Michelle Pfeiffer plays a mom on the edge at Christmas time in the new movie “Oh. What. Fun.” If the sarcastic punctuation wasn’t enough of a tip off, Pfeiffer’s character Claire is not having the best time.

Claire’s grown kids (Felicity Jones, Chloë Grace Moretz, Dominic Sessa ) don’t appreciate her efforts. Her husband (Denis Leary) is supportive without being helpful. And she is operating as a one woman show, managing this precious time with her family and trying to keep it all cozy and happy and fun through constant, thankless labor (cooking, cleaning, wrapping, planning). She even looks fabulous on her many, many (too many?) garbage runs. But after one particularly cruel oversight from her family, she takes off from her suburban prison and doesn’t tell anyone. For once, she’s decided to go do something for herself.

Promising though it may seem, “Oh. What. Fun” is a movie that does very little with its setup and terrific cast (including the likes of Danielle Brooks, Joan Chen, Maude Apatow, Rose Abdoo and Eva Longoria in almost cameo-sized roles) opting instead for the most generic version of itself.

The movie, streaming Wednesday on Prime Video, begins with a kind of “low point” (for a beautiful, well-off, stay-at-home Texas mom, that is) in which she tells some children in a neighboring car at a gas station to be nicer to their exhausted mother in the front seat. “She’ll be dead someday,” she says calmly and seriously. She wishes the mother a Merry Christmas, gives the kids a piercing look and then we get the dreaded freeze-frame/record scratch and a voiceover about being entitled to a little outburst around the holidays and a half-hearted rant about how many holiday movies are about men. Already this movie is making this poor woman apologize.

“They need to make a movie about the true heroes of the holidays: Moms,” Claire says. Sure, yes, preach Claire, even if her exclusions are suspect and her examples need further review. I’m pretty sure “Home Alone” was at least a little bit about the mom, and that “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” doesn’t deserve the vitriol. Alas, noble intentions aside, “Oh. What. Fun.” probably wasn’t what she had in mind.

Director Michael Showalter co-wrote the script with the short story’s author, Chandler Baker and is committed to keeping the proceedings light and breezy (no cancer diagnoses here). But the effect is a movie that seems almost embarrassed to commit to its own silly premise, rushing through everything instead of letting us enjoy this cast. Everyone gets assigned one tidy problem or flaw and no one has any sort of lived-in familial chemistry with one another.

Channing (Jones) is the oldest and is married to Doug (Jason Schwartzman) who really wants her younger sister Taylor (Moretz) to think he’s cool although Taylor, a serial monogamist who always brings a new woman home for the holidays, is just mean to him. Sessa is the youngest: Underemployed and recently dumped. There are two grandchildren too, Channing and Doug’s twins, but they’re nonentities.

Claire wants one thing for Christmas: For her family to have submitted her to a contest to meet her favorite daytime talk show host, Zazzy Tims (Longoria). Of course no one got the hint. But her breaking point really comes when she realizes everyone has gone to an event that she planned without her. No one noticed she wasn’t in one of the cars. And so instead of driving herself to meet them, she decides to drive to Burbank and crash the Zazzy Tims show instead.

Showalter attempts to turn this road trip into a kind of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” journey, even having her share a dingy motel room with Brooks, playing a suspiciously contented delivery driver (a little on the nose for an Amazon movie). But it barely commits to the bit and they soon go their separate ways instead of embarking on a buddy trip.

There must be a kind of director’s jail for such restrained use of a performer like Schwartzman (as Claire’s son-in-law), or using Chen as a one-joke “perfect” neighbor with her all-white and silver Christmas decorations.

In its own way, “Oh. What. Fun.” has also accidentally tapped into the cinematic zeitgeist. This is a year in which on screen mothers aren’t just on the edge – they’re in complete and total freefall. Jennifer Lawrence’s feral barking in “Die My Love,” Rose Byrne’s waking nightmare in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” Jessie Buckley’s primal agony in “Hamnet.” Even Teyana Taylor’s postpartum apathy in “One Battle After Another” could fit.

Lighter versions are welcome too – there’s nothing like comedic release. But if the idea was to make something for the moms, “Oh. What. Fun.” is about as thoughtful as a hastily scribbled card on a piece of printer paper the morning of her birthday. We can all do better.

“Oh. What. Fun.” An Amazon MGM Studios release streaming Dec. 3 is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 106 minutes. Two stars out of four.

2.5/5 stars

Any suspicion that logic would prevail over the cool factor is dispelled in the opening scene, when No 4, the poker-faced Hong Kong assassin played by Ngai, engages his unarmed target in a brutal brawl on a moving tram before finally strangling him. He could have simply started with the strangulation.

The “vendetta” in the film’s English title refers partly to No 4’s traumatic childhood, during which he survived a mystery attack that resulted in his mother’s beheading, before being taken in by a secret organisation of assassins. The connection between these events is as straightforward as one might guess.

The first time Googoosh was asked to write a memoir, the request came from Iran’s Islamic Republic interrogators. Their goal was for the pop superstar to relay a “cautionary tale.” This, of course, did not sit right with the beloved diva who was the Olivia Newton-John of Iran’s music world until the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 — and all female performers were banned from singing in public.

“I didn’t want to cooperate with them,” Googoosh tells me as she reflects on the sham memoir the agents tried to get her to write. “I hated to tell my story to them.” Decades after refusing to put her name on a government-sanctioned lie, Iran’s biggest pop star has finally broken her silence. Her new book, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice,” was not a choice, she writes, but a “necessary duty.”

The lyrical story chronicles her life from birth to the present, including Googoosh’s four marriages and moments of joy and despair spent under decades of house arrest while Tehran was rocked by war. It’s shockingly candid, revealing multiple abortions, drug abuse (including her own) and chilling moments of suicidal ideation. “If people hate me when they read it, it’s OK. That was my life,” Googoosh says. She asserts she didn’t want to write something just to be pleasant. She also considers her home country tenderly, and in her book notes, “Iran is part of my being. You can take Googoosh out of Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of Googoosh.”

Faegheh “Googoosh” Atashin was born in 1950 in Tehran to parents who were Azerbaijani Iranians. Googoosh wasn’t even potty-trained when she began performing as a toddler at cabarets as orchestrated by her showman father. She was mostly self-taught, imitating other famous singers. Soon she was in films and by the ’70s she was Iran’s most famous pop export, performing on international stages alongside Ray Charles and Tina Turner. Her infectious vocals, whether upbeat disco bops or heartwrenching ballads, became imprinted on the national consciousness. Ultimately her career was cut short. She writes: “The revolution swept across my homeland like a raging storm, unraveling the delicate fabric of a world once interwoven with tradition, modernity, and poetry. Almost overnight, the shimmering parties, the premieres of daring boundary-pushing films, and the intoxicating rhythm of music and freedom were replaced by fear, uncertainty, and darkness.”

On a recent fall afternoon, I met with Googoosh and her co-writer, Tara Dehlavi, on Zoom. Googoosh appears as chic as ever with her signature honey-gold hair slicked to the side and impeccable Covergirl-worthy shimmery makeup that makes the 75-year-old look decades younger. Googoosh mentions many famous writers over the years have reached out wanting to work with her on a memoir, but Dehlavi is not a known writer; she’s instead a soft-spoken 39-year-old former clinical psychologist whose exile from Iran has placed her in France most of her life.

“I said let’s write it in English,” Dehlavi tells me. She adds the reason she wanted Googoosh to write her memoir was that so much of it was untold, including how at age 50 she made a miraculous comeback. “I proposed, let’s please share your story with the world … and future generations. Because there have been many documentaries made about you but nothing from you yourself,” Dehlavi says.

(Brian Bowen Smith/Simon & Schuster)

Googoosh places full responsibility for the memoir’s existence on Dehlavi. “With Tara, I opened my heart,” she says. “I was free to talk about myself.”

Since settling in the West in 2000 — first Canada, then Los Angeles where she still resides — Googoosh has enjoyed multiple tours, including performances at the Hollywood Bowl, Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House. Her fame is as solid as ever, thanks to a loyal diaspora full of fans old and new. Last spring, not only did she star in Ed Sheeran’s music video “Azizam” (she appears in the final seconds, where Sheeran is launched from the endless festivities of his Persiophile fever dream back into the recording studio. There, Googoosh tells him in Persian, ‘Azizam, let’s go write a hit song, hurry up!’), the song was released a week later with her vocals for a Persian version. Like everything she touches, it was a huge hit.

Googoosh admits her star has not yet dimmed, not even in her 70s. “For 21 years they closed the bottle, and all of a sudden, the bottle is opened and [out] I popped!” Googoosh says with her signature smile as one of her beloved Pomeranians pops up on her lap.

It turns out Dehlavi was the perfect person to have asked her to chronicle her life — and perhaps the only one who could have gotten that eventual yes. “Actually her mom is my very best friend from when she was 13 years old,” Googoosh says. “They are a part of my family.”

Dehlavi did not expect to be a key part of the team, a project that would essentially encompass the whole of her 30s, but it’s clear this would not have gotten done without her. “There were times where I jokingly felt I was worse than the interrogators in Evin [Prison],” she says. “But I just wanted to be the project manager on this. … I just got scared if we found a ghostwriter, her voice would get lost in translation and so I got more and more protective of that voice. I was just like a bodyguard — I can’t just let anyone take Googoosh’s voice as the narrator.”

As a protector of Googoosh’s story, she recalls double-checking if the star really wanted to share some more revealing anecdotes. “She was like, ‘We’re either going to write this memoir or we’re not,’” Dehlavi says. “Just like in her art, where she goes all in, and feels the lyrics, the words, the music, it was the same with this book. She was like — I either speak or I stay quiet and I don’t write this.”

In their decade of drafting, Dehlavi and Googoosh wrote two other versions of the book until they got to this one — the version that finally felt right.

Googoosh admits her star has not yet dimmed, not even in her 70s.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

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The result is a memoir that is poignant without being distractingly ornate. Chronological chapters are interspersed with glimpses into Googoosh’s horrific time incarcerated in an Islamic Revolutionary Court makeshift prison, where she was among detainees who at times looked to her legacy, and songs, for light amongst the turmoil. The book operates in a similar way as we journey to what we know is a happy ending — Googoosh getting her voice back to not just sing again but to tell us this long-awaited story.

“I was thinking my story was not important for people, especially for foreigners,” Googoosh shares with me. “But I was wrong.”

One of the most moving parts of the book is how it ends, with the specter of a protest slogan linked with Iranian women’s rights activism, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” alluded to, adding to the noble grandeur and potent ambition you somehow sense throughout the project. Dehlavi agrees. “I think both Googoosh and I through her story and through her memories knew that inevitably it would shine light on the struggle of women in Iran,” she says.

In the final pages, Googoosh notes that women in Iran are currently not allowed to record music or sing solo in front of a male audience. She writes with the same aching longing you hear in her ballads, the acknowledgement of pain, but the steadfast belief in something bigger and better — in this case, her “hope that my story can break down the silence that surrounds my people’s plight, especially our women. I pray that very soon, they, too, will have reclaimed their voices.”

Khakpour was born in Iran and raised in Greater Los Angeles. She is the author of five books, including most recently, “Tehrangeles.”