Something from Tiffany’s is not the holiday movie we need

‘Tis the season to be jolly – about lightweight, formulaic, good-looking and forcefully woke Christmas movies on streaming platforms that are not offensively bad but still instantly forgettable. Something from Tiffany’s, based on Melissa Hill’s novel of the same name, is frothier than a cappuccino produced by a broken coffee machine. I know this sounds absurd, but on a premise level alone, this film is to flimsy New York rom-coms what _The Lunchbox_ is to Mumbai middle-class dramas. I’m kidding, but I’m also not. If humble lunchboxes became an old-school dating app in Ritesh Batra’s wonderful film, a mix-up of jewelry from Tiffany’s becomes the SoHo-styled quirk of fate here. Ethan (Kendrick Sampson), a dishy Black widower, buys a fancy engagement ring to propose to his girlfriend Vanessa (Shay Mitchell), but an entirely contrived and cutesy mix-up (featuring a road accident and concussion) means that his ring instead reaches Rachel (Zoey Deutch) as a casual Christmas gift from her self-absorbed boyfriend Gary (Ray Nicholson). Rachel says yes, Gary plays along because he’s white, and Ethan is left with Gary’s cheap earrings, an amused daughter, a neglected girlfriend and a chance ‘friendship’ with Rachel. Of course, they’re meant to be, mostly because it’s 2022 and interracial love needs to be normalized. So what if they share less chemistry than Elon Musk does with the concept of democracy ? To drive home the diversity card, Rachel’s BFF and business partner is Black and queer, and she has no qualms being nosy in a story that overdoses on cross-connections. The reason I’m harping on about the representation angle is because bouncy movies like these seem to think their job is done by showcasing a colour-blind Blue State where even the snow falling sounds progressive. It looks too designed, too performative for the romantic-comedy part to actually be innovative and heartfelt. It doesn’t upend White Hollywood stereotypes so much as reiterate them – by being utterly unmemorable. You know what would be contemporary and brave? For once, just once, I’d like to see a bigoted and racist protagonist get transformed by love. I’d like to see the subconscious conflict written into their star-crossed dates. (Why are all the flaws only reserved for the partners of the protagonists? Vanessa dislikes New York and she’s a PR executive, while Gary is a tattoo artist who’s never on time.). But the sanitization of romance is very much rooted in the sterilization of sociocultural nuance. It’s like a live-action Disney template that pretends to be liberal within the shackles of Holiday tradition. Tamara Chestna’s script does little beyond exist, even though the elements are all there. Ethan is a Creative Writing professor and author who is looking to move back from Los Angeles to New York after the death of his wife. He’s in the city to meet a potential publisher, against the wishes of his LA-loving girlfriend. You’d think he would be edgier and broodier, but the movie is too Christmassy to care for real emotion. It’s too obsessed with Kendrick Sampson’s gorgeous eyes to really bother about his fictional personality, as if to ask: He’s a single father and he looks like that, what more do you want from us? His little daughter (Leah Jeffries) demonstrates a semblance of grief, but she too is the typical movie kid who’s older than her years and has watched Sleepless in Seattle way too many times. Rachel is by far the most interesting character of the film. She runs an Italian restaurant and bakery, talks a lot, and speaks to her food because bread seems more responsive than her boyfriend. To be honest, she would make a fantastic single protagonist in a film that recognizes her as a career girl trying to make it in the big city. The synopsis of this film is written from her perspective (“a woman receives an engagement ring meant for someone else…”), but the movie itself rarely believes that she’s complete on her own. A few quiet scenes of her alone in her kitchen might have elevated the empty fabric of a story that considers New York a hash-tag ‘vibe’ rather than an actual place. If only today’s rom-coms aspired for more than token wokeness and utopian feelings. Needless to mention, I’m not a fan of the Netflix and Amazon factory chain of inert rom-com templates. Most of these movies seem to be nostalgic but lazy odes to older, smarter and more human films from the 1990s. None of them are interested in standing on their own, updating the genre or making a dent in the modern entertainment landscape. It’s just numbers, messages, eyeballs and streaming records. Just the other day, I saw a Facebook friend celebrate two decades of Love Actually, another vintage rom-com that fell prey to today’s Cancel Culture (a movement that’s determined to rid this universe of art, context and everything in between). I doubt the teens today will grow up and digitally reminisce about S_omething from Tiffany’s_ – or generic moments from it – twenty years later. Even the secret spots that the man takes the woman to in the city have started to resemble each other in terms of view and wind velocity. “The risk of love is loss,” says Rachel, evoking her late mother’s words at one point. You can bet her mother was a heartbroken fan of Notting Hill and When Harry Met Sally, who just couldn’t handle the demise of the feel-good Hollywood era. I feel that sense of loss every day, and no glorified Tiffany’s advert can change that. Something from Tiffany’s is streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and Instagram