Michael Showalter, in the past decade, has parlayed his success as a comedic writer and performer into a career as a writer-director of audience-pleasing dramedies on film and television, representing microgenres from the prestige biopic to the age-gap romance, and often anchored by strong performances from seasoned actresses. Some have garnered awards for these actresses — Amanda Seyfried won an Emmy for The Dropout, Jessica Chastain an Oscar for The Eyes of Tammy Faye — and even more down-the-middle commercial fare like The Idea of You is distinguished by nuanced work from the likes of Anne Hathaway. His new film, the Christmas caper Oh. What. Fun., stars Michelle Pfeiffer in a role that seems tailor-made for a beloved movie star in a breezy Showalter project: Pfeiffer plays Claire Clauster, an underappreciated mom to three adult children who dashes off from Texas to California after her family mistakenly leaves her at home during a Christmas Eve outing. Yet there is no actual fun to be had in Oh. What. Fun. Adapted by Showalter and Chandler Baker from Baker’s eponymous short story, the screenplay is a faded facsimile of better movies, and its overqualified cast flails to fill out their one-dimensional characters under halfhearted direction.
Claire’s kids show up to her Texas home on Christmas Eve carrying unwieldy baggage. Eldest daughter Channing (Felicity Jones) is struggling to write a new novel and feels overshadowed by her hyper-festive mother; underemployed Sammy (Dominic Sessa) is brooding after getting dumped by his girlfriend; and apparently “cool” Taylor (Chloë Grace Moretz) has showed up with her tenth new girlfriend in as many years. Claire hustles to make an elaborate Christmas Eve dinner while her kids lounge around with their partners and their own children, and her husband Nick (Denis Leary) steals the spotlight from her by decking himself out in a Santa costume. Compounding her frustration is that none of her children nominated her in time for the annual “Holiday Mom Contest” run by her favorite talk show host Zazzy Tims (Eva Longoria), so when Claire’s entire family mistakenly leaves her at home the next day as they enjoy a dance performance she purchased the tickets to, Claire runs off, leaving them to muddle through Christmas without her while she goes on a long-distance road trip to Zazzy’s studio.
The cast of Oh. What. Fun. is stocking-stuffer full. In addition to the aforementioned characters, Channing’s awkward husband Doug (Jason Schwartzmann) and Taylor’s DJ girlfriend Donna (Devery Jacobs) have their own subplots, and the entire family also nurses a petty feud with the ostentatiously classy Wang-Wasserman family next door, led by condescending matriarch Jeanne (Joan Chen). A consequence of this narrative overcrowding is that, with limited screen time to spread around, each of the characters is granted exactly one characteristic. While ostensibly a comedy, the screenplay is extremely light on jokes, so the actors don’t even have solid comic notes to play. Consequently, each actor compensates either by hamming it up (Sessa, Schwartzman), falling back on tired shtick (Leary), or gunning for more grounded characterizations (Pfeiffer, Jones). None are successful, which says less about the talents of the cast — all of whom have delivered numerous better performances elsewhere — than it does about the inadequacy of the material they’ve been given, and the inability of Showalter to help them rise above it. Never a visual stylist, Showalter’s direction is especially dull and functional here, and he does not evince any of the skill he has previously shown with directing actors; with each actor seeming to exist in a different movie, the overstuffed ensemble seems blatantly under-directed.
With so little to entertain or engage the viewer, each narrative problem — of which there are many — becomes magnified, most crucially the fact that Claire’s flight from her family could have been solved with a single phone call. The consumerist cynicism of the project, an Prime Video streaming original, also shines: product placement is blatant (“welcome to Crate and Barrel!”), and Danielle Brooks, in a thankless cameo, plays a character who waxes poetic on how much she enjoys her job as a delivery driver. There is no joy, no humor, no pathos to be found in Oh. What. Fun.; the best one can say for it is that it might inspire viewers to turn off the TV and spend time with their family.
DIRECTOR: Michael Showalter; CAST: Michelle Pfeiffer, Felicity Jones, Denis Leary, Jason Schwartzman; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Prime; STREAMING: December 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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