There are two kinds of people in the world: People who love “Love Actually” and people who want to give those other people such a pinch. Richard Curtis’ all-star Christmas classic (you can add quotes to “classic” if you want to) quickly became a perennial yuletide favorite for its treacly melodrama and/or its melodramatic treacle. Like many Christmas movies, it’s sappy to a laughable extreme. But also like many Christmas movies, that’s why people love it. Or hate it.
“Love Actually” is such a ubiquitous holiday staple now that even characters in Richard Curtis movies have to watch it. The new animated Netflix movie “That Christmas,” directed by Simon Otto, is based on three children’s books penned by Curtis — “That Christmas,” “Snow Day” and “The Empty Stocking” — which now take place at the same time, in the same town. It’s an idea that would be clever if the messages of the stories didn’t sometimes contradict each other.
In the “That Christmas” subplot, a group of children are left alone on Christmas Eve by their parents, who then get snowed out of town. The children are left to fend for themselves on Dec. 25 and decide to abandon or mutate all their parents’ boring old holiday traditions, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about family and stuff. In the “Snow Day” segment, a young boy named Danny (Jack Wisniewski) is always home alone because his mother works in hospice care, so he spends what should have been his day off learning physics with his stern teacher, Ms. Trapper (Fiona Shaw). Danny learns a thing or two about appreciating his mother’s sacrifices and Ms. Trapper learns to be less of a hard ass.
In the third storyline, “The Empty Stocking,” a pair of young identical twins named Sam (Zazie Hayhurst) and Charlie (Sienna Sayer) have a problem. Sam is very good, but Charlie is very naughty, and Sam is scared that Charlie won’t get any presents from Santa. So she decides to trick Santa into giving all her presents to her sister. Santa Claus is voiced by Brian Cox and looks so much like the Santa Claus from “Arthur Christmas” you’d be forgiven for thinking “That Christmas” is a sequel or prequel. Alas, “That Christmas” is no “Arthur Christmas,” literally or otherwise.
Each of the film’s stories have just enough juice to fill a single half-hour holiday special, but when you combine them you get … a movie in which all of that stuff happens to happen. “That Christmas” is technically the sum of its parts, they just don’t amount to very much. The tales are perfectly satisfying on their own — especially “The Empty Stocking” — but they don’t mix well. The message of one of these stories is that presents aren’t important, but the life-or-death problem of another story is solved in large part because of someone’s Christmas present. To quote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “Consistency is all I ask.”
Then of course there’s the shameless tie-in. No, not the contractually-obligated reference to how great Netflix is — which to Netflix Originals is like an Alfred Hitchcock cameo, if Hitch was always hard-selling you on something you’ve already bought. No, it’s the scene where the children in the animated film “That Christmas” watch the live-action movie “Love, Actually.” It’s a throwaway moment, but it raises highly unsettling questions. How can live-action movies exist in an animated universe? Do these kids know they’re peering into the real world, or are these animated kids in the real world, and in this “real” world live-action movies are the animation? Is “Love Actually” — and by extension, all us humans who watch it — the actual simulacrum?
It’s entirely likely that first-time feature director Simon Otto, previously the head of animation on the mostly-wonderful “How to Train Your Dragon” movies, didn’t expect anyone to lose sleep over this. But I don’t know if I’m real anymore and “That Christmas” is to blame. I’ll be sending Otto, Curtis and the higher ups at Netflix my therapy bills, and I suggest you do too. (Netflix, I will accept part of my reimbursement in the form of those gold “Love Is Blind” wine goblets — those are actual gold, right?)
Anyway, I digress. “That Christmas” is an ordinary feature that could have been extraordinary as a series of three shorts. Instead, this is what we’ve got: a vaguely watchable animated Christmas movie that only works in fits and starts. A few of the sappier moments hit hard enough to dislocate a jaw. Most earn little more than a shrug. A few of the jokes are funny, but I can’t remember what any of them were two days after I’ve seen the film, which takes an already middling compliment down another notch.
If I could narrow “That Christmas” down to a simple comparison, it would be to the deleted scene from “Love Actually” where Liam Neeson’s son breaks into an airport and uses Olympic-level gymnastics to escape the security guards. Like “That Christmas,” that is a real thing that got made and sure, it’s something to watch. It just wasn’t thought out very well.
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