The only reason anyone would want to watch this wimpish Christmas affair is the still-beauteous Michelle Pfeiffer, who once was the queen of all she surveyed. She is still a force to reckon with. Sadly, the material she chooses to peg her stardom on is colossally mediocre, almost a travesty, and certainly not worthy of the ageing, though far from fading, diva.
In Oh. What. Fun. (the three full stops unintentionally indicate how ironical the title us) Pfeiffer plays Claire, the matriarch of the Clauster family who, like Seema Bhargava in the recent Perfect Family, is taken for granted. After arranging the perfect Christmas reunion for her children, she is appalled when the family forgets to take her along to a Christmas event, organised by Claire.
Children, I tell you.
The film is written like pointers in a kindergarten essay on Mummy Deserves Better. In fact, there IS a literal rendering of this sentiment in the beginning of the film when Claire walks up to a car to remind three mom-harassing kids that one day, Mommy will be dead.
In the meantime, there is this bland homage to motherhood, so stale and uninspired it could be the perfect antidote to a Christmas hangover and a great way to get over insomnia if you don’t like Christmas movies. The daughter-mother conflicts seem designed to make the daughter look ungrateful and the mother unflattering.
Felicity Jones, as the eldest daughter, gets more footage than the other children, who are as hazy as the fog during Christmas. At one point, the son murders a Christmas song on his guitar. The film does much the same.
There is also the Clausters’ ‘perfect’ neighbours, a family that seems to get it right in every department. In comparison, we are supposed to appreciate the chaos of the Clausters. But dysfunctionalism cannot be a virtue per se. There has to be more to this than meets the eye. Sadly, there isn’t. What we see is what we get. And that isn’t enough. Michelle Pfeiffer deserves better. So do we.
