The contemporary culture of spoiler paranoia is hardly ever one that collides with the romantic comedy genre: who walks into a romcom not knowing more or less what’s going to happen by the time the credits roll? Last Christmas, however, is a bit of an exception: from the moment the trailer for the latest fuzzy diversion from Bridesmaids director Paul Feig hit the internet back in August, it seemed clear this one wouldn’t end in the usual way. Were we right? Nothing but spoilers ahead, obviously.
So, that ‘twist’
The internet hivemind can be wrong about many things, but when it came to cracking the secret of Last Christmas from its trailer – which, at three minutes, was unusually long and information-packed – it didn’t take people long to put two and two together. The film is billed as a riff on the music of George Michael, named after the song Last Christmas, with that incessant “I gave you my heart” refrain … We hear manic pixie nightmare Kate (Emilia Clarke) telling us that she “nearly died last year” over what look suspiciously like scenes of heart surgery … Oh God, could mysterious, slightly otherworldly dreamboat Tom (Henry Golding) be the benevolent ghost of her heart donor?
Some argued that perhaps that was exactly what the trailer wanted us to think, and we were somehow being wrongfooted. After all, would Feig and screenwriters Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings really hinge an entire film on what is essentially one goofily literal bit of wordplay? Unfortunately, it turns out that’s exactly what they did: in what amounts to one of the more colossal failures by a studio marketing department in recent years, the film effectively spoiled itself three months ahead of schedule. (Feig has since admitted his regrets.)
Had it been unexpected, this stickily sentimental supernatural turn might at least have had a certain euphoric WTF quality: as it is, when you spend the whole film tracking the buildup, small, illogical details only become more glaring. (Why did ill-fated bike courier Tom keep his mobile phone in a cupboard at home while on the job?) And even when you know what’s coming, the actual reveal is botched through sloppy montage: why base a whole film on this one bad joke if not to have Golding actually, with tears sparkling in his eyes, earnestly deliver the line, “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart”? How could Thompson and Feig overlook such sublime camp potential? Humbug.
‘Yugoslavia, 1999’
At least knowing the twist in advance gives you some headspace to focus on the film’s peculiar grasp of modern history, signalled in the very first scene – a prologue introducing young Kate’s (or Katarina’s, to use her loathed birth name) musical talents in a church choir – by a title card announcing the time and place as “Yugoslavia, 1999”. Much is made of Kate’s family having fled the conflict in Yugoslavia to settle in London, an ordeal that has given her mother (Thompson, sporting a dismally generic comedy borscht accent) a seemingly terminal case of lugubriousness.
The chronology is baffling, though: you’d expect someone at some stage in the script development process to have pointed out that the breakup of Yugoslavia took place seven years earlier, in 1992. Do they mean specifically the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, by which Serbia and Montenegro was known until 2003? Which of the Yugoslav wars did Kate’s family flee? The film could have made things easier for itself (and us) by not wedding itself to such specific dates and just ambling around in an alternative Hollywood timeline. But then it couldn’t have treated us to its various cringe-inducing references to Brexit Britain, which are cannily calculated to come down inarguably on the side of hard-working, salt of the earth immigrants without committing to a leave or remain stance.
George Michael: father figure
Kate’s fandom for the former Wham! frontman is explained as an affinity for artists who were “misunderstood and underappreciated in their time”. She’s young, and perhaps hasn’t perused Michael’s extensive list of No 1 records on both sides of the Atlantic, but “underappreciated” feels a stretch: the film certainly misunderstands Michael, so we’ll allow that one. Thompson has repeatedly explained in interviews that the project began, with the singer’s blessing, as an attempt to build a very British comedy around the George Michael songbook – his own Mamma Mia!, minus the actual musical numbers – so it’s odd that the film plays as if the Michael theme were a very late afterthought.
Aside from the obvious, narratively integral presence of Last Christmas, Michael’s songs feel both randomly selected and haphazardly applied in the film – as if, late in proceedings, Feig and Thompson took a closer listen to the singer’s oeuvre, realised only a single lyric could be aptly shoehorned into the daft plot, and decided to make the best of things. (What does Freedom ’90 have to do with a montage of Kate and her mum traipsing around a Christmas market? Nothing at all, but it’s still a tune, so that makes for one of the film’s brighter moments.)
Most perplexing is the preponderance of Michael’s dourer ballads on the soundtrack: Faith and Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go make brief appearances, but Heal the Pain, Waiting for That Day and Praying for Time (an unplugged version, no less) are prominently showcased. It’s supposed to be a fun film, so where are the bangers? Could I’m Your Man or I Knew You Were Waiting for Me not have been easily cued up by the featherweight plotting? At least we know why I Want Your Sex, Outside and Freeek! are missing: the film, like the chemistry between Golding and Clarke, is as sexless as a Christmas stollen. (It’s hard to make love to a ghost, admittedly, but they could have tried.) George Michael deserved a hot, fabulous, boundlessly queer cinematic tribute: this may as well have been conceived around Michael Bublé’s Christmas album.
