With some decent star power in the acting stakes I expected more from this confused mish-mash of a Christmas movie. The idea of entwining different individual stories into one isn't original but I thought that with a Yule-tide twist it might have come together better than it did.
As usual, in the timeworn trail of George Bailey, we get a bunch of sad people at Christmas time needing a seasonal miracle to get them happily into the holiday spirit. However some of the stories are so slight and trite, they barely register, like the young man who deliberately gets himself hospitalised because he remembers a happy childhood Christmas there, away from his selfish parents, while in another bizarre episode, Alan Arkin is wasted as an old widower who tries to connect with a young cop, (Cruz's fiancé) telling him he's the reincarnation of his late wife.
The main stories of lonely divorcée Susan Sarandon, with her Alzheimer's suffering mother meeting up with Robin Williams defrocked priest and Penelope Cruz as a young bride-to-be struggling with the jealousy of her fiancé, just about pass muster, but the movie falters when the stories shift focus, plus the editing is very poor. To give just one example, after Sarandon and Cruz fortuitously hook up early on in the piece, they opt out of the latter's family Christmas dinner, head to a café for what you'd expect to be a heart-to-heart chat, but which we actually never see happen and in fact they don't even meet up again.
Indeed, the film doesn't really bring the five stories together at all, so that despite some decent acting by the principals it fails to gell and really transport the viewer into the Christmas spirit, even with some nice wintry New York city-scapes in the background.
As usual, in the timeworn trail of George Bailey, we get a bunch of sad people at Christmas time needing a seasonal miracle to get them happily into the holiday spirit. However some of the stories are so slight and trite, they barely register, like the young man who deliberately gets himself hospitalised because he remembers a happy childhood Christmas there, away from his selfish parents, while in another bizarre episode, Alan Arkin is wasted as an old widower who tries to connect with a young cop, (Cruz's fiancé) telling him he's the reincarnation of his late wife.
The main stories of lonely divorcée Susan Sarandon, with her Alzheimer's suffering mother meeting up with Robin Williams defrocked priest and Penelope Cruz as a young bride-to-be struggling with the jealousy of her fiancé, just about pass muster, but the movie falters when the stories shift focus, plus the editing is very poor. To give just one example, after Sarandon and Cruz fortuitously hook up early on in the piece, they opt out of the latter's family Christmas dinner, head to a café for what you'd expect to be a heart-to-heart chat, but which we actually never see happen and in fact they don't even meet up again.
Indeed, the film doesn't really bring the five stories together at all, so that despite some decent acting by the principals it fails to gell and really transport the viewer into the Christmas spirit, even with some nice wintry New York city-scapes in the background.