locked away in a closet, carrying memories I still hold onto, even at the tender age of twenty-seven. Again, it doesn’t take long for me to remember the joys of the holidays, even as an adult, especially now, with the passing of a loved one that will forever change the “traditions” I will have on the 25^th of December, which is growing much sadder than it did in past holidays.

In the film, the mood of nostalgia and unbridled joy is set immediately, while Claire promises, through voice-over narration, that Oh. What. Fun. will boldly do what most studio-driven Christmas films haven’t done and focus on the maternal figure of the picture, breaking down many of the problematic tropes that defined a large corpus of films audiences grew up watching, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Because all of us, as humans, celebrate the holidays, one way or another, through different cultures, religions, and belief systems, we have memories that can be well drawn out by movies that recall family members we grew up with, or specific elements that make us go, “Hey, I did that!” The VHS collection, the endless movie marathons, the games we play every Christmas, the chaos of family gatherings. These are things we take for granted, but only realize their finite nature when people close to us pass away, and everything begins to change.

Showalter could’ve absolutely based his film on that inextricable fact, and the first half-hour or so of Oh. What. Fun. certainly positions the movie in that regard. Mood is far more important than story, especially in Christmas movies, and it’s only when the “story” starts to kick in that the film slowly loses me. Showalter draws an age-old conflict between Claire and her children – Channing (Felicity Jones), Taylor (Chloë Grace Moretz), and Sammy (Dominic Sessa) – where one of the kids assumes more responsibility than others and fractures the familial bond she has with her mother and father (played by Denis Leary).

It’s there that the movie attempts to deconstruct familiar Christmas movie tropes, but never goes anywhere remotely interesting. Instead, Showalter repeats familiar beats we’ve come to know from Hallmark movies, which Oh. What. Fun. could’ve qualified as if a star-studded cast of A-listers didn’t elevate the production. It’s shot and edited with the same televisual quality that many Hallmark productions follow, complete with a flat-screen-friendly 1.78:1 aspect ratio and quick wipes that transition the story from one scene to the next.

You’d be remiss to think you accidentally pressed play on a Hallmark movie than something more substantial, especially when Showalter forgoes mood entirely and tells a pedestrian story we’ve seen time and again, as Claire has had enough of her family taking her for granted and decides to call it quits on Christmas, leaving town and driving on her own to a taping of her favorite show, hosted by Zazzy Tims (Eva Longoria).

What could’ve been an intriguing journey of self-actualization for Claire is turned into a bog-standard comedy, where character growth is minimal, and the atmosphere of the piece is completely gone, save for a few genuinely impassioned sequences between Sammy and the neighbor’s (Joan Chen) daughter, Elizabeth (Havana Rose Liu). The latter is utterly sensational and continues her impeccable streak of note-perfect performances, even in flimsy stuff like this production or last year’s AfrAId. There’s a specific scene she has with Sessa’s Sammy (another great burgeoning actor, following his breakout turn in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers) that had me levitating, as it brilliantly captures a sense of unbridled joy and effervescence in ways the rest of the movie doesn’t. You’d wish everything else had that same feeling, but it sadly never comes through.

Sessa and Liu are the only strongest points of a cast that sadly phones it in, despite the solid names Showalter builds up. Pfeiffer and Leary look bored, while Jones tries her best to play a character who falls victim to a thousand different clichés. At least she has more to work with than Chen, Moretz, Devery Jacobs, and Danielle Brooks, who are all wasted in fleeting appearances and add little to no texture to what should’ve been an ensemble piece, where the family realizes the mistakes they’ve made at a profoundly emotional level that caused Claire to pack it up and represent what many moms around America (and the world) felt when she eventually appears on Zazzy’s show.

That said, Longoria’s presence is fun, and she does make the most of the small time she has on screen. By that point, however, Oh. What. Fun. has already lost the small audience it had once Showalter shifts gears and tells a by-the-numbers story that promises to do the opposite of what it ultimately does. The saddest part is how it could’ve been a great bit of Christmas fun, since we now seldom get any of these movies out either on the big screen or on streaming platforms. Unfortunately, it turns out to be yet another cog in the ever-evolving algorithm of platforms; all of us have barely watched any original “content” out of them.

SCORE: ★★