Love the Coopers (2015)

Love the Coopers arrives with four generations, a snowstorm, a Bernese Mountain Dog who turns out to be narrating, and a cast of decorated professionals who have all been in better rooms. Jessie Nelson directs, which puts a woman at the helm, and the film dutifully spreads its emotional labor across Charlotte, Eleanor, Emma, and Ruby. The arcs remain courtship arcs. Eleanor needs a man to survive dinner, Emma needs a man's advice to buy a gift, and Charlotte's forty-year marriage resolves into a reconciliation. The arrangement is traditional to its bones, and no thesis about gender or power is advanced, which keeps the relevant marker modest.

Elsewhere the cupboards are bare. Anthony Mackie appears as Officer Percy Williams, a supporting role with no comment attached to it, and the ensemble is otherwise white and unbothered by the fact. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no engagement with racial identity or systemic injustice, no environmental messaging, no meditation on body image, and no neurodivergent character in sight. Hank loses his photography job to a machine, a detail that would be a gift to a certain kind of screenplay, and the film declines it entirely. History is left alone. Nothing is revised.

The film wants reconciliation, not instruction. Its sins are of craft: the smarm, the tonal lurching, the hospital climax, the dog. Audiences graded it a B minus. Critics were less generous. For a work that assembles this much talent and this much available meaning, the restraint is almost impressive.