Merry Good Enough is, as the title suggests, a perfectly serviceable Christmas movie. It’s not horrible, it’s not great, it’s just good enough. The problem, of course, is that good enough doesn’t exactly mean all that much these days. There is a lot of Christmas content to compare every movie to.
The film, which revolves around Lucy (Ray Levine) and her complicated relationship with her family – starting with her mother, but truly encompassing everyone from her sister to her brother, without forgetting her absent father – is hardly your typical cheerful holiday movie. In that regard, the movie does a great job of going against expectations. There is a lot of reality to Merry Good Enough, even when things go well.
Siblings flighting, and yet deep down, still understanding each other better than most other people ever can, because that’s just the way it is. You’ve just been through too much together. A mother that doesn’t always get what her children want – or even, perhaps, what she wants. A father who has lost sight of what family is, and yet can perhaps re-discover it when his kids need it the most.
Because yes, sometimes we love our family in the good times. And the bad times. And sometimes we hate our family. In the good times, and the bad times.
It doesn’t sound all warm and fuzzy, because it isn’t – but that doesn’t mean Merry Good Enough isn’t worth watching. It might just depend on what exactly you’re looking to get out of your holiday entertainment. There are a lot of movies whose entire point is to make you feel better about the season and to make you want to hug your family. Merry Good Enough isn’t one of those.
However, one thing to be said in the movie’s favor is that it’s not trying to be. Instead, Merry Good Enough is trying to make you think about what it means to be family. Not just that, but about what it means to give up on it and what it takes to go back to the beginning and start anew.
Whether that is enough or not depends, as they say, on the point of view. Merry Good Enough is what it is, a movie about complicated family dynamics that is at its best when it allows the characters to just exist in the same space without trying too hard to send a message.
Especially when the message is: family is complicated, man.
Merry Good Enough is now available on VOD.
