In the annals of heart transplant “rom-coms,” there are very few to choose from. Arguably beginning with 1993’s Untamed Heart starring Christian Slater and Marisa Tomei–which isn’t really all that “light-hearted” (wordplay unintentional) in between Caroline’s (Tomei) near rape and Adam’s (Slater) talk of having a baboon heart. Following that, there was 2000’s Return to Me with David Duchovny and Minnie Driver as Bob Rueland and Grace Briggs. Centered not only on the hilarity of the existence of an Irish-Italian restaurant where Grace works, the stakes of its premise are based on Grace getting a heart transplant from Bob’s now dead wife, Elizabeth (Joely Richardson). Naturally, the two would find one another because, as any heart transplant movie will tell you, once you have someone else’s heart it evidently brings you closer to that person and those who were in their lives. But neither one is aware of the somewhat awkward circumstance regarding Grace’s heart, for she’s decided to keep the information about her transplant to herself.
Much the same way as Katarina a.k.a. Kate (Emilia Clarke) in the Paul Feig-directed, Emma Thompson-written Last Christmas. In case you weren’t sure, the film is most assuredly named in honor of the Wham! song, and intended as an overall George Michael homage for no apparent reason other than running with the theme of the title so as to have a built-in soundtrack. In fact, the only mention of any reason why Kate might have such an obsession with the pop star is because, “Like me, he was unappreciated in his time.”
One supposes her love for the more well-known half of Wham! began in Yugoslavia circa 1999–for that’s when and where the opening scene occurs, with a young Kate singing “Heal the Pain” in her choir (as though that would have been permitted). As a Yugoslavian émigré forced to flee the country with her mother, Petra (Thompson, who appears to be offering more of an offensive sendup than a performance), her father, Ivan (Boris Isakovic), and sister, Marta (Lydia Leonard), Kate is decidedly more British at this juncture in her twenty-six years (for it is Thompson’s none too subtle intent to get the message across that everyone in London is an immigrant at this point). And she has all the mannerisms to prove it–from asking, “Why is my life so shit?” to drinking like a lush at the nearest pub.
Seemingly modeled after some tamer and more prone to redemption version of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag in terms of her flagrant selfishness and constant fucking up without learning anything from her bad behavior, Kate is suddenly brought to life again by the appearance of a mysterious bike riding stranger named Tom (Henry Golding)–oddly fond of telling her to “look up” all the time. That way she’ll notice things she never had before. Of course, it lands her in a pile of trash bags at one point, but he insists it’s worth it. Their inexplicable attraction to one another continues to escalate as they meet up outside of her workplace most nights, a year-round Christmas store where she dresses as an elf. Of course, she should have been suspicious from the outset that there is no way to contact Tom other than by the simple happenstance of meeting him.
When she tells him she’s homeless after having alienated her last willing friend to take her on as a temporary flatmate, he escorts her around the corner to the shelter where he volunteers to show her what that really means for those who don’t even have a mother they rather despise to turn to for help. Emma Thompson (through her screenplay) putting a white girl in her place for not knowing the true meaning of suffering feels a little like the pot calling the kettle black in this case though. For it is, by and large, bathetic bleeding heart schlock at every turn, reaching a crescendo in the final scene at the homeless shelter talent show where, of course, George Michael songs are touted and everyone is healed.
While the movie is intended to be “sweet” and reassuring in some way to immigrants that they still have a place in Brexit-era Britain, it comes across as the very pinnacle of an affluent and sequestered from everyday society celebrity’s “let’s heal the ills of humanity with George Michael songs” take on things. Sprung from the mind of someone who is totally out of touch with the world around them thanks to the cushion of money. Sort of like Woody Allen’s perspective of New York in the equally as cheesily titled A Rainy Day in New York. It’s almost as though Thompson has completely forgotten about the talk show host character she played in Late Night (a movie, incidentally, originally intended to be directed by Paul Feig), who needed a millennial Indian woman in the form of Mindy Kaling to remind her how to reconnect with the common man. And try as she might to have created an “instant Christmas classic” like the one she starred in back in 2003, Love Actually, Last Christmas does not exactly scream “enough of these [maudlin Christmas movie] chains,” as George Michael might phrase it. Nor does it defy convention in any memorable way. Least of all in the niche heart transplant genre layered into the Christmas one.
