PARTY COOPERS

Opening this weekend:

Love the Coopers—The Coopers, and their extremely First-World problems, being:

Dad (John Goodman) wants to leave mom (Diane Keaton) because he’s sick of her putting the concerns of their grown kids ahead of their own relationship. She’s talked him into sticking around for one more picturesque family Christmas in their handsome suburban Pittsburgh home.

Meanwhile, Gramps (Alan Arkin) has bonded with a young diner waitress (Amanda Seyfried) and now she’s planning to move away. Son (Ed Helms) has lost his job, and is hiding it from his family. Daughter (Olivia Wilde), dawdling in the Pittsburgh airport, meets a handsome young solider (Jake Lacy) on his way to deployment and talks him into posing as her boyfriend for the holiday in hopes of avoiding the disappointed, disapproving, worried looks of her parents.

Gee, wouldn’t it be something if two of them actually fell in love?

Middle-class whining about what a drag it is to spend time with your family at the holidays is theme which the movies have pretty thoroughly explored over the last few decades. Indeed, Keaton has already starred in a similar ensemble comedy-drama, The Family Stone, back in 2005. She’s one of the executive-producers of Love the Coopers, so she must like this sort of thing, or at least like the sort of money it can make.

Directed by Jessie Nelson from a script by Steven Rogers (which went into production under the better title The Most Wonderful Time), Love the Coopers is slickly produced and more watchable than it really deserves to be. Partly this is thanks to a Starbucks-compilation-CD-style soundtrack of genteel holiday numbers, including Sting’s lovely version of “Soul Cake.” Partly it’s because of the underrated winter beauty of Pittsburgh.

But mostly, as you might guess, it’s because of the ability of that cast to engage, even with fairly blah material. Along with the above, by the way, the ensemble includes June Squibb as a dotty old aunt, and Marisa Tomei and Anthony Mackie as, respectively, Keaton’s shoplifting sister and the cop stuck with taking her in. This promises to become the most interesting strand—Mackie gives his role a little tension and sting, and he and Tomei have a nice rapport—but it peters out without a real payoff.

There’s also narration, but both the (unmistakable) voice of the famous speaker and the identity of the narrator seem meant to be a surprise until the end credits.

PRO AND CONJURE

The opening minutes of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone are a pretty convincing depiction of how, very probably, most show-biz careers are spawned.

The title character, though he hasn’t yet given himself that grand moniker, is chased down the street by a gang of bullies on his 10th birthday, in 1982. Their gift to him is a punch in the stomach and a blunt reminder that he’s a loser who no one will ever like.

His gift from his mother, however, is better: a Rance Holloway magic set with an instructional videocassette in which the great prestidigitator assures him that everybody loves a magician. Burt and his only friend Anton build on what they learn from this basic stuff, and soon they’re partners in a stage act.

Burt and Anton are played, in this prologue, by the excellent Mason Cook and Luke Vanek, respectively. Steve Carrell and Steve Buscemi take over when they hit adulthood, and their Vegas act, full of elaborate sets and huge hokey props, is a fixture at Bally’s, with its own theatre. Ten years into their run there, Burt has been turned by boredom and repetition into a hateful jackass, snarling contemptuously at everyone who works with him, including the long-suffering Anton. He lives in joyless luxury in a casino penthouse, where even his nightly seductions of comely volunteers from the audience have become a carefully-rehearsed routine.

But like any other star, Burt finds himself in decline, threatened by the newfangled stylings of the insufferable Steve Gray, “Brain Rapist” (Jim Carrey), who wows the crowds with extreme “street magic” stunts, often involving revolting abuse of his own body. Burt and Anton’s act—and friendship—fall apart when they try to compete with this approach, and Burt finds himself unemployed, broke and at the reluctant mercy of his disgusted assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde), herself an aspiring magician.

The rest of the movie, rather snappily directed by TV veteran Don Scardino from a script by several hands, including John Francis Daley of Freaks and Geeks, is about Burt’s attempts to resurrect himself, both as a performer and a person. It’s a perfectly legitimate template for a showbiz story, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone entertained me, and made me laugh quite a bit.

But it’s marred, for me seriously, by a high degree of cloddish, heavy-handed shtick of what I suppose might be called the Hangover school: mean-spirited slapstick and obvious, telegraphed jokes. There are lengthy set-pieces, like Burt and Anton’s stunt in a suspended booth, or Anton’s imbecilic charitable efforts, that seem meant to convulse us with hilarity. But they just go thud, like a failed a magic trick.

It isn’t just that these scenes aren’t funny. It’s that they’re not consistent with the characterizations. Anton, for instance, is supposed to be the smart, sensitive half of the pair, so the gag about his misguided interactions with Third World people plays particularly dumb.

This side of the material also feels disingenuous in the face of what the movie seems to be championing—corny but comparatively genteel showmanship over shock. It struck me, by the way, that Burt and Anton’s show could still play in Vegas to full houses, and leave them well and unironically satisfied. (I’d certainly go.)

What saves the movie is the sensational cast. Despite the unhilarious nature of the stuff he’s given to do, Carrey isn’t bad at all in his Criss Angel send-up. James Gandolfini is very funny as the dull-souled Bally’s honcho, and Buscemi is always easy to like.

As for Carrell, he’s about as poised a leading man as you’ll find in American movies right now. He has suavity and charm balanced with an accessible everyman quality and a comedic fearlessness. His best moment here is the pleasure Burt registers, quietly but deeply, when he meets his old idol Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin in full curmudgeon mode) in a retirement home—it’s the point at which Burt starts the trudge back from Assholedom, and it gives a hint of the movie that The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have been.

But then, the potentially touching scene in which Burt and Anton make up is thrown away on overplayed and way overextended mock-sniveling. Carrell and Buscemi both deserve better than this, but alas, they’re complicit in it. It’s a lousy trick they’ve played on themselves.

PLAGIARIZE ON THE PRIZE

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” or so T. S. Eliot famously quipped. Maybe, but some writers have a hard time being so flippant on the subject of artistic theft (Eliot, it should be noted, was talking about inspiration and innovation, not true plagiarism). Even those of us who would never think of trying to pass off another’s work as our own on purpose—even if you didn’t get caught, there would be no pleasure in whatever success you attained—still live in terror of unconsciously appropriating a sentence, or a joke, or simply a turn of phrase from something we’ve read.

Thus the theme of The Words—the theft, by a writer, of someone else’s words—is troubling. It’s also potentially compelling, and while I’m still unable to tune into the star appeal that leading man Bradley Cooper clearly holds for many people, the movie, by the writing-directing team of Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, has a terrific supporting cast, and I went into it intrigued. The result, alas, is a good-looking movie that’s so banal and artificial, so enthralled by musty clichés about what an author’s life is supposed to look like, that the cautionary horror in the idea never takes hold.

Cooper plays Rory, an aspiring young writer living in Brooklyn who’s told by agents that his work is too subtle and “interior” to be published (really? I didn’t think there was any other kind of “literary” fiction). While they’re honeymooning in Paris—just like all struggling young writers get to do—Rory’s beautiful new wife (Zoe Saldana) buys him a beat-up leather portfolio in an antique shop.

One day while rummaging through it, he finds an old, yellowed typewritten manuscript of a novel tucked away in a hidden pocket—the novel, it turns out, he’d always wanted to write. He feels compelled to retype it, his wife reads it on his computer while he’s out and looks at him with new wonder, and before he knows it he’s handed it to an agent. It’s a smash, of course, wows the critics, wins awards, gets the book he actually did write sold. But pretty soon he’s confronted by an old man (Jeremy Irons) who lost a manuscript decades ago in Paris…

Though his lines aren’t any less forgettable and uninspired than anyone else’s, Irons gives them a muttering, ironic bite, like the sound of a damaged cello, that brings The Words whatever fun it has. The movie could have used a lot more of him. What really hurts, however, is the frame story through which it’s told: Yet another writer (Dennis Quaid) reading from his new novel The Words, and later telling the end to a sultry grad student (Olivia Wilde). This outer layer feels precious and evasive, and it leads the movie to an unsatisfying, anticlimactic finish—The Words ends not with a bang but with a whimper.

Um, I mean, not with a loud noise but with a soft, plaintive cry.