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Let’s be honest: Netflix Christmas movies tend to be the province of one-time stars who have gone MIA, in a manner of speaking, like Lindsay Lohan, like Brooke Shields, or like Alicia Silverstone in this year’s “A Merry Little Ex-Mas,” not to be confused with 2022’s “Merry Ex-Mas,” or 2014’s “Merry Ex Mas,” which can only suggest that next year we will graduate to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Ex-Mas.” Silverstone, however, is in a different tier than your typical Made-for-TV Christmas movie lead. She gave one of the finest romantic comedy performances of the modern era, if not all time, in “Clueless,” and though her career has ebbed and flowed, anytime I would see her in something, like Amy Heckerling’s “Vamps,” or a guest appearance on the TV show “Children’s Hospital,” it was clear she maintained her comic chops. And if the quality of assembly line holiday-themed movies tends to correlate to the quality of the lead performance, Silverstone’s is likely as good as you’re going to get this holiday season.
Silverstone lamenting, “We were going to do origami,” or snarling, “I go everywhere with a screwdriver,” likely mean nothing out of context, but I’m telling you, the way she says them in “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” is not just literally laugh-out-loud funny, it’s an embodiment of the holidays as a pressure cooker of family stress. It also breathes life into her character, Kate, a handywoman who harbored bigger dreams of life in a bigger city until she put all that on hold to marry Everett (Oliver Hudson) and start a family. As “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” begins, however, the happy couple is seeking a divorce, Kate is plotting a move to Boston, and so they plan to spend one last holiday together as a family. But Everett’s new girlfriend Tess (Jameela Jamil) joining the festivities rekindles resentments and Kate spirals from fear that she might be losing her family to this interloper.
Silverstone effuses her character’s spiral with a mirthful comic desperation, one that transforms the gingerbread house competition mandatory for all such movies into just that, a competition she becomes convinced can salvage everything if only she can win it. And though the part of Tess is broadly written, Jamil plays it with true panache, and she and Silverstone play off one another well, as do Silverstone and Melissa Joan Hart as the former’s sassy sister. Hart, in fact, deserved more screen time, more than Hudson, certainly, who proves a non-starter. Part of the problem may stem from the script. By making Kate and Everett’s divorce amicable rather than antagonistic, it removes the necessary tension for a central rom com couple to thrive, none of which is helped by Hudson’s easygoing air. When Tess makes a crack about their sex life not being quite all the way there yet, Jamil sells the joke even as it seems to fly right over Hudson’s head.
It goes over the movie’s head too. There might be a few attempts at bawdiness forbidden on the Hallmark and Great American Family Channels, and Kate’s character might be infused with Silverstone’s real-life leftist tendencies, but “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” has a real reactionary streak, nevertheless. It begins with various townsfolk essentially telling Kate and Everett that divorce is a moral abomination. And it’s why even if Kate is eventually allowed to follow her professional dreams, she can only follow them once she as reaffirmed her faith in the traditional family unit, which given Silverstone’s frantic air throughout, feels less like reaffirmation than quiet coercion. And now is a good time to tell you the name of the holiday-themed town where Kate and her family reside is called Winterlight, like the 1963 Ingmar Bergman movie where a priest goes through the motions while doubting the existence of God. I thought less of the priest, though, than his mistress, Marta, counseled to get out of the small town before it crushes her dreams, only to stay behind and stand by her man, praying on his behalf to a Creator she does not even believe in. That might as well be me before every one of these seasonal movies, praying to the movie gods before it starts, hearing only silence in return.
