At the risk of sounding like the Grinch, I must once again bemoan the release of Christmas movies before Thanksgiving; the temperatures may be dropping at long last, but it’s still too close to the gloominess of daylight savings and too far from the belt-loosening of the actual holidays to fully indulge in Netflix’s now-annual buffet of cheap Christmas confections. Nevertheless, their content conveyor belt rolls on, offering treats about as substantial and enduring as cotton candy beginning in mid-November.
Like American chocolates that no longer, in fact, contain real chocolate but sell like gangbusters on Halloween anyway, the Netflix Christmas movie, like rival holiday movie master Hallmark, is relied upon, even beloved, for its brand of badness, for its rote familiarity (nostalgic casting, basement-bargain budgets, styrofoam snow, knowingly absurd premise) and uncanny artificial filler, for its ability to deliver hits of sugary pleasure while still somehow under-delivering on expectations. At worst, these films are forgettable train wrecks (last week’s A Merry Little Ex-Mas); at best, they are forgettable fun, such as the Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle Falling For Christmas, of which I remember nothing other than cackling with my friend on her couch. (Actually, at best they are memorably ludicrous, such as last year’s impressively unserious Hot Frosty.)
Champagne Problems, Netflix’s latest Christmas concoction, disappears into the vast middle of the forgettable spectrum. Written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, a former studio writer whose last Netflix-core romcom, Love in the Villa, was so disposable I forgot I had even reviewed it, it goes down like cheap bubbly, appropriately flat and situational.
It begins, naturally, with what one imagines an AI-generated ad for drug store brand champagne would look like, should US drugs stores be legally allowed to market their own champagne. The commercial, it turns out, is actually the pitch of one Sydney Price (Minka Kelly) to her colleagues at the Roth Group, a private equity fund (without, of course, saying the words private equity) looking to take over a legacy champagne brand. With perpetual TV curls and an endless supply of luxe coats, Sydney is the construction paper cut-out of a career woman – underestimated, obsessed with her phone, ambitious to the detriment of her personal life and, in fact, any personality at all. So much so that when her ogreish boss (Mitchell Mullen) selects her to fly to France and close the deal over Christmas, her sister Skyler (Maeve Courtier-Lilley) makes her pinky promise: she must take a single night in Paris to actually live for herself.
Of course, there’s no place like Paris to wrest one away from Google Maps, even when the city is laden with below-grade CGI snow. And at an absurdly cutesy bookstore, Sydney meet-cutes with Henri Cassell (Tom Wozniczka), who does the wresting of her beloved Google Maps. As demanded by the genre, Sydney at first resists this absurdly perfect man for silly reasons (work, a briefly mentioned divorce, just because).
Equally as expected are movie mechanics proceeding at abrupt quarter turns, just as one rotates the aging champagne bottles in the cellars of Chateau Cassel, the champagne vineyard Sydney hopes to acquire. The catch? Henri is the heir to Chateau Cassel, as reluctant to run it as he is resentful of his father Hugo (Thibault de Montalembert) for selling it – and, in perhaps the film’s most salient contribution to the genre, extremely judgmental of private equity. The conflict? Sydney sincerely believes she’s not stripping this family-owned company for parts, and is competing for the acquisition with three caricatures: a severe French grand dame (Astrid Whettnall), a severe blonde German man (Flula Borg), and severely delusional gay billionaire (Sean Amsing, admirably if annoyingly unhinged). The twist? Sydney’s skeevy coworker Ryan (Xavier Samuel, who has more chemistry with Kelly in a single scene than Wozniczka does in the whole movie), shows up unannounced. The grist? Henri and Sydney look yearningly at each other in holiday pajamas, across a vast chasm in economic worldview.
The gift and the curse, of course, is that none of this sticks for longer than a bubbly buzz on an empty stomach. And there is no real absorbent filler here – Kelly, still best known for playing a deceptively sharp cheerleader in Friday Night Lights, goes for strictly serviceable, all sweet surfaces and gestures of care, more a maternal presence than a romantic lead. Wozniczka, too, provides exactly the dollop of French charm with mild self-torture and nothing more. The gimmicks are unfunny, the romance inoffensive, the happy-ever-after straightforward. For all its waxing poetic on the specific luxury of champagne, no one is pretending this is anything other than a mass market item; the things to hate are also the things to like. One might call a critic’s feelings about it a champagne problem.
Champagne Problems is now available on Netflix
