Last Christmas Review: An Overstuffed Turkey

Hapa Mag - December 11, 2019

By Nathan Liu

*CONTAINS SPOILERS

Kate is a mess. She’s couch surfing, she gets drunk every night, and her nascent singing career is going nowhere. The only stable thing in her life is her job at an all-year Christmas shop, which she despises. In all fairness, though, Kate’s had a very traumatic year, actually requiring a heart transplant at one point. That would be enough to rattle anyone. And with overprotective, immigrant parents, it’s no wonder she moved out. She could have been nicer and more strategic about it, but still. What will happen, though, when she meets a mysterious, eternally jolly man named Tom, who seems determined to get her back in the Christmas spirit? Why a break-in, an unexpected coming out party, and the murder of a fish, of course!

Last Christmas is an overstuffed turkey. It looks delicious and has some very nice ingredients, but when you actually finish eating it, you realize that there was way too much crap inside. If the movie were just a romantic mystery about a woman rediscovering her Christmas spirit, thanks to a kind, possibly supernatural figure, that would be fine. But this film is that, plus a story about Kate’s sister being in the closet, and a political statement about Brexit. There’s a fairly substantial subplot where Kate’s family, who are immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, fear that they will be sent back, and where we see Brexit supporters harassing foreigners on a bus. And all I have to say in response to that is, why? Regardless of how you feel about Brexit, I think we can all agree that it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, or getting back in the holiday spirit. Same with the bit about Kate’s sister being in the closet. It honestly feels like the filmmakers are trying to be topical, but they don’t know how to organically incorporate these elements into the picture. As a result, they wind up making something that feels uneven, and instantly dated.

The film’s treatment of its Asian characters is also worth discussing. The movie features both Henry Golding as Tom, and Michelle Yeoh as Kate’s boss, “Santa” (not her character’s real name, of course, but what she’s constantly referred to as). In theory, they are non- stereotypical figures. You have Golding playing the romantic lead, and in Yeoh, you have a middle-aged Asian woman who loves Christmas and has her own, fairly substantial, romantic subplot. At the same time, the film does occasionally stumble with these characters. Yeoh, for instance, is always wearing a qipao, and there are a few instances in which the filmmakers joke about how she doesn’t have the best grasp of English. Kate, played by Emilia Clarke, describes Santa as “weird,” “mysterious,” and “Asian,” as if that last adjective is a personality trait. And while Golding’s Tom is the romantic lead, he doesn’t, for reasons that I won’t get into, wind up with Kate at the end, which is frustrating, because there are so few mainstream American movies made with Asian men as the romantic lead. Seriously, in the last ten years, I can think of only two: 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen and 2017’s The Big Sick. And very often, when a film does feature a romantic pairing between an Asian man and a white woman, the couple doesn’t wind up together, as in 1959’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1992’s The Lover, 2003’s Japanese Story, 2007’s Never Forever, and 2009’s Mao’s Last Dancer. This tradition dates all the way back to the silent era, when Sessue Hayakawa, Hollywood’s first Asian star and big screen sex symbol, would constantly be paired with white love interests, only to have them leave him, or for him to give them up so that they can be with the “right” kind of people, i.e., white people. The only time he was ever allowed to “get the girl” was when he was paired with a Japanese love interest, as he was in 1919’s The Dragon Painter.

Golding seems to be following in Hayakawa’s footsteps, since he’s been in three Hollywood movies so far, two with white women playing his love interest, and one in which he’s paired with Constance Wu. The only film in which his romantic relationship ends well is the one where he’s dating a fellow Asian. Just to be clear, I don’t believe that any man is entitled to a relationship, or that Asian men should only date white women, but having relationships between Asian men and white women rarely, if ever, work out on screen is troubling for mixed people like myself. Growing up, I was constantly told that interracial or interfaith marriages were “statistically” more likely to end in divorce. The people making these claims would state them as objective facts, without any apparent malice in their hearts. That, in turn, led me to constantly worry about my parents getting divorced. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized the racist, segregationist undertone to such proclamations. What better way to discourage people from dating outside their own race than by convincing them that doing so will always end in failure? And with so many movies telling young Asian men that they either aren’t sexually desirable, or that attempting to date outside their own race will always end in failure, there’s a lot of room for insecurity.

In the end, Last Christmas is a movie that could’ve been a holiday classic, but is ultimately undermined by an overstuffed script and painfully unfunny jokes. (Seriously, there’s a “meet cute” between Yeoh and her love interest that is just painful to watch). The flick has sweet moments, to be sure, and Golding and Clarke have good chemistry, but those things aren’t enough to warrant a recommendation from this critic.