Review: Last Christmas

Matters of the heart, and matters of Wham!

“Didn’t you hear the jingle bells, Khaleesi! Didn’t you hear the jingle bells!?”

Director: Paul Feig

Writer(s): Emma Thompson, Bryony Kimmings

Cast: Emilia Clarke, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Peter Mygind, Lydia Leonard, Rob Delaney, Peter Serafinowicz, Ingrid Oliver, Laura Evelyn, Rebecca Root, Boris Isakovic, Emma Thompson

Synopsis

Kate (Emilia Clarke) is a singer who makes a day to day living working at a Christmas shop in Covent Garden, run by ‘Santa’ (Michelle Yeoh). Kicked out by various flatmates and bed-hopping at the end of drunken nights, Kate feels like she’s in a downward spiral, until she meets Tom (Henry Golding), a man to which she feels a deep, unexplained connection. Through her experiences with Tom, Kate begins to pull her life back together, but she can’t figure out why Tom never seems to commit, and is sometimes gone for days on end …

Main review

As a romantic comedy, Last Christmas is an odd film. On one level, it’s riddled with cliches and a narrative that can seem trite, yet when the film needs to, it can either pull off a delightfully well-structured joke, or hit the audience with a strong emotional punch. Last Christmas is therefore a film of contradictions, which makes it an interesting film in the genre, if not an absolute classic.

Paul Feig, the director of Knocked Up, Bridesmaids and the all-female Ghostbusters seemed an odd choice for a Richard Curtis-esque, London centric romantic comedy, and admittedly sometimes the comic timing of his direction feels a bit off. Nevertheless, the script itself sometimes does a lot of the legwork. Thompson’s and Kimmings script has some great dialogue, and it builds up the film’s emotional beats remarkable well. It’s this sharp wit that saves Last Christmas at many points.

Then there is Emilia Clarke herself; an excellent actor who while feeling a little bit miscast, still does a lot with her material and much like the script, really sells the film’s emotional beats. Emilia Clarke is very representative of the film as whole; feeling slightly off, but still pulling something together decent, through a sheer force of will.

It’s interesting that despite being a film ‘featuring the music of George Michael’ (and Kate is clearly a George Michael fan), Last Christmas is not so much about music as the lasting psychological effects of a particular trauma. When it wants to be, Last Christmas is actually quite emotionally heavy, despite jokes about eclectic Christmas tat, or Michelle Yeoh’s attempts to seduce a German silver fox. Last Christmas isn’t a classic, British, Christmas-set rom-com (Like Bridget Jones’ Diary, or Love Actually), but it’s certainly an interesting one.

Pros

• The Covent Garden Christmas shop full of eclectic Christmas tat.
• Emma Thompson’s overbearing, Balkan matriarch.
• The subplot involving Michelle Yeoh’s German suitor.
• The film’s emotional beats are remarkably strong.
• “Ooooh! It’s a techno-manger!”

Cons

• Some of the comedy beats are rather clunky; there’s some great dialogue, but more often than not, the comic timing is off slightly.
• Emilia Clarke feels a little bit miscast, although she still holds her own.
• Like many rom-coms, the narrative can feel a bit trite.

In a nutshell …

Emilia Clarke is perhaps not a natural comic actor, and some of the comedy beats can be clunky. However, thanks to a combination of Emma Thompson’s and Bryony Kimmigs’ sharp-witted script, and strong emotional beats, Last Christmas is actually rather heart-warming, even when dealing with quite heavy subject matters.