Today's Feature: A Christmas To Remember
A TV personality crashes in a blizzard, and when she awakens, she has compete amnesia.
Does anybody remember the 1987 movie Overboard, that delightful romantic romp starring Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn? If you don't remember the movie, the plot follows a dickhead lower-middle class carpenter played by Russell who runs afoul of a mean rich lady played by Hawn while renovating her yacht's walk-in closet. After falling overboard (heh, heh) later that night, she gets fished out of the water by a garbage scow and discovers she has severe retrograde amnesia. Russell sees her story on the news and steps forward, claiming to be her husband. He then takes this stranger to his home and basically makes her his own personal slave, forcing her to cook and clean and care for him and his awful sons, insisting that she loves to work herself half to death every single day to take care of her beloved family.
Sure, the two eventually do fall in love, and even though she gets her memory back in time she still chooses ultimately to stay with her new family, forsaking her old life of empty decadence, but that doesn't make the premise any less fucked up. I must have watched this movie thirty times when I was a kid, and I loved it. I thought Overboard was hilarious, and I couldn't get enough of this ridiculous comedy. But then I watched it again maybe ten years ago, and I was horrified. It doesn't matter that Goldie Hawn's character is supposedly such a heinous bitch when she;s introduced, because she doesn't deserve to be dragged through a gauntlet of misery and toil by Kurt Russell's smug, vindictive carpenter. That she ultimately decides she loves this creep and his revolting spawn and doesn't want to leave them isn't a happy ending; it's Stockholm Syndrome.
The movie is presented as some sort of harmless lark, a delightful romantic comedy that one shouldn't take so seriously, but the plot is truly troubling, and I found I could no longer enjoy this movie that I loved so much as a child because I couldn't get past the film's condoning of Russell's abusive behavior. He should be in jail by the end of the movie, not planning a happily-ever-after with his brainwashed lady love. There should be no reward for taking such dreadful advantage of another human being.
Thankfully, Overboard has almost nothing to do with today's movie, A Christmas To Remember. To start with, Mira Sorvino's character, Jennifer Wade, isn't really like Goldie Hawn's Joanna Slayton. She's the host of a popular cooking show on a fictional cooking network, and a nice enough lady, but she's been something of a workaholic since her mother died several years back, and her best friend and agent Paula demands she take a break for the Christmas holiday, booking her pal at an exclusive resort spa in Colorado to help Jennifer unwind for a change. Arriving in snowy Colorado, Jennifer gets lost on a mountain road and drives her rental car into a snowbank, bumping her head in the process.
Driving home after making a house call to help birth a farmer's foal, veterinarian John Blake (Cameron Mathison) finds Jennifer standing in the middle of the otherwise deserted road, dazed and very confused. The blizzard prevents John from taking Jennifer to the nearest hospital, which is more than sixty miles away, so he takes her to his house and treats her wounds to the best of his ability, letting her sleep in his guest bedroom. Waking up in a strange house with a strange (yet adorable) little dog on her lap, Jennifer finds that she can't recall... well, anything from her past, even her own name. But John and his three kids do everything they can to make Jennifer feel at home in her new surroundings, treating her like a member of their own family.
The town sheriff takes Jennifer's picture and begins circulating it throughout the area, hoping somebody is looking for her and will come forward to identify her, and while everybody waits for her memory to come back, Jennifer, nicknamed Maggie by John's kids, finds herself inexorably drawn to his honest and generous family, falling in love with John, his children, his dog, and with the idyllic life she imagines she could have if she could just stay missing. Jennifer begins to worry that maybe the person she used to be wasn't very nice, and she wonders if regaining her memories is such a good thing, after all. Perhaps it would be better to just be carefree Maggie, living a quiet and contented life with a widowed veterinarian who has fashioned ram horns into doorknobs.
That's a true thing. He has huge-ass ram horns mounted as doorknobs on his house's front doors. Is that a common thing in rural communities? I honestly have no idea if this is typical décor in some parts of the United States, but I suppose I wouldn't be surprised. I see plenty of houses in rural Kansas that have giant fish for mailboxes, which I find tacky and foolish, but hey, it's not my mailbox. If you want to yank your parcels out of a metal bass's gaping mouth every afternoon, be my guest. If you want to twist a ram's horn to open your front door, more power to you. I don't personally see the appeal, but I would never tell you that you couldn't use mounted antlers for a coat rack if you were so inclined.
I'm not okay with the elephant foot umbrella stand thing, however. As soon as you start turning endangered species into home furnishings, you've crossed a serious line and should probably rethink some of your life choices.What kind of diseased soul has such an unquenchable desire to transform an amazing and rare wild animal's foot into a place to hold your inclement weather accessories? That's twisted, man, and I can't condone it. I don't really see the appeal of big game hunting. It feels unseemly to me, like the kind of dude who gets off on blasting holes in a bunch of endangered animals is severely deficient in basic human empathy. It's more of that alpha male bullshit that I just don't have time for. People who think they're hard because they have a barbed wire tattoo on their bicep and wear Affliction t-shirts or whatever. That kind of preening, grandstanding lifestyle just seems exhausting.
Think about the kind of person who is so big into hunting that he starts using pieces of the animals he kills to replace fixtures in his house. The deer's already dead, I might as well turn its hooves into paperweights for the kids and its jawbone into a handle for the wife's hairbrush. A cougar's head is mounted in the bathtub, hot and cold water pouring on demand from its open mouth. Assortments of random bones strung together and suspended from the ceiling over the dining room table in a macabre chandelier. Beaver tail beer koozies for the whole family. A stranger entering this cozy abattoir might feel like they're stepping into Hell itself.
I don't really have much to say about A Christmas To Remember, if you haven't already noticed. The story holds no real surprises, so you already know how it ends. Although I suppose I appreciated that instead of leaving her career as the host of a popular cooking show, Jennifer actually just started filming her show from her new home in rural Colorado. Usually these movies end with the female lead abandoning her career to begin a new, more personally fulfilling life raising somebody else's kids, and it's lovely to see one of these stories actually end with our heroine getting the best of both worlds, so to speak.
I really enjoyed A Christmas To Remember. The story isn't breaking any new ground, but it doesn't need to, because it's all executed so well that the familiarity is part of its charm. From beginning to end, it's a perfectly pleasant and endearing holiday story that even manages to evoke that warm and fuzzy feeling that the best examples of these movies manage so well.Mira Sorvino is excellent in her role, effortlessly charming as a woman who finds herself slipping into unexpected domestic bliss after waking up with a clean slate in somebody else's pajamas. She's such a gifted actress and I really wish she'd accept more roles like this, that just allow her to utilize her natural warmth and charisma without a lot of ridiculous plot contrivances or unnecessary drama.
There's a wonderfully simple scene where she's lying in bed with John's youngest daughter, singing her to sleep with a sweet little song, and her performance is so natural and gentle that it just melts my heart. I said this last year when I watched Finding Mrs. Claus, but I'll say it again because it bears repeating: Mira Sorvino deserves to be a bigger actress. Why didn't she ever become America's Sweetheart? It's a cruel and unjust world in which we live, my friends. The kind of world where backwoods creeps turn perfectly good ram horns into doorknobs simply because they can.
VERDICT: I CAN'T REMEMBER
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