A BRAMBLE HOUSE CHRISTMAS
Believing that his late father was swindled by his nurse in his final days, a man goes undercover to discover the truth.
George Conrad is dead. Once upon a time, he was a loving husband and father, but he mysteriously abandoned his family when his children were still quite young, never providing any explanation and never reaching out to his children for the rest of his life. Now all grown up, Finn (David Haydn-Jones) and Molly (Julia Benson) Conrad have just been notified of their father's passing, and are surprised to learn that he's not only left all of his money, totaling $100,000, to his hospice nurse, but also an all-expenses-paid Christmas vacation to an inn called Bramble House in Oregon, a location that held a special significance in Mr. Conrad's own past.
Finn is taken aback by this revelation, believing this nurse to be a con artist who took advantage of his father on his death bed, convincing a confused and dying old man to leave her all of his money with some made-up sob story, cheating Finn and Molly out of their rightful inheritance. Molly offers Finn a more rational explanation: perhaps George's children were never in the old man's will in the first place, and that the old man was very much in his right mind when he decided who would inherit his money. After all, the guy abandoned his family and never even attempted to contact them again, so maybe he didn't really care about his own kids very much to begin with.
That's a tough pill for any kid to swallow, no matter your age. Why did he leave? A question that can destroy a person, because all it does is raise further questions, questions to which, perhaps, the answers may be too complicated for a child to truly understand. This is a question that has haunted Finn and Molly virtually their entire lives, and now that their father is gone, they may never have their answer. But Finn is determined to find the answer to one question: why did his father leave all of his money with this perfect stranger? So he books a trip to Oregon to meet this nurse, this Willa Fairchild (Autumn Reeser), at Bramble House and find out for himself.
Meanwhile, Willa and her young son Scout have just checked in at Bramble House, and after getting settled and putting her son to bed, Willa just can't help but notice that some of the inn's Christmas decorations are still in their boxes in the foyer, due to an ill-timed leg injury on the part of the proprietor, Mable (Teryl Rothery), which has kept her from getting all of her holiday decorating done in a timely manner. So Willa decides to do her friendly innkeeper a favor by finishing the job, festooning the stairwell banisters with festive garlands and trimming the tree by the reception desk.
Finn arrives after hours while Willa's just finishing up her late-night decorating spree, and he mistakes her for Mable, apologizing for his tardiness. But Willa quickly corrects his error, introducing herself and offering to show the stranger, who booked his reservation under his nom de plume, Finn Knightly, to his room. Finn prepares himself to confront Willa then and there, but her son Scout comes downstairs, asking for a glass of water. So Finn decides that perhaps a better course of action would be to keep his surname a secret for now while he gets to know Willa over the next few days, in order to figure out who she really is. He figures that if he presents himself as a stranger, that he may learn more about her true nature than if he immediately identifies himself as the estranged son of the old man who left her a tidy sum of money, and I suppose he has a point, but you just know this decision is going to come back to bite him on the holiday ham before the story's over.
Coincidentally, Finn is the illustrator of a series of children's books entitled Everyday Sam, and young Scout may be the biggest Everyday Sam fan in the world, his nose always buried in one of the numerous books that detail the adventures of an average kid who finds out that he can be a hero in his own family and community without superpowers or magical gifts. The next morning, he recognizes "Finn Knightly" from the back cover of the latest Everyday Sam adventure he's been reading, and Willa's surprised to learn that they have a minor celebrity in their midst. Finn offers to make one of Scout's dreams comes true, since he's working on the illustrations for the next Everyday Sam book, which is due next Christmas, and he needs a model to stand-in for some character sketches of the eponymous hero of the story.
Spending a little time with Willa and Scout over the day, Finn begins to see that she's certainly not the conniving gold digger he initially believed her to be. And through their conversations, he even learns more about his late father, a man he barely knew in life. So he decides to spend a few more days at Bramble House, ostensibly to keep digging for the truth about Willa, but really because he's enjoying his time with Willa and Scout and doesn't want the fun to end.
The next day, Finn offers to hang out with Scout for a while to give Willa a little alone time at the inn, so he takes the boy to the local diner where Scout dreams up the perfect Christmas present for his mother: a picture book illustrated by Finn with captions written by Scout, detailing his adventures at Bramble House. While Finn works on some sketches with Scout over hot chocolate, he asks the boy if he wants to be an author when he grows up.
At first, Scout doesn't know how to answer the question, and he tells Finn as much since for the past two years, he's been very ill and the people in his life just sort of stopped asking him that question, because of the unspoken concern that he may not survive to adulthood. But after a recent heart operation, Scout's been on the mend and his outlook is very encouraging, indeed, so he answers that yes, he would like to be an author when he grows up. There's actually a moment in this scene where you can spot Finn's heart growing three sizes during Scout's story. Finn's entire demeanor changes and the expression on his face grows so warm you might dare to use the term "radiant". This is the precise moment in the film when all of the pieces come together in Finn's mind, and he falls in love, not only with Willa, but also with this miraculous little boy, as well.
It's also probably the best scene in the film, due almost entirely to David Haydn-Jones's very subtle acting as he listens to Scout's tale. I just completely bought into the emotions of the moment.
Meanwhile, Helping Mable bake cookies for a Christmas Eve party, Willa convinces her stubborn host to stop trying to accomplish everything on her own and just let people help every now and then, since she's been running herself ragged for years trying to make her guests' stay at Bramble House absolutely perfect, and as she's getting older she knows she can't keep up this pace forever. And also, maybe she could take a little time from being the perfect innkeeper to find a little love of her own, since her most frequent guest Ken, whom she's known since they were in high school, has been carrying a torch for her all these years. Mable's noticed this, but she's always been too preoccupied with running Bramble House that she never seemed to find the time to live for herself.
So Mable takes a leap of faith and offers Willa the opportunity to help run Bramble House, allowing Mable a shot to take a step back and follow her own heart while giving Willa a chance to start over with her son, since she's currently between jobs and already seems to be a natural fit around the inn. Willa asks Scout if he'd be okay with relocating to Oregon to begin again at Bramble House, and of course he's okay with this possibility because the kids are always down for whatever in these movies.
Have you ever noticed that? These kids are always the most agreeable little moppets you'll ever find, just completely cool with uprooting their lives and settling down in a strange new town, or with inviting a new guy or gal into the family to take their missing mommy or daddy's place. That ain't how it goes in real life, I can tell you that. Kids are complicated creatures, and they don't always like big changes, or new people coming into their lives who seem to be attempting to take the place of their dead mother or father.
But these movies take place in a fantasy land where even parents who are struggling to make ends meet live in ridiculously spacious houses and they drive nice cars and are never wanting for decent clothes. It's a world where everybody either celebrates Christmas, or just doesn't celebrate Christmas yet, because they haven't had their eyes opened to the true joys of the season by a kindly stranger. This is a world where "the big city" is a cold and uncaring place that tends to stamp out the spirit of Christmas in people, and they can only rediscover that love by getting out of the concrete jungle and mingling with the genuine folks who live in those charming little towns just off the main roads, where people still say "Merry Christmas" and haven't forgotten the values of charity and family. The "Real America", in other words.
Of course this is a very myopic view, and maybe it's not the healthiest way to look at this country. There's nothing more "real" or inherently American about the people who live in small towns as opposed to those who live in bigger cities. Maybe you could argue there's more overt patriotism in these small communities, but all that flag waving bravado tends to feel a bit more like jingoism to me. I've spent plenty of time in small towns, and I know they're not always the most welcoming places to outsiders, especially if those outsiders don't share the same skin color or religious beliefs. It's a difficult thing to face, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.
If anything else, the events of the past few years have shown us that racism and bigotry aren't exactly relics of the past, no matter how badly many of us wish it could be so. There's a deep cultural divide in the United States, with both denizens of small towns and large cities claiming to represent the "Real America", but the truth has always remained somewhere in between. People who have spent their entire lives in Chicago can't imagine living in a flyover country blip on a map like Batesville, Arkansas, some backwards town filled with naïve and unsophisticated rubes. But the people of Batesville see the the folks living in Chicago as out of touch and elitist.
And here's the thing: they're both right, but that's not the whole story.
Different environments begat different life experiences. The folks who live in small towns tend to be unsophisticated, and the citizens of big cities do tend to form unfounded elitist opinions regarding their rural counterparts. The true issue doesn't lie with our differences, but with the way politicians on both sides have emphasized those differences, playing Americans against Americans so that we're too distracted by this almost entirely imagined conflict to see that we're all being screwed over by the people in power. There's much more that unites us in this country than what divides us, but we continually lose sight of that, because it's so much easier to simply believe the worst of our fellow citizens, since they live in a "liberal enclave" big city or some "redneck conservative mecca" of a rural community. Meanwhile, the CEOs, shareholders and lobbyist firms are watching their bottom lines swell obscenely with each passing month, gathering more and more wealth and influence, with no intention of ever letting it go.
We're being taken advantage of, and the truly dispiriting realization is that too many of us don't seem to care, because we only see ourselves as momentarily disadvantaged, that one day our ship will come in and we'll find ourselves right where we belong, playing golf and sharing stock tips with our fellow captains of industry in some elite country club while the rest of those saps outside the gated community grovel for our scraps. That's what the American Dream has taught us, but as the late George Carlin so aptly stated, it's called the "American Dream" because you have to be asleep to believe in it. When we open our eyes, we see the American Nightmare for what it really is, something that has been corrupted and perverted by con artists and snake oil salesmen for so long that we can't remember things being any other way.
Great gains have been made, to be sure, but there's still so much work to be done, and that work can't be done by simply ignoring entirely half of the population of the United States, writing them all off as a lost cause. If we want any kind of true and lasting future for ourselves, we're going to have to eventually put aside our differences and come together for the benefit of all, not some.
Shit. What am I even talking about? I must apologize because I'm not at all sure why I went off on this lengthy tangent. I think maybe I was trying to make a point about these movies, but I seem to have lost it somewhere along the way. Perhaps I might have been triggered by writing about Mable's offer to Willa to work at Bramble House. It reminded me of something in yesterday's review, something that's always bothered me about these movies, in general.
In Christmas In Evergreen, both our protagonists abandon their lives and (in Allie's case, potential) careers in cities to settle down for a simpler, quieter life in idyllic small town America, which is a running theme with Hallmark Channel movies. Very rarely do these tales end with the romantic leads moving to the big city to find their happy ending. It's always the other way around, isn't it? An "authentic" Christmas can never be found in the confines of a city in these stories. If you've never experienced the joys of gazing upon a real Christmas tree, brightly lit and standing by a festively decorated and glowing fireplace on a cold winter's night then you've never known a real Christmas, according to basically every single holiday movie Hallmark has ever made.
Also, no other religions even exist, because there's no room for anybody else's religious beliefs. Who's ever heard of Hanukkah in one of these movies? Nobody, that's who. Not a lot of people of color hanging around, and absolutely no homosexuals or transgendered individuals. I know I've touched on this in earlier reviews, but it does bear repeating. The films made by Hallmark Channel depict a very warm, inviting, non-challenging, family-friendly version of Christmas that appeals to a primarily Caucasian audience.
As I understand it, the annual viewership of the network is up double digits this year, and almost all of that growth falls in the 25-54 white lady demographic, which is hardly surprising. As I said, these films don't challenge their audience at all, and they tend to act as a form of visual comfort food for people who are maybe a little overwhelmed by their daily life and just want to take a short break from all the drama and get a little hit of the Yuletide warm and fuzzies. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, not at all. Hell, that's basically why I started watching these movies in the first place. I know they're simplistic drivel that nobody will ever hail as high art, but they're not trying to be.
These movies are made to entertain their intended audience, and nothing more. They don't have any stated political or social agenda; the producers and writers have just learned through feedback that their audience likes the same basic stories told again and again with slightly different packaging. They're only giving the people what they want. But is that what they need? That's a tricky question.
Imagine a Hallmark Channel original movie that featured two gay male leads, and the story didn't treat them any differently from any of their thousands of other movies with heterosexual romantic protagonists. That movie would no doubt automatically alienate a large portion of the network's regular viewers. They would make a big fuss about choosing to stop watching the channel and pulling their support of the Hallmark brand. They would tell their friends that their beloved safe haven has become a den of sin and they would wonder if anything left in this world is sacred. How could they possibly explain to their impressionable young children the sight of two grown men kissing under the mistletoe in a Hallmark Channel movie?
Yes, some people would tune out, and they wouldn't come back. But others would keep watching. And maybe those people that keep watching will accept that two men loving each other isn't some unnatural act, but that their affection is just as valid as that of a man and a woman falling in love. Maybe it isn't a sin, something to shun or to ignore. Maybe that movie could open a few eyes in rural America. Maybe it would be an excellent first step. We're definitely not there yet, since that movie doesn't currently exist. But we'll get there some day.
Until then, however, plenty of people would argue that the movies produced by Hallmark Channel are beneath their concern, that they teach the wrong lessons to people who are looking for love. Others would counter that these movies are just "fantasies", but isn't a holiday movie that doesn't feature anybody celebrating any other holidays in December, or one that doesn't feature many (if any) people of color in its cast being labeled a "fantasy" problematic? Of course it is. Hallmark Channel is almost ridiculously backwards in many regards. That's not news. I've grappled with this in the past, and I'm obviously still struggling with this, as you can plainly see.
I want more inclusion, and recent developments seem to indicate that this inclusion is coming, but not quickly enough. The problem is Hallmark Channel has no incentive to make big changes in their business practices. Clearly their current model is paying huge dividends for them. In a television climate that is hurting just about every other corporation, the Hallmark brand is still growing, introducing a third channel to their lineup this year, which is a huge deal. So why should they shake things up in an attempt to broaden their audience when the endeavor could backfire, costing them the loyal audience they already have, one that they've carefully built up over many years?
Because Hallmark Channel making a change of such magnitude, showcasing interracial and homosexual romance, would indicate a greater change in our society as a whole, normalizing what far too many people still see as "taboo" subject matter and demonstrating that the world simply isn't the same place it was even ten years ago, that this social upheaval isn't something to be feared, but celebrated. But Hallmark Channel's not going to take that step until they feel they have to do so, and that might not be for some time.
But does that make the movies produced by the channel inherently bad? No, not at all. Let me give you an example of sorts.
1994's Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton, is one of my favorite movies of all time. I know the movie backwards and forwards, and I love it more than most people in my own family. It also features no people of color in any prominent roles. The only non-white actor I even remember off-hand was an organist with no lines played by the late Korla Pandit. Is Ed Wood a bad movie because of this fact? Of course it's not.
In fact, if you take a look at Tim Burton's filmography, how many prominent people of color can you name in all of the films he's directed? There's Billy Dee Williams in Batman, Jim Brown and Pam Grier in Mars Attacks!, Michael Clarke Duncan and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in Planet Of The Apes (even though they were covered in prosthetic makeup), Samuel L. Jackson in Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, and... that's it. Out of sixteen live-action features, six non-white actors have been featured in prominent roles in four of his films, and none of these actors played a lead role. The rest of those casts were so very, very white.
Do you think Tim Burton is inherently racist? I don't buy it. He's just a weird guy who only knows how to make movies from his own perspective as an incredibly white man, and has no reason to step out of his comfort zone. If you want diversity in cinema, that doesn't mean every currently active white director has to change what they're doing, it means the studio system has to include more diverse voices moving forward, giving these up-and-comers a chance to tell stories from their own points of view. More directors of color and more LGBTQ directors is the answer, and as the demographics in the country continue to shift, these voices are going to become more prominent.
This change is happening as we speak, but like every other large-scale change, it happens at an agonizingly slow pace. The movies released by Hallmark Channel aren't the problem, but the executives not hiring more diverse storytellers to bring their unique stories to life on the network is part of the problem, but that won't last forever. I don't think it's shameful to watch and enjoy these movies, and I don't think it makes you a secret racist, either. It's okay to like a movie like A Bramble House Christmas, even if you can't help but notice the lack of people of color in the cast. But it's not okay that A Bramble House Christmas is essentially the only kind of movie that Hallmark Channel is currently producing.
It's very easy for white people to shrug criticisms like this off, just because black person can occasionally be spotted in a supporting role in one of these movies, and that demonstrates that the network is at least trying to be more inclusive, if only in the smallest, least consequential manner possible. I used to be the same way, because I'm a sheltered middle-class white dude, and my perspective has been the dominant one in the United States... forever, basically. I'd watch movies like these and see an all-white cast and interpret that as completely normal, because that's all I really knew. Surely people of any racial or cultural background could relate to these stock characters, right?
That point of view is, I've learned, almost offensively short-sighted. No, most people can't relate to the plight of a pretty young white woman who lives in a massive house in a well-to-do neighborhood, never seeming to struggle to support their children or pay the monthly bills even though they work as a fucking waitress in a small-town diner. That's a fucking fantasy. We don't all have fond memories of the Christmases we spent growing up in some bucolic paradise in Vermont.
Do you know how many people live in fucking Vermont? Just over 600,000, in total. That's the entire state, not just the capital of Montpelier. Do you know how many people live in New York City? Around 8.5 million.
How many more people out there have fond memories of Christmases spent in a shabby apartment, children doubled-up in their beds because there's not enough space for everybody to have their own room? There's no chimney, no fireplace, probably not even a Christmas Tree, because the parents had to buy groceries, instead. Maybe there are only a few wrapped gifts in the apartment, since money was a little tight that year. But those families still came together and celebrated the holidays, and they still found a way to smile a little more, to open their hearts and let in the spirit of Christmas. And despite the hardship, despite lacking all the trimmings of a "perfect Christmas", the people who experienced those memories hold onto them and cherish them just as dearly as the more well-to-do folks living in their suburban sprawl. Their memories are just as valid, their stories just as worthy of being told, their experiences deserving to be shared.
But we don't really get to see those movies on Hallmark Channel. Not yet, anyway.
Oh hell, what have I done? This review is so fucking long, and I've almost completely forgotten that I've even been writing a review in the first place. I've let this shit get out of hand, so I need to take back control, step off my soap box, and finish this damned thing, before I completely disappear up my own ass. So let's just continue, shall we?
Later, Finn tells Willa that he knows about Scout's recent health scare, and she can't help but express her gratitude to the late Mr. Conrad, who left her the $100,000 to pay off the medical bills she accrued over the past two years of Scout's illness, bills that she could never hope to pay on her own. Conrad left Willa the money so that she and Scout could start over, building a better life for themselves, and he paid for their vacation in Bramble House because his fondest Christmas memories were forged in this magical place where he spent his holidays as a child, and he wanted this kind woman and her beloved son to have a chance to build a few special memories of their own at Bramble House.
Finn knows now that he was completely wrong about Willa, this remarkable woman with whom he is hopelessly in love, but he also knows that he's been lying to her about who he truly is all this time, and if he doesn't broach the subject in the proper way, he just might destroy any chance of a future with her. Unfortunately for Finn, his sister Molly has come to Bramble House to have it out with Willa herself, and she's not at all tactful about revealing to Willa the truth behind her visit, and her brother's true identity.
Feeling betrayed, Willa doesn't give Finn a chance to explain himself, packing up her son and declining Mable's offer, checking out of Bramble House and making her way to the airport to return home to Minnesota. Finn explains to Molly that he's fallen in love with Willa, who is not at all the con artist he initially thought she was, telling her the true motivation behind their father leaving the $100,000 to the Willa and Scout, and Molly realizes she's made a perfect ass of herself and has probably just torpedoed her brother's chance at romance. So she offers to help Finn find Willa and Scout, and they hop in her rental car en route to the airport, but they instead find the pair at the town square, since Scout wanted to stop and see the big Christmas Tree one more time before they left town forever.
Finn explains himself to Willa and tells her how much he loves her and Scout and wants them all to be a family, and Willa forgives her handsome beau and they kiss in the shadow of the big Christmas Tree. Willa decides to take Mable up on her offer after all, putting down roots in Bramble-
Wait the town's name is Bramble? I thought Mable's last name was Bramble, and that's why the house was called Bramble House. Bramble's the name of the town? Bramble, Oregon. That just sounds stupid.
Mable also finds the courage to tell her long-time house guest Ken that she wants to go steady, so hooray. A Bramble House Christmas is a well-made movie with some good performances and you've heard all this before. It was a charming little movie and I liked it well enough. I really have nothing else to say, because I've got a migraine and this review has already gone on far too long as it is.
Little White Lies - It's a lie of omission on Finn's part, but it still counts.
And that's it, because Scout's daddy is alive, just not in the picture. He's got better things to do, I guess. Besides, Finn's around, so he can be little Scout's new daddy. Everybody wins.
Here's a little fun fact that has nothing to do with anything: the director of A Bramble House Christmas, Stephen R. Monroe, also directed the remake of 1978's grindhouse classic, I Spit On Your Grave, as well as the SyFy original classics Mongolian Death Worm and Ice Twisters.
Small world.
VERDICT: NICE
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