Today's Feature: My Christmas Dream
A department store manager has to choose between her dreams and her heart.
Danica McKellar has returned this holiday season with a brand-new Hallmark Channel original movie, and guess what? It's not as bad as last year's offering! Not to say that Crown For Christmas was necessarily a bad movie, because it wasn't, not really. Just unengaging. Luckily, My Christmas Dream doesn't have that problem.
In My Christmas Dream, Danica McKellar plays Christina, the ambitious manager of McDougal's Department Store, a nationally recognized brand that has plans to go international in the new year with a state-of-the-art new store in Paris, France. Christina is angling for the open managerial position at the new store, because living in Paris has been her fondest dream for as long as she can remember, but her entire future depends upon impressing the company's owner, Victoria McDougal (Deidre Hall) with the store's annual Christmas display, a beloved tradition celebrating its 25th anniversary. Unfortunately, Christina's hit a creative wall with just a few weeks to go before the big unveiling, and has no display to... well, display.
She's also struggling with feelings of guilt after firing a freelance painter named Kurt (David Haydn-Jones) who fell behind on a deadline, after learning that he had an adorable young son named Cooper whose only Christmas wish this year is for Santa to make his daddy happy again since he's been so down and out on account of mommy moving to Australia a little over a year ago for reasons that are never explained. At least she isn't fucking dead, so I'm going to count my blessings. In fact, little Cooper is so determined to give Santa his urgent message that he takes a city bus all the way to McDougal's in the middle of the day just to deliver it in person to the store's resident Kris Kringle, and softy Christina decides to drive the boy home to his old man before an Amber Alert is issued.
Christina and Cooper become very fast friends, and after Christina's car battery dies in Kurt's driveway, he offers to give her a jump, heh, heh. With his jumper cables. Not his penis. This isn't that kind of movie. Although based on the way Kurt looks at Christina throughout the movie, I'm pretty sure he would prefer it to be that kind of movie. While searching for the jumper cables in his garage/workshop, Christina notices all of Kurt's lovely paintings and wonders why he hasn't tried to find a gallery to exhibit his work, but he just shrugs her suggestion off, insisting that it's just a personal hobby and not worthy of public consumption. But this gives Christina a brilliant idea that might save both their butts this holiday season, and she offers Kurt a new temporary position at McDougal's to use his creative flair to help her bring the all-important Christmas display to life before it's too late.
There's a whole lot of activity as Christina and Kurt put their heads together to come up with a theme that will really knock Victoria McDougal's designer socks off, and that's hard to do, because she wears suspenders to hold her socks up, so those socks are pretty secure. Victoria uses suspenders because she doesn't believe in elastic. I don't know if the lady had a bad experience with elastic in the past, but she just refuses to put her faith in the stuff. She still sells all sorts of products that feature elastic in her stores, but she personally despises the stuff. I do applaud her ability to look past her personal bias when business is involved, because if she refused to stock products that featured elastic in her popular department stores, that would seriously affect her bottom line.
That's a pretty weird prejudice to have, isn't it? Who hates elastic? That's one of those weird hangups that only the rich could ever afford. Do you think folks living paycheck to paycheck give two shits about elastic? I assure you that is not on their list of priorities. Most people probably aren't even aware that you can actually purchase little suspenders that you can strap across your calves to hold your lazy fucking socks up in this modern age. That's such a ridiculous extravagance. I'd wager that fascist clown Donald Trump has suspenders for his limp socks. You know he can't keep it up on his own without a little assistance.
People like that have no idea with a "common man" even is. These goons are so disconnected with the reality of the common man, they don't even know how to operate a gasoline pump. That's not a joke, by the way. Their lives are so alien from ours that all of these boring little things we just have to deal with are completely unknown to them. They look at us and see nothing more than rabble, and they despise us. Don't think for a second that one of these wrinkled sharks gives a damn about you or your family, because we're nothing but pawns to them. You can't ever win their game, because they're constantly changing the rules to keep us in our proper places, and the sad part is most of us are perfectly content with this situation.
Too many people look at themselves in their current state, struggling to make ends meet, and they keep telling themselves that they'll be just like those folks on the hill one day. They're not poor; they're just the rich interrupted. But you'll never join them on the hill. They don't want you there. They prefer you right where you are. These reptiles don't understand how the world beyond their gilded walls works, and they don't care. They don't understand how a husband and wife working their fingers to the bone for minimum wage to provide for their children could possibly need welfare to keep from starving. They think those people are lazy and entitled because they have the temerity to ask for a little help from good old Uncle Same when they have nowhere else to turn to. If you really wanted to take better care of your family, you'd just find a third job.
They place their empty heads on expensive therapeutic pillows hand-sewn by starving children trapped in literal dead-end jobs in third world sweatshops and sleep like corpses while far too many people are spending their nights resting fitfully on broken-down camp beds in overcrowded shelters, worried about whether or not they'll be forced to spend their next night outside in the freezing cold streets, with nothing but broken concrete and old newspapers for a bed. Millions of people in this country are struggling just to get through each day, and these creatures think that they've already been too generous, that we've grown fat and careless under their benevolent eye, and that perhaps they should take a little more away from us, to help build character. Maybe another war is in order, something good and long to help thin the herd, another great enemy to serve as a fitting distraction from our real problems. After all, they have to give the masses another scapegoat to despise, otherwise we might actually turn our attention to the real enemy, and they wouldn't want that.
Suspenders for their socks. Christ.
Christina and Kurt grow closer while they work such long hours putting everything together for the big unveiling, but Christina doesn't want to get too attached, because her Christmas dream (hey, I just got the title!) is to thrill mean old Victoria McDougal with her kick-ass store display and land that big job in Paris, so she keeps kissy-face Kurt at arm's length, but it's just so hard because she has a thing for guys with abnormally large foreheads. She even begins to finally see Christmas as something more than "the busy season" at work as she spends more time with Kurt and little Cooper while they prepare for the holidays. But falling in love was not a part of her plan, and it's damned inconvenient, so Christina tries her best to keep things professional between them.
Of course, she fails at that, because this is a Hallmark Channel original movie, so she was doomed to love the affable artist from the very beginning. There's just no cheating fate in these movies. That's why people watch them. This is what they want. Who wants to cuddle up on the sofa and tune in to their favorite television channel owned by a fucking greeting card company and watch a movie that doesn't end with the leads getting together in the end? Well, me, but I'm an aberration, and I understand the formula, so it doesn't bother me. I wonder when the network will develop the intestinal fortitude to write one of these movies featuring a gay/lesbian couple. Probably not for a very long time, but a boy can dream.
What was I talking about? Oh hell, you know what happens. Christina and Kurt shock the world with the single greatest Christmas-themed department store display in the history of the world, Christina gets her dream job, realizes she's fallen for Mr. Painter Man and that her real Christmas dream was jumping this rugged artist's bones under the mistletoe all along, so she convinces Victoria McDougal to give her some cushy corporate promotion with a corner office in town so she won't have to relocate, and she spends a very merry Christmas with her lovely new family as they all hug each other and laugh awkwardly until the picture fades to black.
My Christmas Dream follows that standard, overly-familiar formula very, very closely, with absolutely no plot surprises, but it works. It works a whole lot better than Crown For Christmas, but why? Why is My Christmas Dream so different? I even acknowledged in my review for that film last year that the cast and crew all performed admirably, and yet I failed to connect with the material. So why did I connect with My Christmas Dream?
It's a funny thing, but I believe that this movie simply feels more legitimate than Crown For Christmas, where I detected a cynical bent to the proceedings, as if everyone were merely going through the motions to churn out a product. My Christmas Dream never felt cynical or forced, and I was able to suspend my disbelief and just enjoy the familiar story. Danica McKellar's performance certainly helped, especially her rapport with Christian Convery, the young actor who played Cooper. Every moment between these two characters felt completely authentic, which is an absolute rarity in movies like these.
Children in these stories tend to come across as stiff and unconvincing, demonstrating a complete lack of chemistry with the adult actors, who tend to use the kids more as props than as performers. But that's thankfully not the case with My Christmas Dream, because Christian Convery is a charming young man who has a believably playful relationship with David Haydn-Jones (who plays his father, Kurt), and forges an especially sweet connection with Danica McKellar, which makes perfect sense in retrospect because McKellar has a son of her own who is around the same age as Convery.
Every interaction between these two actors just feels genuine, because McKellar is channeling her own maternal instincts through her character, never talking down to Convery, kneeling down to meet his eyeline when she speaks to him, a natural warmth and affection in her tone while she delivers her dialogue. There's a scene late in the movie after Christina's been awarded her dream job and has to try and explain to a distraught Cooper why she's going to be living in Paris and they won't be able to see each other again that is just devastating, because both actors in the moment are completely believable in their roles, Christina in her grief that she has to tell this boy she loves that she's going away and Cooper in his pain and confusion that the woman who claimed to care about him and his father can choose to just leave them both so abruptly. This scene is just genuinely great, performance-wise, and it knocked me out. At the end of the scene, when Christina hugged Cooper so tightly because she didn't want the boy to see her cry, I was completely swept up in this poignant moment.
I'm not saying this scene was good for a Hallmark Channel original movie; it was just genuinely good, and even if the rest of the movie were just mediocre, I'd give it a pass based on that scene alone. Fortunately, the rest of the movie is good, too. Maybe not as good, but still a deeply charming little holiday romance that I enjoyed very much. It's a shame that Hallmark doesn't usually truck in sequels, because this is one movie I'd love to see them follow-up on in a year or two. It would be nice to see how this new family is getting on a little further down the line.
VERDICT: DREAMY
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