Oh. What. Fun.

The Tinsel and the Tedium

Claire Clauster opens the film holding a battered VHS of *Planes, Trains, and Automobiles* and staring straight into the camera. Then she drops a little fact that lands like an accusation: Steve Martin’s wife gets only 89 seconds of screen time in that supposed holiday classic. It’s funny, sharp, and immediately to the point. Christmas movies are full of domestic warmth, but they almost never center the women doing the labor that makes the warmth possible. Michael Showalter’s *Oh. What. Fun.* (yes, the sarcastic punctuation is intentional) clearly wants to answer that. For a brief stretch, it even looks like it might. The film frames itself as a long-overdue correction to decades of holiday stories where dads rediscover meaning and moms keep basting in the background. For maybe twenty minutes, I was on its side.



Showalter has become a genuinely interesting director to watch, partly because his path has been so strange. He came out of the hyper-ironic chaos of *Wet Hot American Summer*, made something unexpectedly tender with *The Big Sick*, and lately has drifted toward slick streaming projects that feel assembled to order. I’ll still go to bat for *The Eyes of Tammy Faye*, but here you can feel him splitting in two directions. Working with Chandler Baker on the script from her story, he seems torn between making a barbed comedy about invisible maternal labor and fulfilling the obligations of an Amazon Prime Christmas movie that needs to land soft. The result has a real wobble. One minute it bites, the next it lunges for easy sentiment, and the gear shift is rough.



The setup that kicks Claire into motion is cruel in exactly the right way. She has organized a Christmas concert outing for the whole family, bought the tickets herself, and managed the endless logistics. Then her husband Nick (Denis Leary, amusingly committed to the role of a man whose defining trait is wanting a nap) and their three adult children somehow leave for the venue without her. Showalter lingers as Claire stands alone in the aggressively perfect Texas house she has decorated into submission. The silence that replaces the bustle is almost giddy. You can see obligation leave her body in real time and exhaustion rush in to take its place. So she grabs a bag, gets in the car, and heads for Los Angeles, hoping to reach Eva Longoria’s Zazzy Tims on a daytime talk show. It’s a great inciting incident. The trouble is that the movie never finds a story as good as that premise. Nell Minow wrote at *RogerEbert.com* that the film "makes the mistake of showing us clips of other, better Christmas movies right at the beginning." That really is the danger here. You don’t want to remind viewers how the classics feel if you’re about to give them something flimsier.



Michelle Pfeiffer is the reason to bother. We haven’t had enough chances lately to watch her carry a movie like this—not really since *French Exit* in 2020—and she gives Claire a rattled, high-wire energy the screenplay can’t fully match. The Texas accent is thick, but what really sells the character is her constant motion. While the sibling material with Chloë Grace Moretz, Felicity Jones, and Dominic Sessa falls into fairly thin bickering, Pfeiffer keeps telling a better story in the margins. She wipes counters, straightens decorations, hauls trash, adjusts little bits of festive mess nobody else even notices. That physical busyness says more about invisible labor than the voiceover ever does. She still looks immaculate, sure, but there’s a worn edge around the eyes that makes the whole performance stick. You believe this woman has spent decades manufacturing holiday joy by sheer force of will, and you absolutely understand the moment she decides she cannot do one more thankless December.

In the end, *Oh. What. Fun.* wants the tartness of a feminist critique and the sugary release of a fireplace reconciliation, and it never really figures out how to make those urges live together. The movie asks us to soften toward a bunch of fairly unbearable adult children simply because Christmas is on the calendar. Maybe that lands for some viewers. I’m not convinced. But whenever Pfeiffer is left alone in the frame, staring down yet another season of forced cheer, the movie suddenly finds a pulse. It’s bitter, a little tired, and much more interesting than the film wrapped around it.