Smarmy Yuletide cheer all full of itself and its cleverness

Rating: 3/10 (21 December 2016)

Fortunately my wife doesn't read reviews on the IMDb site, because she loves this movie, and subjects me to it every Christmas season.
This movie is wonderful for all the people who can't get enough of Hugh Grant looking sparkly, complete with glinty smile right out of a Crest commercial, as a newly-minted Kennedyesque British PM, or Keira Knightley beaming and glowing for the cameras as if she were modeling for a spread in a high-end bridal magazine. In perhaps the creepiest story arc of this contrived movie, Knightley plays a newlywed who discovers that her new husband's best friend (and best man at their wedding) has an unrequited crush on her. Instead of shunning him or telling hubby (a perfectly good chap played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), she thinks the man's gestures are sweet.
We also get Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as a couple whose marriage is on the rocks, Liam Neeson as a man who is struggling with the loss of his wife, the mother of his sensitive 10-year-old stepson (who just happens to be a budding drummer who idolizes Ringo Starr), Colin Furth as a novelist who falls for his sexy young Portuguese housekeeper, and (tying all the plot-lines together) Bill Nighy as a jaded middle-aged rock star who hopes to turn a Christmas-themed cover of The Troggs' 1968 hit "Love Is All Around" into a Yuletime pop hit, and who realizes that the deepest emotional connection he has with any human is with his corpulent, long-suffering manager (Gregor Fisher). Given the sappy soft-rock soundtrack calculated to evoke kitschy emotions in the audience, it is the height of hypocrisy and cynicism for the makers of this movie to mock the kitschy bowdlerization of The Troggs' song.
The whole movie is an exercise in manipulation of the most obvious and meretricious sort. The PM enacted by Grant rejects sexier women to fall, of course, for a rather heavy-set, naive, and awkward (but still highly cinegenic) young woman. The Knightley character reacts to the creep not with "eww" disgust and dismay but rather with sympathy, especially since he feeds her narcissistic self-image. There are happy endings appended to all the story lines in classic canned sitcom fashion, where no problem can't be resolved in 22 minutes, though this movie takes over 2 hours to reach this conclusion. If you like the smarmy self-satisfaction combined with middlebrow intellectual pretension that characterized the romantic comedies of Delia and the late Nora Ephron (I hate them), chances are you'll love this self-infatuated extravaganza. Me, I'll take Alistair Sim as Scrooge for my Christmas watching.