LOVE YOU LIKE CHRISTMAS
An executive gets detoured on her way to a wedding and winds up in a Christmas-loving town.
Maddie Duncan (Bonnie Somerville), the protagonist of Love You Like Christmas, is a marketing executive living in New York City. I know this because the movie told me this, which is more than I can say about the last movie I reviewed. She's super busy all the time and blah, blah, blah, you know the rest. In early December, Maddie gets invited to a client's wedding, but the invitation was short notice and she hates to fly and so she uses her late aunt's vintage Ford Mustang to drive from Manhattan to Colorado, but her car breaks down outside of... Christmas Valley, Ohio... and she ends up stranded in this quaint little town full of folks who are just obsessed with the most wonderful time of the year.
All Maddie wants to do is get the hell out and make it to Colorado in time for this big wedding, but the local mechanic, who spends most of his time on the clock serenading the cockroaches at the auto shop with his mediocre acoustic guitar strumming instead of actually fixing any cars, drags his ass with repairing Maddie's vintage Mustang, and so a one-day delay eventually balloons into a nearly two-week delay, and she ends up missing the wedding entirely. But that's okay, because Maddie spends all of her new-found free time ingratiating herself with the locals, who are all very excited about this Christmas thing and don't know why it hasn't caught on with the masses just yet.
Maddie grows fond of the owner of the boarding house in which she's staying, a charming older woman named Frondie who's pining for her long-term border, a semi-retired traveling salesman named Florian who is so oblivious to Frondie's romantic overtures he may as well be blind and deaf. Another frequent guest of the boarding house is a young lady named Jo Tyler, whose mother died tragically when she was only six years old and now her rugged Christmas Tree farmer father Kevin (Brennan Elliott) is struggling to raise his daughter right and keep his family business afloat, which isn't easy since this guy is a fucking moron.
This MENSA member is planting seedlings outdoors in December. In Ohio. He's supposed to be a third-generation Christmas Tree farmer, and he's planting pine seedlings in December. Nobody plants pine seedlings in December. Ask any professional Christmas Tree farmer, and they'll tell you to transplant seedlings outdoors in April, when the ground is thawing and the flora is beginning to come out of its winter dormancy. If you plant a vulnerable pine seedling outside in December, that little tree has about a ten percent chance of surviving until the spring.
Never mind the fact that he's planting this seedling right next to the old stump of a pine tree that was harvested at least a year prior. That isn't done, either. Professional farmers remove the old stumps and till the soil to ensure the best possible growing conditions for their seedlings. And they don't generally do all this planting with their bare hands, either, unlike this rank amateur. There is specialized equipment used by professional farmers to do this shit, but Kevin has apparently never heard of any of these fancy, big city farming implements, so he just digs holes in the frozen ground with a fucking trowel like a halfwit and plants his vulnerable seedlings next to dead tree stumps with their complicated networks of dead roots still underground, hampering the development of any new trees attempting to grow in the immediate vicinity.
No wonder this dumbshit's farm is on the precipice of bankruptcy. He has no earthly idea what he's doing. This prize winner just cuts down a bunch of trees each year and drives around Ohio trying to pressure random tree lots into selling his wares, which is absolutely not the correct way to try and peddle your Christmas Trees. He's a member of the Christmas Valley community, but this place doesn't have one tree lot within its town limits. Not one. That's insane. Kevin's never approached the mayor and asked to set up shop in town, selling his trees to all the kind people of Christmas Valley?
He dreams of selling his trees state-wide, but he complains that he only has around a hundred full grown trees on his farm, and I have news for you, Kevin: your average Christmas Tree lot in a town like Christmas Valley would require an on-hand stock of around a hundred trees at the very least to be at all profitable. This simpleton will never have enough trees to supply the entire state of Ohio's Christmas Tree needs. Even if he sells his entire stock of trees in one year, that just means he'll be out of business for a decade while the new trees he plants grow large enough to be harvested. So where's this genius's master plan for keeping his family farm open?
Maddie sticks around to help Kevin market his tree farm in order to expand his brand and drum up more sales, but she doesn't even start this campaign until mid-December, when most people have already bought their Christmas Trees. Creating a brand takes months and years, not a handful of days, but of course Maddie's big campaign somehow triumphs, despite all common sense and reason working against her. How does the campaign work, nobody asked? She convinces local businesses in Christmas Valley to sell Kevin's trees by asking them to sell Kevin's trees, something Kevin, by all accounts, should have done himself a long time ago. So the farm is saved!
Kevin was too stupid to, at any point, ask his friends in town if they would like to buy his goddamned Christmas Trees. It took an outsider with a degree in marketing to come up with this brilliant suggestion.
I live literally across the street from a family-owned Christmas Tree farm. They're a cut-and-carry place, where families come during the holiday season to find the perfect tree for their home and cut it down themselves. The place does a lot of work to make families feel welcome when they enter the farm. Complimentary warm apple cider and hayrides out to the farmland where families can make cherished memories and build new traditions picking out that special tree that will stand proudly in their homes throughout the month of December, bringing joy to their faces whenever they gaze upon its ornament-laden branches.
That's what the tree farm across the street sells to its customers. They provide an experience the people who visit will never forget. And in the off-season, they remain open to provide different varieties of trees for landscaping needs. The tree farm has developed several avenues of revenue to keep themselves afloat, and they're doing just fine. But this asshat Kevin probably never even thought of providing a cut-and-carry experience for his customers.
Kevin could transform his farm into a rustic retreat for families to come and find that magical perfect tree that will bring light and warmth and the joy of the Christmas season into their homes, but he can't be bothered because he's too busy planting dying seedlings in the middle of December and wondering why they never survive until the spring. Maybe I shouldn't be looking for accuracy in Christmas Tree farming from a Hallmark Channel original movie, but I've always been a pedantic little shit, and I can't just ignore things like this. There's clearly something wrong with me.
I swear, I could actually feel myself growing stupider as I watched Love You Like Christmas. I could also feel myself growing older, because this movie draaaaaaaags like you wouldn't believe. I felt like it took me four hours to get through this movie. It just kept plodding along, repeating the same boring fucking sequence of events over and over again.
Maddie wakes up at the boarding house and visits the town mechanic, who tells her that it's gonna take a few days to fix her car. Maddie returns to the boarding house to hang out with Florian and Frondie, before visiting her pals at the local diner. Kevin meets Maddie at the diner and invites her out to the farm for a little rural bonding time with Jo, so Maddie leaves the diner without eating her specially prepared egg white omelet. Jo gets ridiculously excited about performing some simple task with her new BFF Maddie, like gathering pine cones or making a wreath. Kevin tries to kiss Maddie, but she tells him she's leaving in a few days and doesn't want to get attached. Then Maddie returns to the boarding house and falls asleep, and the cycle begins again.
This sequence of events happens three times in a row. It's an exercise in madness. I suppose it would be slightly less degrading to sit through this Möbius strip of a movie if the characters or locations were at all endearing or charming, but they're not. None of the characters are at all interesting to follow in Love You Like Christmas. We've got Maddie, who just makes goofy faces and doesn't know at all what she wants out of life. We've got Kevin, who doesn't have any business running a farm of any kind and thinks he's got it all figured out because he never left his home town and is drowning in his family legacy.
Then we've got Jo, who's so overeager and grating that I don't see how Maddie could spend more than thirty seconds in her presence without wondering why the girl's pediatrician hasn't renewed her Ritalin prescription. This little girl thinks walking around and picking up pine cones is the most amazing thing that's ever happened in the history of human civilization. Seriously, it's just too much. Then there's Holly, the owner of the diner she recently inherited from her uncle, who needs to be reminded by Maddie that she should probably hurry up and decorate the diner for the holidays, because she literally couldn't figure that out for herself. But don't forget Roy, a frequent patron of the diner and non-character who does absolutely nothing aside from eavesdrop on private conversations and look like Larry David's stunt double.
Florian and Frondie just exist and smile warmly while other people act around them. Frondie makes green scrambled eggs for breakfast, because she thinks it will be a festive holiday treat for her guests at the boarding house. Have you ever seen scrambled eggs dyed green? They look like snot. A plate of green scrambled eggs looks like a fucking ogre blew his nose at the breakfast table. And that's Frondie's biggest contribution to the plot. And Florian? His biggest claim to fame is that he memorized the "A" volume of an encyclopedia set because he got bored on the road when he was a younger man and read the samples in his suitcase. He knows the definition of the word "aardvark" and I'm supposed to be impressed?
There's also the short-order cook at the diner named Luke, but he's the only cool guy in the story and he doesn't get nearly enough screen time. The whole movie should have been about this swell guy Luke who loves to cook and his daily trials dealing with a town full of mental degenerates who come into his diner asking for egg white omelets without ever eating or paying for them.
Is there really anything more I can say about Love You Like Christmas? Oh, Maddie leaves her high-paying job in Manhattan to get hitched to the incompetent Kevin who will surely lose his farm and all of his belongings within a few years at the very best, and the movie frames this as a good decision. She just puts all her chips on big Kevin and his overly enthusiastic daughter, and I'm supposed to care about this, but I don't. It's a terrible choice, and one she will quickly come to regret, but Hallmark Channel will never make the honest sequel, Divorce You Like Christmas, and that's the real crime.
I'm also pretty sure the town of Christmas Valley was founded by a cult leader, by the way. Every house in Christmas Valley has a framed portrait of the town's founder, Jeremy Christmas, hanging in their dining room. And this portrait depicts the leering face of a bearded madman. People keep talking about the legendary Jeremy Christmas like he walked on water, and I never see any signs of the Christian faith anywhere in this community. So Jeremy Christmas founded a town in the early 20th Century for his cult of Yuletide-obsessed fanatics to live freely and worship their pagan gods in peace somewhere in the wilds of Ohio.
And this is a nitpick, but I really must share it, because it's been driving me crazy. Actress Bonnie Somerville mispronounces the word "pecans". There are two agreed ways to pronounce the word "pecans". The first being "PEE-cans" and the second being "peh-CAWNS". She pronounces the word "PIH-kens", like "Slim Pickens". That's just objectively wrong.
Also, around the mid-point of the movie Maddie attempts to drive out of town and ends up losing a game of chicken with a rogue reindeer loitering in the middle of the road. I say the reindeer was in the middle of the road, but it's abundantly clear that the reindeer was standing in front of a green screen and just keyed in later, because at no point does this animal appear to be a part of its surroundings, just sort of floating on the side of the screen. Take a look for yourself:
That's just poorly realized. They didn't even add a shadow to attempt to ground the reindeer in the shot. Why did they bother at all? Just rewrite the scene and have her slide over a patch of ice or swerve to avoid hitting a stray dog or something. Don't shoehorn in a distracting special effect just because you think you can get away with it, assholes. And this isn't some sort of magical reindeer, or anything like that. Blitzen didn't escape from Santa's clutches and hide out in Christmas Valley, Ohio. It's just a random reindeer that supposedly got away from a local farmer. No magic there.
No magic anywhere in Love You Like Christmas. This movie was an interminable slog, and I almost tapped out this morning because I felt Love You Like Christmas draining my will to live. There's nothing to recommend about this worthless movie. It's a cheap little product that tries to distract from its absolute lack of charm or character with a bunch of garish window dressing. The romantic leads have no chemistry and I never gave a damn about their tepid love affair. So boo. Boo!
Mommy's Dead - You bet your ass, Mommy's dead!
Small Town Salvation - Although is it really salvation when Maddie will come to regret her decision to relocate to Christmas Valley in a year or so when her man's lost the family farm, and she can't return to her marketing career after burning all her bridges in Manhattan by storming out on her employer in the middle of a big money pitch to one of the company's most important clients?
Christmas In July - The producers try to be clever by inserting a series of second-unit pick-up shots filmed in late autumn to hide the fact that the movie itself was filmed in Ontario in the middle of Summer, and there ain't no hiding that. From the extended shots of characters walking on white cotton sheets in the "forest" to cars driving through puddles of soap bubbles in the road, there's no fooling me. Brennan Elliott was sweating through his parka in half of his scenes. It's embarrassing.
VERDICT: JEREMY CHRISTMAS LIVES!
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