Movie reviews: 'Office Christmas Party' opts for sentimentality over debauchery

'Strange things start happening': Crouse on 'It' CTV's Film Critic Richard Crouse says moviegoers look at 'It Chapter Two', 'Becoming Nobody' and 'Once Were Brothers'.

OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY: 2 STARS

Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman appeared together in the edgy “Horrible Bosses” films, so you’d expect their new movie, “Office Christmas Party,” to be holiday fare more naughty than nice. But you’d be wrong. Their latest doesn't suffer from being too vulgar, but from not being vulgar enough.

Aniston's character runs Zenotech Data Storage Systems, a tech company she inherited from her late father. Dad left her the company, but gave the main branch to her party animal brother Clay (T.J. Miller). A strictly by–the-book business person, she's a Grinch who cancels all branch Christmas parties to save money and gives Clay until the end of the quarter, just two days away, to turn things around or she will lay off 40 per cent of the staff and cancel all bonuses.

Clay is scattered with a "mind like a drunk baby," but determined to protect his branch and his staff. To that end he recruits head programmers Josh (Jason Bateman) and Tracey (Olivia Munn) to woo a lucrative client (Courtney B. Vance) by throwing a no-holds-barred office Christmas party.

“This is the way we close Walter, we throw the best Christmas party he's ever seen,” says Clay. “We could save everybody's jobs.”

Despite Clay’s warning, “When I drink a lot bad things happen,” they proceed with the party. Add in a greedy pimp, $300,000 in cold hard cash, a sexually repressed head of HR (Kate McKinnon) and an office load of drunk, disgruntled employees and you have a Bacchanalia that would make would make Caligula blush.

Given the premise, “Office Christmas Party” is not nearly as wild as a movie about an out-of-control party should be. Despite its excess of flesh and booze, the movie often opts for sentimentality over debauchery. It most certainly doesn't put the ‘X’ in Xmas.

Tone wise, it should feel like anything could happen; like the movie could go off the rails at any second. Instead, it’s as sweet and gooey as a (slightly soiled) Hallmark Christmas card.

Packed with comedy heavy hitters like Aniston, Bateman, McKinnon and Miller, it’s the supporting cast who garner most of the laughs. Fortune Feimster, a comic best known for her work on “The Mindy Project” livens things up as a motor mouth Uber driver and Randall Park’s take on a shy-but-kinky office worker has its charms, but it is Courtney B. Vance who steals the show. The velvet-voiced character actor who specializes in playing lawyers—think “Law & Order” and his Johnnie Cochran in “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”—unexpectedly lets his freak flag fly and the results are glorious. If it was his movie it might have been more fun.

Somebody should’ve spiked “Office Christmas Party’s” punch.

JACKIE: 3 STARS

Less a biopic than an intimate character study, “Jackie,” sees Natalie Portman play one of the most famous women of the Twentieth Century, first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Director Pablo Larraín personalizes the reaction to assassination of John F. Kennedy, presenting a portrait of grief that values rawness over slick sentimentality.

Focusing on the events immediately following November 22, 1963, the film cuts through the carefully constructed image Jacqueline Kennedy presented to the world. Instead, it shows her as a grieving widow struggling to fulfil her personal responsibilities under the scrutiny of the American people and White House staff.

Larraín employs a standard biopic starting point to frame the tale—an interview with a journalist (Billy Crudup)— but then throws all other familiar biographical approaches out the window. Kennedy’s story is a tragic one played out on the world stage and yet the film is never mawkish. It is a look at the end of “Camelot”—the musical and the ideological state of mind it personified for the Kennedy administration—as a psychological portrait of the woman at the very centre of it all.

Portman plays Kennedy not from the point of view of history—she is remembered for her grace and dignity—but as a woman fraying around the edges as she ponders the gravity of her situation and the legacy that will be left behind. She doesn’t look like Kennedy, but in a performance largely captured in close up, creates a portrait that seamlessly blends the poised, public Kennedy persona with a woman on the verge of a breakdown. It is often harrowing and certainly shows a different side of Kennedy than any other look at the subject.

“Jackie” is a bold film that values visceral feelings over glossy convention. It presumes much in its efforts to peer into the cracks of history, taking abundant artistic licence with what some will see as an intrusive look into Kennedy’s life. This is not “Camelot,” it’s the flipside of that romantic fairy tale.

LION: 4 STARS

“Lion,” the heart-tugging true tale of Saroo Brierley, is the story of one determined man’s attempt to connect with a past he barely remembers.

When we first meet Saroo (played as a child by Sunny Pawar), he’s a lively five-year-old boy living in abject poverty in a small town in India. His mother is a labourer, moving rocks to eke out a living for her family. Saroo and his brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) help out, stealing coal from passing trains to make money to buy milk. When the boys get separated while looking for work the youngster ends up on a train, destined for Calcutta, 1,600 km from home.

Alone and lost, he desperately tries to find his way home, but without knowing the name of his town or mother—“Her name is Mum,” he says.—he wanders the streets, his only possession a piece of cardboard to sleep on. For weeks he navigates through the dangerous city streets, learning who to trust and when to run. Found and sent to an orphanage, he is then adopted by Australians Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham ). “Did you really look for my mom?” he asks as his caseworker signs off on the paperwork.

Cut to twenty years later. Saroo (now played by Dev Patel), raised by loving parents, has grown into a handsome young man, but is increasingly troubled by the question marks of his early life.

“I'm lost,” he says to girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara). “Do you have any idea knowing what it is like knowing my real mother and brother spent every day looking for me?” Thoughts of his early life plague him until he begins to piece together the details of where his journey began.

Nicole Kidman may be the Academy Award winner in the cast, and she is very good, but the performances you’ll remember come from the two Saroos, Sunny Pawar and Dev Patel. Two actors, one character; both looking to find themselves, physically and spiritually. It’s an engrossing and often heart-wrenching journey and the pair keep us interested for the whole trip.

Pawar is a wide-eyed charmer, innocent but fearless, who conveys both the desperation to get home and the will to survive in dangerous situations. It’s a performance completely free of the preciousness that often mars kids' work; one that effortlessly cuts through to the core of the character.

Patel navigates a different part of Saroo’s journey. As an adult he speaks English with a heavy Australian accent and can no longer remember the Hindi of his youth. Thoroughly westernized, it isn’t until he accesses some long repressed memories that his need to find his real home surfaces. Patel embodies the emotional battle between the home he has grown up in, with all the comforts of a loving adopted family, and a need to understand where and who he came from.

“Lion” isn’t perfect—some of the Google Earth searches are as interesting as you might imagine a Google Earth search on the big screen to be—but it is emotionally engaged with all of its characters, and you will be to.

MISS SLOANE: 2 ½ STARS

The title of political thriller “Miss Sloane” refers to the main character, a lobbyist played by Jessica Chastain, but the film could easily have been titled “Drain the Swamp.” Made before Donald Trump became President Elect, it only takes about twenty seconds before the word “Trump” crops up in the dialogue. He’s never mentioned by name, but this look at “the most morally bankrupt profession since faith healing” paints exactly the ugly picture of behind-the-scenes machinations that Mr. Trump railed against on the champagne trail.

Chastain is Elizabeth Sloane, a sleep-deprived D.C. lobbyist “at the forefront of a business with a terrible reputation.” She’ll represent anyone, it seems, except the gun lobby, who offer her a lucrative contract, only to be laughed at and rejected. Soon after she leaves her firm—one of the biggest in the country—to join a small, scrappy group who aim to whip up support for a bill that will demand background checks for all gun owners.

The bulk of the film consists of the inner-workings of a campaign, the dirty tricks and money management it takes to influence the influencers. Sloane, focussed on the win, pushes protégé and mass shooting survivor Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) front and centre, making her the face of the issue. Soon, unexpected personal consequences of Sloane’s aggressive antics and a congressional enquiry into her behaviour threaten to derail all her hard work.

“Miss Sloane” is a fast-paced political suspense film that reverberates with echoes of Armando Iannucci, Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin. Zippy dialogue flies off the screen probably easier than it would actually fly off the tongue, giving voice to colourful characters who say mostly interesting things.

“When this town guts you like a trout and chokes you with the entrails don't come snivelling to me,” snarls Sloane.

It’s a catchy line and Chastain spits it out with conviction and often transcends the rat-a-tat dialogue by bringing some actual humanity to a character largely made up of bon mots and a bad attitude. It’s a struggle for Chastain to grow Elizabeth Sloane as a character, but in her rare quiet moments, when she isn’t mouthing Jonathan Perera’s carefully crafted words, she finds warmth and vulnerability in a person described as the “personification of an ice cube.”

All the good work, the dialogue, the character work, the timely “drain the swamp” subject, all of it, is undone in just a few minutes as “Miss Sloane” climaxes with one of the worst endings in recent memory. There will be no spoilers here, but in the movie’s final moments a crescendo of over plotting takes over, pushing the story into a melodramatic territory. Instead of echoing Armando Iannucci, Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin, Perera appears to pay tribute to Agatha Christie with a series of ridiculous revelations that defy logic.

“Miss Sloane” feels timely but its determination to live up to Sloane’s ethos—“It's about making sure you surprise them and they don't surprise you.”—undermines its effectiveness.