Breakup Season

Grade: B-

The worst thing that happens in Breakup Season is a breakup, yet everything is treated with the utmost level of weight and stakes. You’d think it was a war or medical disaster movie. But nope. Somebody who has been with someone else for less than a year has decided “no thank you.” That’s all. As I’ve been with the same woman since 2001 (age 20), I’ve never experienced a real relationship split-up in my adult life. Maybe from an emotional standpoint, Breakup Season gets it just right.

The plot involves Ben (Chandler Riggs from The Walking Dead) and his girlfriend Cassie (Samantha Isler from Molly’s Game and Captain Fantastic). It’s a few days before Christmas. A quick shot of a movie theater marquee advertising The Menu, Devotion, and Violent Night puts it in 2022. Ben is bringing Cassie to his home in Oregon to meet his family.

They include his parents, Mia (Brook Hogan) and Kirby (James Urbaniak from Oppenheimer and The Fabelmans), who bounced back and forth from reminding me of Dick Cavett and Willem Dafoe. Ben has one sibling in front and one in back: 30-year-old Gordon (Jacob Wysocki), who has just moved back home after a painful breakup of his own – and Liz (Carly Stewart), an obsessive Vlogger. Cassie is to be there for a handful of days, through the holiday. On their first evening there, she drops the news to Ben that she wants to be done. She looks into leaving early, but the highway to the airport isn’t drivable, due to the heavy snow. While she looks for flights online, tense frantic music plays like she is diffusing a bomb. Stuck there, Cassie and the family have to navigate this awkward situation.

This is an effective ensemble. Riggs brings a nice Everyman charm to Ben, who sometimes suffers from the common male malady of wanting to fix and solve everything RIGHT NOW, instead of just letting the woman in his life feel the way she feels. My two favorite performances come from Isler and Stewart as Cassie and Liz. They really like each other, and bond. There’s an interesting moment that unfortunately goes unexplored. Liz’s reaction to seeing Gordon’s ex-girlfriend- when they unexpectedly run into each other – is lukewarm to cold. I wanted to know more about why Liz wasn’t crazy about her, yet warmed up to Cassie so much. There’s a through-line about a little train that goes around their Christmas tree, and keeps stopping at the same place. When it finally operates like it should, I was worried the screenplay would tie it to some melodramatic metaphor or payoff, but refreshingly, it’s handled without much fanfare.

Unnecessarily, Ben has a beard in the epilogue scene – to, y’know, signify the passage of time. We could already get that from the full trees and plants, sunflowers, and characters comfortably sitting outside. I was afraid it would settle into an easy ending, with a last split second change of mind – involving a U turn followed by a speech akin to something Michelle Pfeiffer or Meg Ryan would do. To Breakup Season’s credit, it sticks to its guns. What we’re left with is a sweet family dynamic, and a heavy-handed but fairly fine film. It didn’t blow me away, but you could do a lot worse this holiday season.

Grade: B-