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.