Love the Coopers

A tough look at loveable yet prickly familial frustration as interdependence contends to celebrate the holiday season.

Woe abounds as expectations have led to disappointment and latent engrained perennial disputes condone the eruption of homogenous feuding.

Yet love also persists, coating their arguments with huggable layers of rosy historical endearment, cozy familiarity embedding accessible cheer, like fluffy comfortable blankets filled with age-old soul, reunionizing banter and pith, struggling to reach out amidst the haughty grievances.

It's a Christmas film at that, and yes, I could examine it through a less festive lens, but I did leave the theatre feeling warm and gooey inside, if not lightheaded, reminded as I was of the merriment and wonder that excels at this time of year, eager to watch Christmas specials on YouTube, contemplative of the excitement that still has yet to come.

It is heavy on the patriarchy, the women usually coming round to seeing the male point of view.

Balancing the genders strengthens scripts even if you're writing about cave people or the 19th century.

Bucky (Alan Arkin) does ideally represent the enlightened patriarch whose occasionally harsh counsel aids his family and others as they interact with one another and struggle to deal with life's pressures.

His grandson Bo (Maxwell Simkins) following in his footsteps.

The petulance and the poignancy, the dazzling and the discontent, Love the Coopers heralds the holiday season, along with myriad other cultural exclamations, like a blazing birth of mirthful obstinance, eggnog spiked with gin, it's a great time of the year.