Love the Coopers was tonight’s selection at the ArtHouse Film Festival. It’s a holiday film, and could potentially replace Love, Actually as the modern go-to Christmas movie. It’s a chaotic character stew that works, in its own way.

The film opens with a narrator (Steve Martin), who sets the scene. Charlotte (Diane Keaton) and Sam (John Goodman) have been married for 40 years. As usual, they are hosting dinner on Christmas Eve and all the family’s coming. What the rest of the family doesn’t know is that they are getting a divorce, but don’t want to ruin Christmas for everyone else, so they’ve put on their brave faces and will pretend nothing’s wrong. Their son, Hank (Ed Helms), is divorced, and living locally, and they pick up his youngest, while he goes on a job interview and his two sons do some last minute shopping. Meanwhile, their daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) hangs out at the airport, wasting many hours until dinner, so she doesn’t receive the annual look of pity from her parents. She bumps into Joe (Jake Lacy) at an airport bar. He’s stuck at the airport because all flights are grounded.

Furthermore, though I’m probably rearranging the sequence of events, Sam’s father Bucky (Alan Arkin) visits the diner he goes to regularly, because his favorite waitress Ruby (Amanda Seyfried) is there. She informs him that she’s moving away to start a new life, and they argue. Charlotte’s sister, Emma (Marisa Tomei) is arrested for shoplifting at the mall that Hank’s two sons are at. Charlie (Timothée Chalamet) and Bo (Maxwell Simkins) are oblivious to Emma’s plight because Charlie is fawning all over Kendra (Michelle Veintimilla) who works at the mall, and Bo is looking for that “perfect gift” for his brother. Oh, Sam and Charlotte have a large, sweet dog, and they’ve brought home Aunt Fishy (June Squibb) for dinner, too. The narrator fills in missing details throughout.

Got all that? Good, because every one of them has their part to play in this movie. There are some brief flashes of previous events that are touched upon, much like in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (predating Family Guy and Dream On by decades), but are not comedic. Some of the film is comical, some of it sad, and some bits rely on standard holiday tropes, which, for the most part, are not as stale as one would expect. Other tropes play out to their unavoidable and predictable conclusion. Diane Keaton and Marisa Tomei do not really seem like sisters, separately, but together, they do mesh well and you get ‘it’. The ending does seem a bit drawn out, but it does come together in the end.

That said, I still liked this movie. If you’re looking for holiday schmaltz, this is it.