Tales of love, unrequited or otherwise, interwoven over the festive season, laden with pop songs and narrated by one of the biggest celebrities in showbusiness, That Christmas is best viewed by romcom auteur Richard Curtis as a kid-friendly attempt to atone for his long-standing seasonal hit Love Actually. Beautifully rendered by Simon Otto, head of character animation for the well-respected How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, it might be too busy, story-wise, for younger audiences, and even rather scary towards the end, but the writer-director’s genius for dialogue is firmly on display here (an especially timorous character is afraid of infinity because “there’s just so much of it”). Adults will roll their eyes at the fart jokes; but then, kids will cringe at the sound of Ed Sheeran and Coldplay.
Gathered up from Curtis’s short-story book of the same name, That Christmas takes place in a diverse but gentrified Suffolk seaside town that may as well be Notting-Hill-on-Sea. Taking voiceover duties from Hugh Grant is Santa Claus (Brian Cox), who looks back on four eventful days in the neighborhood following a big snowfall in the runup to Christmas Day. Like Love Actually, it features a multitude of interlocking stories and characters, but Curtis is humble enough to offer up his divisive romcom for derision, poking fun at his 2003 film as a cheesy object of yuletide scorn (alongside Brussels sprouts and washing dishes). In that sense, the film finds Curtis, once again, having his cake and eating it, making fun of the tropes of sentimental feelgood fare (“The tradition of traditional traditions,” as one character puts it), while happily dialing them up to 11.
At its core are three children; the first is Danny (Jack Wisniewski), the new boy in the area, who lives with his single mum (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse. Danny is playing a chickpea in the school’s woke nativity The Three Wise Women and is secretly in love with the play’s bashful author Sam (Zazie Hayhurst). Sam, meanwhile, is concerned that the antics of her rebellious identical twin Charlie (Sienna Sayer) will put her on Santa’s naughty list come Christmas Day.
In a strange move that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, a bunch of local parents decide to head off to a wedding on Christmas Eve, leaving their little ones in the charge of Bernadette (India Brown), the teenage Cecil B. DeMille who directed the school play. But the snow hasn’t finished with Wellington-on-Sea yet, and the adults soon find themselves at the mercy of the elements. Bernadette, however, isn’t fazed by the situation, and, with some help from Santa Claus, even gives the kids the best non-traditional Christmas ever.
Obviously, there is more, and even with an animated cast, and minus his usual collaborators as voice actors, Curtis’s authorship is obvious from the get-go, notably in the poignant backstories of newcomer Danny and the formidable Miss Tapper (Fiona Shaw), who teaches Danny how to use Newtonian physics to make a snowman. The biggest giveaway, however, might be Santa’s unexpectedly philosophical monologue, something one might imagine Hugh Grant delivering with his collar turned up against the cold: “I always think that Christmas is a bit like and emotional magnifying glass. If you feel loved and happy, Christmas will make you feel happier and more loved. But if you feel alone and unloved, the magnifier gets to work. And that makes all those bad things bigger and worse.”
That, in a sense, is the whole film right there, and it’s pretty much on-message, given Curtis’s previous output. That Christmas, however, is a little gentler than usual and seems to show a bit of tongue-in-cheek reflection from the author, perhaps inspired by the dressing-down he was apparently given by his daughter for the “sizeist” jibes in some of his comedy thus far.
Maybe this inspired the character of Bernadette, or maybe it was Sam, but either way it’s significant that the school play here is “a strictly vegetarian, multicultural funfest with lots of pop songs and stuff about climate change” in which the three shepherds are now organic farmers with flocks of broccoli, sweetcorn and aubergines (plus a chickpea). Is Richard Curtis vegetarian now? It’s hard to tell. If you try to Google it, you’ll get, “Is Richard Curtis dead?” “Is Richard Curtis related to Tony Curtis?” and “Is Richard Curtis still making movies?”
The answer the first two is quite clearly no, but, as twee as it is, Last Christmas proves that he’s the best at what he’s good at, and it’s nice to have him around.