Spoilers ahead! Also, I can’t take complete credit for this hOt TaKe, as it was really my fiancé who first made the observations detailed below after we had seen both movies.
If you had told me that the two holiday wide releases trying to tackle immigration and racism in 2019 would be Knives Out and Last Christmas, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. If you had told me that Last Christmas, so sugary sweet it should come with a warning, would actually be the more successful of the two, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you. And yet here we are!
“No,” you’re probably saying. “That can’t be right!” OH, BUT IT IS. Let me explain why.
To start, you’ll need a little context behind both films, so: major spoilers ahead! Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen either movie yet (though at this point, you’ve had plenty of time, so what are you waiting for??).
Okay, here we go! Let’s start with Knives Out:
Knives Out centers around a wealthy family, the Thrombeys. Best-selling mystery author Harlan Thrombey (Christorpher Plummer) has just committed suicide by slitting his own throat. Or has he? The police aren’t entirely sure; nor is Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) who’s been hired by an anonymous client to look into the unusual circumstances of Harlan’s death. But, don’t worry, we see how he dies within the first act:
Harlan’s nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) apparently picks up the wrong bottle of medication and injects Harlan with a lethal dose of morphine instead of his prescribed medication. Thinking that he only has 10 minutes to live, she begs Harlan to let her call an ambulance, but in dramatic fashion, he refuses (or shuts her down, if you want to be less charitable). Instead of allowing Marta to handle the situation (remember, she is the actual trained nurse here), Harlan uses his non-medical, but otherwise lucrative, mystery writing skills to devise an elaborate plot to throw any would-be investigators off Marta’s scent and slices his own throat. Yep, a character literally slits his own throat in an act of benevolent paternalism toward his beloved immigrant friend/nurse.
It’s pretty much all up/down hill from there as we better get to know the Thrombeys and Detective Benoit Blanc. We don’t actually get to know Marta or her family though beyond the following key traits:(a) Marta’s mom is undocumented; (b) Marta also lives with her sister; (c) Marta is so pure, so inherently good that lying literally causes her to vomit; and (d) Marta has a kind heart (thanks, Detective Blanc!). Yeah, the film is done with Marta now. What’s that, you say? What about character development? Hahha, oh no. She might be in every scene but that’s all you’re getting!
As for the rest of this star-studded cast of characters? Harlan’s family fills out Knives Out with a character list that spans the “both sides” spectrum from nazi alt-right teens to the clearly Goop-inspired liberal wellness influencer. But each character at leasts gets to show some personality before being reduced to simply “awful human being.” That is, of course, the point, as Rian Johnson has a pointed statement to make about the ugliness of the current political climate and the hypocrisy of even the well-intentioned. Unfortunately, in typical whodonut fashion, it’s Johnson holding the un-woke (non-woke?) weapon after all is said and done.
The New York Times’ opinion writer Monica Castillo sums it up nicely when she notes in a recent piece that, “Marta is someone the Thrombeys can show off to make them seem more progressive than they actually are.” As she notes, Johnson includes a running joke where the awful human beings keep saying Marta is from a different South American country (HA HA they’re racist!), but Johnson never actually reveals where she is from. Yeah, it doesn’t actually matter, but it starts to when there are more jokes about anything resembling a character origin than actual character development in the film. And it’s not just the awful human beings. The entire film is premised on the beatification of Marta from beginning (see: Harlan’s demise) to the end where we discover that our hero detective effectively works with/for Marta the whole time because of his immediate assumption based on her “kind heart.”
Heart?!? Does Marta give someone her heart? Perhaps a Christmas ago or so?
SEGUE!
Paul Feig’s Last Christmas (co-written by and starring Emma Thompson), the film based on the Wham! holiday classic starring that delightful man from Crazy Rich Asians (Henry Golding) and Lady of Dragonstone (Emilia Clarke) is a touching tale about the immigrant experience? Yeah, they don’t exactly highlight that in the trailer.
Last Christmas opens with Kate (Clarke), a young woman seemingly in the throes of some sort of personal crisis as she spends the first act trying her best burn any and all bridges in her professional and personal lives. Kate runs into Tom (Golding), a manic pixie dream boy of a man seemingly sent from the heavens to help Kate put out those bridge fires. Yet, Tom doesn’t actually do anything. Kate simply opens up to him in a way that leads to a lot of on-screen self-reflection from Kate. She’s doing the work to be a better person and that means unpacking a lot of emotional baggage for the benefit of the audience.
And the largest bag to unpack? The relationship with her family: her mom, Petra (Thompson), father, Ivan (Boris Isakovic), and sister, Marta (Lydia Leonard). You see, Kate’s full name is Katarina and she and her family immigrated to London from Yugoslavia during the ‘90s. Assimilation, and its limits, crops up as an issue among the family that addressed throughout the film with the dueling cultural identities playing an allegorical role in the film’s big twist.
It’s worth noting that Emma Thompson has received some criticism for playing a Yugoslavian character when she herself is not Yugoslavian, and there are merits to that argument, but I don’t think it’s an inherently wrong or offensive casting choice. In my opinion, there’s also nothing offensive about the way Petra is portrayed. She’s not played for laughs; she’s not a caricature. Like many parents and their twentysomething adult children, she buts heads with Kate often (though not without reason: Kate’s drinking habits are actually kind of alarming, considering the very specific health issues that are later revealed); she wants her kids to be happy and sometimes thinks she knows better than they what that looks like; she’s worried about the impact Brexit will have on their lives and also how it might change how people around them see her and her family; she wants her kids to assimilate and also worries that she’ve assimilated too much. She knows it’s important to hang on to the past and also maybe is holding on a little too strongly (In one scene, as she rises from the table to sing yet another song from the Old Country, her husband says, “Petra, the war ended 30 years ago! Why are you still killing us with these songs?”). Like everyone, she’s got her own prejudices: At one point, as she and Kate are watching a news report about the rise of far-right nationalism in the U.K., Petra says she “blames the Poles.”
But an on-the-nose “Go back to your own country!” scene on a bus notwithstanding, Last Christmas makes its point about immigration subtly and specifically – all times framing its point within the larger context of Kate’s character progression throughout the film. The film, nor the characters in it, does not speak for Kate or her family. It’s not sainthood or nothing for them – everyone, including Kate, her mom, her sister, and her father, are treated like fully-formed characters within the story.
“So what? Knives Out was just an expertly crafted whodunnit, why can’t we just enjoy it for what it is?” you ask. Well, sure, I’d love to, but then again Johnson should have just let it be just that because it is expertly crafted and the cast is fantastic in all of their scene-chewing glory. Instead, it tried to make a BIG SEROUS STATEMENT and failed miserably, so miserably that it now exists in whole as an example of the very sort of faux-woke liberalism it mocks. Whereas, Last Christmas – yes, LAST CHRISTMAS, a movie based entirely on the Wham! song – rises above its confectionary conception to succeed in making a more affecting and effective statement about immigration. Hopefully, you get around to it.