FINDING FATHER CHRISTMAS
A woman searches for her father, whom she's never met, after receiving a clue about his identity.
When Miranda (Erin Krakow) was only nine years old, her stage actress single mother dropped dead in the middle of a rehearsal for a Seattle production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and that's just a real bummer. Not only is your mother dead, which is bad enough, but she died right before Christmas, which is just gonna make the holiday season bittersweet at best for the rest of your life, and her death's association with A Christmas Carol means that any mention of the beloved tale will immediately remind Miranda of her mother's sudden and tragic passing, and that particular story is unfortunately a little hard to avoid around this time of year.
That just sucks.
With no other living family and having never even met her biological father, young Miranda was taken in by a friend of her mother's that the movie oddly never introduces or even names, so I guess she doesn't matter, which seems rather cruel since she only took in an orphaned child and raised her as her own, but whatever.
Since growing up, Miranda has spent every Christmas season throwing herself into her work to keep herself busy, declining every invitation to every festive holiday party and just making herself socially scarce when December 25th rolls around. What, exactly, is her work? I have no idea. Miranda's introduced as an adult leaving her office, but I have no idea what kind of office it is, or what the people who work in that office do. She never brings up whatever her work even is at any point in the movie. She never has a conversation with anybody who asks her what she does for a living. Not once. I'm only just now realizing how bizarre that is.
There's always some sort of conversation between our romantic leads in these movies where they discuss their careers, and that scene sort of happens after she meets future suitor Ian (Niall Matter) in picturesque... shit, I've forgotten the name of the town.
Something Heath, I think. Hampstead Heath? No, that's a world-famous park in London. Heathstone Falls? Charleston Heath? Christ, I can't remember. It's in Vermont, I know that much. Nothing's coming to mind.
Anyway, there is a scene between Miranda and Ian where she asks him about what he does, and he tells her all about his work keeping his family-owned village inn up and running, as well as his swell part-time gig as a lawyer specializing in adoptions, but Miranda never tells Ian what she does, and he never asks. That's really strange. I have no idea what this character does to earn her living, and neither does anybody else in the movie. In the end, after she's fallen in love with Heath Bar, Vermont and her studly beau, Ian, she chooses to stay in this delightful little Norman Rockwell painting of a village, never once wondering aloud about her life and career back in Seattle, so I guess she cares about her job as little as the fellow who wrote her dialogue.
Sorry if I spoiled the ending of the movie for you, but you already knew how it was going to end. You always know how these movies are going to end. The destination is hardly the point when you're dealing with Hallmark Channel original movies, after all.
But getting back to the beginning of our story, Miranda is contacted out of the blue by some old stagehand who was present on the night her mother died, and he recently found an old suitcase in theatre storage that once belonged to her, and he thinks Miranda deserves to have it. She opens the suitcase in the middle of one sleepless night, discovering a few old trinkets, a scarf that still smells of her mother's favorite perfume, and a small manila envelope hidden in the lining of the suitcase like an object in some clichéd spy movie.
Within, she finds an old photograph of a strange kid sitting in the lap of a deranged-looking Santa Claus, and a playbill for a performance of The Tempest in San Francisco that her mother starred in before Miranda was born. She notices the name of the town where the photo was taken stamped on the back, and she decides to travel to Vermont in an attempt to finally find her absent father.
She checks into the local inn, a cozy little place run by a husband and wife duo with the help of their grown son, Ian, and immediately tries tracking down the man in the photograph, the eponymous Father Christmas, falling in love with this idyllic rural community and the generous people she meets along the way. Especially Ian. Eventually Miranda learns that a local stage actor named James Whitcomb, who passed away several years prior, was the man in the photo, and the young boy on his lap was his son Peter, who still lives in town. She finds out that the performance of The Tempest was headlined by her mother and Mr. Whitcomb, and deduces that he must be her father, after all.
Peter has a family of his own, including two delightful children, and Miranda doesn't want to introduce herself as his potential illegitimate half-sister, dashing his memories of his father as a happily married man. She believes that if she tries to share the truth, she'll only end up hurting the Whitcomb family by revealing the late patriarch's infidelity, and can't bring herself to do such a cruel thing, especially at Christmastime.
So Miranda makes plans to leave town before Christmas Eve, much to the chagrin of Ian, who just wants Miranda to stay and take a chance, because she's already told him how much this magical place already feels like home, a real home, something she hasn't had in a very long time. Miranda looks around this community and sees good people, kind people who can be relied upon to help shoulder the load when times get tough. It's the kind of place where the Christmas Spirit lives in the hearts of its citizens all the year, and they don't need to be reminded to be thankful for their many blessings.
Ian doesn't want Miranda to throw away her chance at happiness just because she's afraid she may hurt somebody's feelings, but Miranda wouldn't be able to forgive herself if she became the cause of the Whitcomb family's distress, and that's understandable. She's a caring and kindhearted woman who knows how much James Whitcomb mattered to his family, and she wants to keep their memories of the man intact, even if it costs her perhaps her only chance at true and lasting happiness.
Then Ian's father Andrew has a mild heart attack, forcing him to bow out of the town's annual production of A Christmas Carol, which James Whitcomb founded, portraying Ebenezer Scrooge each year until his untimely death, after which Andrew took over the role. In order to keep the tradition going, Ian steps into his father's shoes, seeing as how he knows the role front to back, being present for his old man's dress rehearsals since he was a teenager. Miranda decides to stay for the performance, being invited to a cast party by Margaret Whitcomb (Wendie Malick), the late James' widow, after the show. Observant Margaret recognizes her husband's features on Miranda right away, and Miranda comes clean at the cast party, telling everyone assembled (including Peter and his family) her real reason for coming to...
You know, this is really bugging me.
The name of the town in this movie was mentioned numerous times, and it adorned several signs that were prominently featured at key points in the narrative. The quaint little inn is named after the fucking town, and I can't remember it. It's driving me crazy. I just Googled Finding Father Christmas, and I can't find the name of this goddamned town. It's like some malign force doesn't want me to remember the name of the town in this movie. I feel like I'm going insane. I swear the word Heath is in the name. Heath something or something Heath.
After Miranda comes clean, expecting Margaret to hate her, she's surprised to learn that Margaret isn't surprised at all to hear this news. She tells Miranda that over thirty years ago, she and her husband James were estranged and on the verge of divorce. James had traveled to San Francisco to play the role of Prospero in a production of The Tempest, with a young ingenue named Eve Chester playing opposite him as Miranda. He fell in love with his co-star, and was even planning on staying permanently with Eve in San Francisco, when Margaret called to inform him that their young son Peter was gravely ill.
Carlton Heath! Hah! I remembered the name of the town! It's Carlton fucking Heath! Carlton Heath, Vermont! Take that, bad memory!
So James rushed home to be with his son, and as the boy convalesced, he realized he wanted to stay and try to save his marriage. He told Margaret about his infidelity, Margaret eventually forgave him, and they stayed together until his death. Neither James nor Margaret ever knew that Eve had had a child, because Eve loved James so much that she knew she could never see him again, because seeing him with his wife would be too painful for her to bear, and she refused to come between James and Margaret again. What a story. That's a lot to take in for the guests at a party under any circumstances.
Surprisingly, Margaret doesn't push Miranda away; she embraces Miranda and lets her know that she is loved, which is highly magnanimous of the woman, considering she's a living, breathing reminder of her husband's one-time betrayal, but Margaret has put the past behind her and has chosen to live for the future, a future that hopefully holds Miranda within it. Peter tells Miranda that he always wanted a sister growing up, and that he wants them to figure out how to be a family together, and Miranda looks at his two children and realizes that she has a niece and a nephew, not only that but an entire family surrounding her, people who love and care for her, and a home she she always wanted in Carlton Heath, Vermont. Not to mention the man of her dreams in the kind and patient Ian.
So I guess things worked out for the best in the end.
That's Finding Father Christmas, and it's a decent movie. We've got great performances across the board, from our leads down to the two little kids who play Peter Whitcomb's son and daughter. Okay, so maybe those two aren't so great, but they're kids, so who cares? And even though this movie was shot in Vancouver in June, the production clearly had a large fake snow budget, because they blanket the entire landscape in enough white stuff to hide just about every trace of summer from the finished product.
The movie looks good, and I was never removed from the narrative by any uncomfortably hot actors or pitiful patches of cotton batting lining the streets of their fictional New England town. The folks who made Finding Father Christmas clearly cared about making their snowbound setting look as realistic as possible, and it shows.
I have to say that the main plot feels incredibly rushed, especially during the climax, which is a bit of a problem. In the last ten minutes of the story, Miranda decides to stay in Carlton Heath for Christmas, takes in the annual performance of A Christmas Carol, attends the after-party, and comes clean to the Whitcomb family regarding her true reasons for coming to town. Peter immediately calls foul, claiming Miranda's just revealed herself to be a spiteful gold digger, out to scam a quick buck from his family, then Margaret reveals that she's known about her late husband's affair all this time and kept it a secret in order to spare her son's feelings.
Then Margaret tells Miranda that she's always welcome in their home and community, and Peter just goes along with it, profusely apologizing and telling Miranda that he's glad he has a new sister. Suddenly we're following Miranda and Ian as they cuddle in a horse-drawn carriage parked on a hilltop overlooking the town. Miranda's decided that she no longer cares about returning to her job (whatever that is) in Seattle, and that staying in Carlton Heath sounds like a wonderful idea. That's a lot of shit happening in a very short amount of time, and it all comes so fast that none of the big moments have enough time to really sink in and the dramatic depth of the climax suffers greatly.
Thinking back, the entire movie just kind of rushes along, never really taking any time to let things settle for a moment before shuffling the viewer along to the next mandated plot point. The movie's still good, but it could have been great. Think about decompressing that final ten minutes of the movie into, perhaps a half-hour or more of screen time. Think about how much more drama, how much more genuine emotion could be plumbed from those story beats if they just had more time to breathe.
Finding Father Christmas feels like an inverse Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge situation. Where that story had no business at all being stretched into two feature-length chapters, Finding Father Christmas feels like it could have easily been adapted into a two-part movie. The whole subplot involving Ian's father's heart attack and Ian stepping up to take on the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in the play could have carried a lot of weight if it had been given a proper amount of time to unfold onscreen. In a two-part movie, that subplot would have acted as the backbone of the second chapter, keeping Ian and his family involved in the story while Miranda got closer and closer to the truth of her parentage.
Miranda's moral dilemma involving the Whitcomb family would have felt much stronger and packed a bigger emotional punch if it hadn't been packed into such a tiny pocket of the overall narrative. Even her burgeoning love affair with Ian would have benefited from more time in the overstuffed movie. Their courtship is still believable despite its compressed nature, but it deserved more time to let the characters get to know each other before they decide they're in love and want to spend the rest of their loves together. A lot of that cutesy relationship stuff that I just take for granted in so many lesser Hallmark Channel movies is shockingly nowhere to be found here, which is problematic, but not a deal-breaker. I just wished the screenwriter had been able to flesh out everything a little more.
Apparently this movie is actually based not on one book, but two, and the screen adaptation combined both books into one story because the producers felt there wasn't enough romance in the first book to warrant a straight-forward adaptation, beefing up the romantic elements of the story with characters and plot lines from the second book, and perhaps that's why this movie feels so crowded and hurried.
Don't get me wrong, because I still enjoyed my experience watching Finding Father Christmas, but there was so much potential here for something really memorable, and the movie just never realizes that potential. Still a good watch, and still recommended.
Small Town Salvation - Miranda's journey of self-discovery in Carlton Heath is literally my definition of this trope.
VERDICT: NICE
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