By Emily Patterson
Netflix’s Best. Christmas. Ever! is the streaming service’s first big Christmas move for the season. But hopefully, for our sakes, it’s not also the best. The movie strives to be a heartwarming family comedy involving actors you might actually remember if you are over 35. But it’s awkward, try-hard vibe is painful to watch – even by straight-to-TV holiday movie standards.
Heather Graham stars as Charlotte Sanders, an engineer for Big Vacuum and mom of two. Her life didn’t work out quite the way she pictured it. Sadly, she had to put her so quirky dream of becoming an inventor of snack-related outerwear on hold to support her family. (Graham, please leave the adorkable thing to 2012’s Zooey Deschanel!) Jason Biggs plays her husband, Rob Sanders. Rob is a, um, professional house flipper? That part isn’t clear. Perhaps Netflix edited it out to spare us all the moral conundrum of rooting for the 2020s biggest housing market villain.
Brandy Norwood plays Jackie Jennings, Charlotte’s best friend from college, who seemingly has perfect life. That’s as long as your dream life involves a McMansion the size of an elementary school decorated with an entire Home Depot worth of Christmas lights. Each Christmas, Jackie sends out a Christmas letter where she brags about her professional accomplishments, her brilliant children, and her hunky yet compassionate husband.
Feeling inadequate, Charlotte stopped talking to her college bud years ago. But when her creepy-monkey-carrying son enters Jackie’s address into the GPS, the family ends up at the bedazzled mansion by accident. Convinced that the Christmas letters are all a lie (or maybe that her husband is cheating on her. It’s not clear?), Charlotte decides to play PI. This involves hijinks so cliched that Netflix must have generated this part of the script with AI. Guess what, Charlotte climbs out a window and gets locked outside in the snow! I’m cracking up. (Not really)
From there, the movie just gets weird. It’s as if Netflix hopes that by throwing in so many plotlines, viewers will forget that not a single one makes sense. Also, brace yourself for dialogue straight out of a cringey influencer’s Instagram Stories. At one point, Jackie persuades Charlotte to buy her husband’s dream house flip because “things won’t happen until you believe they can.”
This nonsensical story and hokey dialogue could be redeemed by the actors’ charisma. But it’s been a long time since Graham starred in Boogie Nights and Swingers, and somewhere in the last 20 years, she forgot how to act. She’s wooden and has zero chemistry with both her husband and her frenemy. And Biggs and Brandy Norwood weren’t much better.
I’m not sure what could have saved this movie. Perhaps turning it into a totally different film about Jackie’s daughter who has mastered mortgage negotiations and PowerPoint presentations but still believes in Santa. In the meantime, take Jackie’s advice. As she tells Charlotte during the climax of the film, “Everyone makes mistakes, that’s why they put erasers at the ends of pencils.” Let’s erase this one right from our memories.