Remember The Love Boat TV show from the 1970s, set on a cruise ship? Each episode had a number of different stories, intersecting slightly or not at all. The overall point was that Love makes the world go round. The cheesiness factor was off the charts. There was a bouncy Hispanic girl (April Lopez, played by Charo) with a funny-foreigner accent and a guitar. You might think that times have changed, but in fact all of the above – except the cruise ship, and perhaps the guitar – could be used to describe New Year’s Eve, down to the bouncy Hispanic girl. She’s now called Ava (played by Sofia Vergara), and says things like this: “How deed you know? Are you psychotic?”.
This film, from the team who brought you Valentine’s Day, is so unreconstructed, un-PC, un-ironic, uncool and just plain unfunny, it achieves its own form of greatness. Maybe it’s just that we’re not used to seeing a multiplex comedy made by an elderly director (Garry Marshall is 77), aimed at people not much younger than himself. There are jokes about GPS. There are jokes about yoga. There are jokes about the Internet, where your teenage kids – or grandkids – go to find videos of people kissing. “It’s like Facebook, but real,” says Zac Efron, speaking of a New Year’s Eve masked ball, which doesn’t really make sense but at least it gets Facebook mentioned in the movie. Teenage characters speak like the kids in 70s sitcoms. A 15-year-old boy tries to persuade his girlfriend’s mum to let her go out on New Year’s Eve, but she threatens to call his own mother instead; “I tried, but she fights dirty,” he reports, in a line no actual 15-year-old has spoken since the days when Coke came in bottles.
An all-star cast seems strangely unembarrassed by it all – though we expect no more from Robert De Niro, who sold off his integrity years ago. He’s the dying geezer who only wants to see the ball drop one more time before he goes (New York apparently has a glitzy ball that gets lowered over Times Square as the year changes). Hilary Swank is the woman in charge of the ball-drop – at one point she pledges not to drop the ball on dropping the ball – with Jon Bon Jovi as a rock star performing for the assembled crowds. Also on hand is Katherine Heigl as his bitter ex-girlfriend, catering the post-concert bash, but the other main characters are only tangentially related. Ashton Kutcher is a New Year’s Eve-hating boho who gets stuck in a lift with a young neighbour (she turns out to be Bon Jovi’s backup singer). Michelle Pfeiffer, in a rather too-intense performance, is a lonely, misanthropic woman who asks Zac Efron to help her achieve her bucket list of New Year’s resolutions (he turns out to be Ashton’s buddy). And there’s also a strand about two pregnant women about to give birth – which doesn’t really fit with anything, but it balances the dying De Niro. Circle of life, innit.
None of this should work (and in fact it doesn’t), yet it’s strangely watchable, maybe because it’s all of a piece. Even the smallest roles are absurdly old-fashioned, a fat lisping male nurse giving the pregnant ladies his effeminate blessing (“May the best vajay-jay win!”) or a passer-by growling “You should see Newark!” when the teenage girl says something about New York. Self-consciousness never intrudes (as it does, for instance, in Love Actually); the film is set in its own blissful bubble. Its target audience is perhaps the small-town pastor’s family whom we meet in their mini-van, giving Josh Duhamel a ride into town – prim wife, fat kids, rascally grandpa – and listening to his sob-story of meeting a girl on New Year’s Eve. “It’s going to have a goosebump ending,” cackles the mother delightedly.
“Some people swear there’s no beauty left in the world. No magic,” sighs the opening voice-over – but those people clearly don’t understand New Year’s Eve, when the world comes together “to celebrate the hope of a New Year”. Those of us who find the last night of the year anti-climactic at best, actively depressing at worst are out of luck here. Even if you resist the magic (like Ashton’s character) it can only be because your heart has been broken. Love is the answer; love will cure everything. “Be nice to each other,” counsels Swank in the film’s big speech. “Be kind to each other. Not just tonight, but all year long”.
How clean-cut is New Year’s Eve? So clean-cut that if a nurse (Halle Berry) puts on a skin-tight red dress after her shift is over, it isn’t so that she can go out on the town and enjoy herself – it’s so she can talk via video-link with her husband, who’s a soldier serving in Afghanistan! And of course there’s a goosebump ending. After two hours of lame comedy and cutesy plotting, the film’s all-out assault on our tear-ducts is shameless – but perhaps irresistible. If ‘Auld Lang Syne’ doesn’t get you, ‘It’s a Wonderful World’ will.
DIRECTED BY Garry Marshall
STARRING Hilary Swank, Katherine Heigl, Robert De Niro, Sarah Jessica Parker
US 2011 118 mins
