Today's Feature: Christmas Under Wraps
After unexpectedly moving to Alaska, an ambitious doctor starts a new romance and learns that her small town is hiding a holiday secret.
Here we are, at last. We've finally reached the halfway point of our festive feature with this, the thirteenth review. Thirteen days since I began this misadventure. It only feels like thirty. Eh, who am I kidding? It's not that bad. Sure, half of the movies I've watched so far have been varying degrees of terrible, which is a worse average than last year's feature up to this point, but yesterday's experience was one of my best since I started doing this crap two years ago, so I'm on something of a personal high. I wonder, though, if we can keep this up with today's movie, a Hallmark Channel original movie from 2014 starring a certain Candace Cameron-Bure...
Christmas Under Wraps was produced and directed by Peter Sullivan, the producer (and sometimes writer) of the inexplicably popular The Dog Who Saved... series of direct-to-video family films. This series began with 2009's The Dog Who Saved Christmas, a garbage movie about a dog whose inner monologue is provided by Mario Lopez that gets in a series of wacky holiday adventures a la Home Alone. For some reason that is beyond me, this movie proved to be a financial success, spawning a series of five sequels and counting, all involving the same dog and his clueless family as they blunder through a series of holidays to the enjoyment of apparently nobody, since I've never met anybody who has actually seen any of these damned movies, but somebody has to be watching them, because they just keep getting made.
None of that really has anything to do with Christmas Under Wraps, but I just wanted to share a little of my frustration regarding the existence of this series of micro-budget talking dog pictures with you, Dear Imaginary Reader. Peter Sullivan also produced and co-wrote last year's I'm Not Ready For Christmas, a movie that, you might recall, I despised with a blinding fury. But I won't hold that against the guy, because life's too short. Sometimes it just feels so very long.
Christmas Under Wraps features Candace Cameron-Bure as Lauren Brunell, an enthusiastic young doctor in San Francisco with big plans for her future that involve becoming a big-shot surgeon in Boston, and not moving to a nowhere town in the middle of Alaska to mend broken bones as a general practitioner, but hey, life doesn't always give us what we want. Now exactly how Lauren ends up in scenic Garland, Alaska is one heck of a story, I assure you, and now I'm going to tell you that story in excruciating detail.
Just before Christmas, Lauren's boyfriend choose to terminate their partnership, not because he's a raging douche whistle, but rather because he feels that their relationship is stuck in a rut, and that neither of them have been able to admit that they're unhappy with the way things are going. He sees Lauren as a very singularly determined young woman who already has their entire future as a couple planned out for them, with no room for the spontaneity that an intimate relationship needs to flourish. He wishes he were the man who could bring out those qualities in Lauren, but recognizes that he's not, so he ends the relationship to give them both a chance to find their well-deserved happy endings, which is a very sober and grown-up way to handle a situation like this, and I applaud the movie for actually having the guts to go in that direction. Even yesterday's Holiday Road Trip just had to cast ex-boyfriend Davis as a rippling bag of assholes, but with Kip Pardue playing the character, there was really no other option.
After finding herself bereft of the tender touch of an amorous young man for the holidays, Lauren eagerly awaits the verdict on whether or not she's been accepted for a surgery fellowship at a prestigious Boston hospital, but unfortunately the cards are not in her favor, and she's rejected in favor of some other candidate. Probably some under-qualified bro who only got the job because he went to college with one of the members of the fellowship board. So typical. But when Satan closes a door, he smashes open a window, and Lauren is quickly offered the position of town doctor at a small clinic in Garland, an isolated little village that she's never heard of all the way up in Alaska, which is, like, the coldest state in the union.
Lauren almost automatically rejects the proposal, but her ex-boyfriend's accusations of lacking spontaneity echo through her mind, and she decides to just the bite the bullet and say yes, beginning a heartwarming adventure that will open her eyes to the wonders of small-town America, the joys of being a part of a close-knit community, and perhaps even a chance at the love of a lifetime with the town handyman, who may or not also be the son of Santa Claus.
Yeah, Christmas Under Wraps is a "secret Santa" movie. That's the big holiday secret mentioned in the log line. Brian Doyle-Murray plays Frank Holliday, the suspiciously jolly head of Holliday Shipping, a company that... ships things... like toys... and stuff... all around the world... at Christmas... and he has a reindeer named Rudy... and maybe some elves working in his factory... yeah. He's pressuring his ex-architect son Andy (David O'Donnell) to take a larger role in the family business, whatever that is, but Andy prefers just being the town handyman, which is what he actually calls himself, because he wants to keep his options open, but as soon as Lauren blows into town on the wings of destiny, Andy sees perhaps a new destiny for himself as Mr. Dr. Brunell.
At first, Lauren has a hard time adjusting to small-town living, but after a few days (the movie takes place over maybe three weeks, so the timeline is a little accelerated), she easily falls into the rhythms of life in Garland, warming up to the friendly denizens who warmly greet her with a hearty "good morning" each day as she walks to work, and she finds that she's busier and more satisfied treating the aches and pains of these fine folks each day than she ever was during her surgical rotations back in San Francisco. And because the gods of Christmas demand it, she falls head over heels in love with Ol' Andy Holliday, the son of Santa Claus. Maybe. He's maybe the son of Santa Claus. He could just be the son of an old man who is merely overly fond of Christmas, and looks exactly like Santa Claus. But who knows?
This movie is a cocktease, is what I'm implying. The narrative is so embarrassingly coy about the whole "is he or isn't he Santa" thing that I honestly found it all somewhat tiring by the time the question was answered. He is Santa Claus, by the by, because of course he's fucking Santa Claus. But that's fine, really. The whole Santa mystery isn't exactly the main driving plot, so I can look beyond that, because the rest of the movie is actually pretty good. It's really just the 10,000th variation of the "big city girl falls in love with the charms of small-town America" theme to which the vast majority of these movies adhere, but that's cool when it's done well, and Christmas Under Wraps is well-executed.
Once again, Candace Cameron-Bure proves that she's seemingly manufactured for this type of entertainment, playing her very familiar role with aplomb, and of course Brian Doyle-Murray is quite good in his supporting performance as the sprightly Mr. Holliday, bringing the perfect balance of humor and humanity to a role that could have easily slipped into a garish caricature of Father Christmas with a lesser actor in the position. And David O'Donnell is a respectable romantic foil for Candace Cameron-Bure, turning in an understated performance that may not be award-worthy, but it's serviceable, and that's all I ever ask for with these damned movies. I'm not expecting brilliance. I'll gladly settle for "good enough".
That's pretty much all I have to say about Christmas Under Wraps. It was a decent little romance, and that's really all I was looking for. The winning streak continues, Candace Cameron-Bure. But one of these days, you're gonna slip up, and when you do, I'll be there. Oh yes, I'll be there. You just wait and see.
VERDICT: NICE
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