★★

One Last Christmas. It's like One Last Job in a heist movie – an enterprise embarked on with the best of intentions, but bound to go badly.

Love the Coopers, from director Jessie Nelson (Stepmom, The Story Of Us) and screenwriter Steven Rogers, is a comedy about a dysfunctional family with a strong Yuletide commitment and a few emotional issues to deal with.

Diane Keaton is the matriarch Charlotte, a Christmas enforcer who visits old people's homes to sing carols to less-than-enthusiastic residents and insists on a family get-together in which tensions are papered over.

Her sister, Emma (Marisa Tomei), resents her; her daughter, Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) anticipates her disapproval at every turn. She and her husband, Sam (John Goodman), are planning to separate: all Charlotte wants is One Last Christmas before they announce their split.

The lead-up to the family dinner rolls out slowly. Rogers and Nelson set up scene after scene between couples, awkwardly dealing with rejection, discomfort, missteps of various kinds.

Eleanor strikes up a conversation with an earnest soldier (Jake Lacy) at the airport, and decides that he might work as a fake boyfriend to take to Christmas dinner, to deflect her mother's disappointment in her. Their scenes feel like they belong to a separate film, a banter-heavy rom-com about opposites attracting.

Otherwise, it feels as if Love the Coopers is treading on the toes of those Garry Marshall films – New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, the forthcoming Mother's Day – that interweave stories and surprises during the course of a day with a burden of expectations. The focus is narrower, however, because the Coopers occupy most of the narrative.

The film seems to be mounting a Christmas critique, with images of multiple Santas on every street corner, production lines of gingerbread men and serried ranks of fir trees. But it's also keen to bring us stories of reconciliation and reconnection that have a painfully familiar ring yet don't seem all that convincing.