Love The Coopers (2015) * *

Directed by:  Jessie Nelson

Starring:  John Goodman, Diane Keaton, Alan Arkin, Amanda Seyfried, Ed Helms, Marisa Tomei, Olivia Wilde, Anthony Mackie, Jake Lacy, (voice of) Steve Martin, June Squibb

Love The Coopers (should be Love, The Coopers) gathers a group of accomplished actors together, sets up their characters' back stories, and meshes them together into a Christmas dinner with little payoff to reward us for sitting through all of the back stories.    It ends with the family members all dancing in a hospital waiting room on Christmas Eve, with all sins forgiven and all problems resolved.    The movie only wants to be loved, the people in it want to be lovable, and they are all fighting for your attention.  

I will encapsulate the stories as succinctly as I can.    The patriarch of the Cooper family is Bucky (Arkin), an octogenarian seemingly with a crush on young, confused waitress Ruby (Seyfried), who has no direction in life.    Then, there is Sam and Charlotte (Goodman and Keaton), who are considering separating after 40 years of marriage.    Charlotte's sister Emma (Tomei) is a single woman who is busted for shoplifting and is forever jealous of Charlotte.     She spends a very, very long ride in a police car conversing with the arresting officer (Mackie), who is gay.    Charlotte's and Sam's son Hank (Helms) is a soon-to-be divorced, recently unemployed father, while his sister Eleanor (Wilde) doesn't want to come to dinner without a mate and persuades a soon-to-be shipped out soldier (Lacy) she meets in an airport bar to pose as her fiancé.    Then, there is the ancient Aunt Fishy (Squibb) and the family dog.   

Love The Coopers spends ample time on the setup, but things mostly fizzle when they all sit down to Christmas dinner.    It is naturally snowy outside and all of the houses in the neighborhood are decorated to the gills.     Long-nursed grudges are brought to the surface until Bucky has a medical emergency and the entire Cooper clan goes to the hospital, including the waitress Ruby who comes along as Bucky's date.    The whole Bucky-Ruby thing is weird, unconvincing, and ends without any satisfactory resolution dealing with the idea of an eighty-something man in love with a twenty-something woman.    The movie sidesteps it and pairs off Ruby with a man only roughly twenty years her age.  

Charlotte and Tomei are supposed to be sisters, but come on.   Diane Keaton is 70 and Tomei is young enough to be her daughter.    For a while, I believed Tomei was playing Keaton's other daughter.    The crux of Goodman's and Keaton's dispute is something involving a trip to Africa which was never taken.     It is as if they are straining to find a reason to want to separate.    Of all of the subplots, I enjoyed the one involving Eleanor and her make-believe fiancé.    The two have chemistry and Wilde has a smile and eyes to die for.    I was at least interested to see how the story unfolded, even though it is resolved as predictably as you figure it would.

Love The Coopers is narrated by a disembodied speaker voiced by Steve Martin, who whimsically discusses the family and how neatly everything is wrapped up at the end.    The only thing he didn't say was, "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!", although he sure sounded like he wanted to.    The movie isn't one with any surprises, except for the identity of the speaker, which is kind of cute.