At the risk of come across as the Grinch, it’s hard not to bemoan the early arrival of holiday movies prior to the Thanksgiving holiday. Even as temperatures drop, it seems premature to fully indulge in Netflix’s yearly feast of cheap festive entertainment.
Similar to US candy which don’t contain real chocolate, Netflix’s holiday movies are relied upon for their style of badness. They offer rote familiarity – nostalgic casting, modest spending, artificial winter scenes, and unbelievable plots. At worst, these films are unmemorable disasters; in the best scenarios, they are forgettable fun.
Champagne Problems, the newest holiday concoction, blends into the broad center of the forgettable spectrum. Directed by Mark Steven Johnson, who previously previous romantic comedy was so disposable, this movie goes down like cheap bubbly – appropriately flat and situational.
It begins with what appears to be a computer-made commercial for supermarket sparkling wine. This commercial is actually the pitch of the main character, portrayed by the actress, to her colleagues at a financial firm. The protagonist is the construction paper cut-out of a career woman – overlooked, phone-obsessed, and ambitious to the harm of her private world. When her boss dispatches her to France to finalize an acquisition over Christmas, her sister makes her promise take one night in Paris to enjoy life.
Naturally, Paris is the ideal location to wrest one away from digital navigation, despite Paris is covered in unconvincing digital snowfall. In an overly quaint bookstore, the lead meet-cutes with the male lead, who pulls her away from her phone. Following the genre, she initially resists this ideal guy for frivolous excuses.
Equally as expected are the film elements that unfold at abrupt quarter turns, reflecting the turning of old sparkling wine in the vaults of Chateau Cassel. The catch? Henri is the heir to Chateau Cassel, hesitant to run it and resentful toward his father for putting it up for sale. Maybe the movie’s most salient contribution to romantic comedies, he is extremely judgmental of private equity. The problem? Sydney sincerely believes she’s not stripping the ancestral business for profit, competing against three caricatures: a severe French grand dame, a rigid German, and a delusional gay billionaire.
The twist? Sydney’s shady colleague Ryan shows up unannounced. The core? Henri and Sydney gaze longingly at each other in holiday pajamas, despite a vast chasm in financial perspective.
The gift and the curse is that nothing here sticks longer than a bubbly buzz on an unfilled belly. There is no substantial content – Minka Kelly, still best known for her part in Friday Night Lights, gives a strictly serviceable portrayal, all sweet surfaces and acts of kindness, almost motherly than love interest material. Tom Wozniczka offers exactly the dollop of French charm with light inner conflict and nothing more. The gimmicks are unfunny, the love story is inoffensive, and the happy-ever-after is predictable.
For all its philosophizing on the exclusivity of sparkling wine, nobody claims it is anything other than a mass market item. The things to hate are also the things to like. One might call an expert’s opinion about it a minor issue.
- The Holiday Film is now available on Netflix.
