Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Last Christmas’ on HBO, in Which Emilia Clarke Works Hard to Save a Cheesy Holiday Mess

This week’s Saturday-night HBO debut is Last Christmas, a slice of holiday cheer in the midst of a July swelter. On paper, the project explodes with talent: Game of Thrones dragon wrangler Emilia Clarke and Crazy Rich Asians standout Henry Golding star. Paul Feig, of A Simple Favor and Bridesmaids fame, directs. A supporting cast including international treasures Michelle Yeoh and Emma Thompson, the latter also producing and co-writing. And it’s all tied together by the music of George Michael and/or Wham!, from whence the title and concept come. Here’s hoping it adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

LAST CHRISTMAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Hot mess, comin’ through: Kate (Clarke), born Katarina, a Londoner from the former Yugoslavia, used to be queen of the choir. Her voice could enchant George Michael himself, from Earth to the spiritual afterlife hinterlands. But now, she’s 26 and aimless, all over the place, crashing on friends’ couches, angry at her mother, not speaking with her sister, drinking too much, sleeping with whoever bought the drinks, late for auditions, all that. She clings to the dream of a singing career, but works a retail job where she wears an elf costume with dingleballs and a little hat, manning the counter at a year-round Christmas store. Oh, the pain of working retail, those people must suffer so, especially if they can sing and movies keep telling them that it’s a stultifying dead-end gig instead of a perfectly respectable job. Woe!

Nothing has been the same since Kate’s operation, whatever that was a few years ago, no spoilers here. Her life was saved but now it seems lost, if that makes sense. One day while she’s dusting the bums of ceramic cherubim, a manic pixie dream guy walks into the store. Tom (Golding) is a charmer who preaches the philosophy of looking up instead of looking down, because you’ll miss the important shit about life, like a very profound golden fish hanging on a sign above a shop. She’s enamored with him, because they had THREE meet-cutes in one day, which can’t be a coincidence. Yet she can’t pin down this mystery gent who takes her down charming London alleyways and through little hidden London gardens, then just kind of drifts off.

Tom’s quirky-cheery perspective starts rubbing off a little. Kate pairs her boss, who calls herself Santa but is actually Huang Qing Shin (Yeoh), with the handsome sauerkraut enthusiast patronizing the shop not for the ugliest Nativity figurines this side of the Eastern Bloc, but to stand in slack-jawed awe of this elegant woman. Kate reconnects with her highly critical, piece-of-work mother Petra (Thompson), a critically damaged survivor of the Yugoslav Wars. Kate begins volunteering at a local homeless shelter. Will she and Tom kiss each other or what? He has to have a secret, another shoe about to drop, doesn’t he? Meanwhile, here’s a George Michael song. Listen to it!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is a Love, Actually-meets-The Preacher’s Wife sort of schlocky Christmas saga.

Performance Worth Watching: Somewhere in this mess of a screenplay, Clarke finds Kate’s core charms — the character is apologetic for her mistakes, but not for who she is. Clarke and Yeoh — the high point of pretty much every film she’s in — also make a convincing subtextual argument that a funny workplace comedy might evolve from this premise.

Memorable Dialogue: Petra sums up her chronic depression succinctly: “I blame it on the Poles.”

Sex and Skin: Kate wakes up in after a one-night-stand and says, “This bed is like sleeping on a pile of kittens.” Does that count?

Our Take: Beware this movie’s inevitable Christmas twist, which bears symbolism that’s as subtle as a 20-story neon-pink baby Jesus in your neighbor’s yard; you’ll see it from a mile away. The idea that Last Christmas is “inspired by” George Michael’s songs is an excuse for said title, and is little more than a superficial gimmick. The script is a dishevelment, romantically wan and comedically desperate — hearing Thompson TALK IN EASTERN BLAWK ACCENT and watching Clarke get bird dook in her eye is just cringingly awful. One can sense Clarke actively battling to keep Kate from being a mile-wide/inch deep character careening from one embarrassing incident to the next.

And yet. Clarke and Golding share a pivotal scene in which she opens up her heart and becomes human, instead of a grab-bag of movie character devices engineered to make us laugh at her pathetic state — which, mind you, thanks to her stubborn refusal to play Kate as a walking joke of a person, isn’t pathetic at all. Maybe, beneath the rampant silliness, a million-zillion strings of Christmas lights, overly romanticized displays of London cobblestone, the Christmas-magic cheese-dip plot twist and frustrating dalliances with serious character-driven subject matter (Petra and Kate’s parallel struggles with depression), the movie might have something to say about how people work and what they do to get by and how they seek to improve themselves.

The movie’s many miscellaneous devices and elements and developments never cohere, and it squanders multiple opportunities for Michael’s music to beef up an emotional scene — except maybe one near the end, when Kate’s series of attempts to put some positive energy into the world come to fruition, and this junkyard of a movie almost becomes functional, and I started asking how I allowed myself to be seduced by its shameless, holistic sentimentalism. This is a bad movie, shotgunned with problems, and I laughed two, maybe three times, but I gave a crap about Kate, and wanted the best for her, and it’s all Clarke’s fault for being a buoyant and cheery and ultimately substantive presence, for being a lone tender marshmallow floating in a damn thin cup of cocoa.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Last Christmas fortified my cynicism for more than an hour, then Clarke eroded it just enough to make me like it. Life is strange sometimes.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Last Christmas