Schlock-Mas: Day Ten

CHRISTMAS MAGIC

To get into heaven, a new angel must help a depressed widower save his struggling restaurant.

Lindy Booth is an angel. I mean Lindy Booth is an angel in Christmas Magic. She was a career-minded young woman living in New York City, leading a selfish life without a husband or children, spending all her time earning and burning in the cutthroat world of event planning. Is the world of event planning really so cutthroat? I have no idea, but this movie seems to think it is.

Lindy's character, Carrie Blackford, is engaged in a never-ending game of one-upmanship with her bitter rival, some blonde harpy named Lynette, and she just poached her latest big ticket client from that stiletto-wearing strumpet a few weeks before Christmas, which is an excellent present she can give herself. Sure, you can't really wrap that up and put it under your Christmas Tree, but that's okay, because Carrie doesn't have a Christmas Tree. Because she hates Christmas. So instead she rewarded herself with an expensive new car, which is almost as nice as seeing the look on that bitch Lynette's face when she finds out her latest client has agreed to hire Carrie to plan their big corporate shindig instead.

On her way back home from... somewhere, Carrie stops at a gas station to fuel up. She makes small talk with a kindly old bus driver outside who takes a peculiar interest in this perfect stranger, some would almost say a suspicious interest. She tells the bus driver she's going to call Lynette on the road and rub the good news in her smug face because she just can't wait until she gets home to do it, and the bus driver tells Carrie to drive carefully, so of course she gets into a big accident and dies almost immediately. Greeted by the friendly bus driver once again, Carrie learns that she's no longer among the living and takes the news surprisingly well, all things considered. The bus driver, named Henry, is actually an angel sent from above to guide Carrie on her quest to earn her way past those pearly gates.

Carrie's mission, should she choose to accept it: find a sad sack restaurateur named Scott Walker (not Scott Walker the British musician who rose to fame with his challenging baroque pop albums in the late 1960s. I only wish it were so) and help him turn his life around, both personally and professionally. Scott's been in a slump ever since his beloved wife (Insert Name Here) died on Christmas Eve five years ago, and his restaurant is slowly hemorrhaging money and he's lost his passion for making music, which used to fill his days and nights with joy.

Why do the spouses always have to die around Christmas? It's bad enough that they had to fucking die in the first place, but the writers of these movies always have to twist that knife a little bit deeper by having the spouses die tragically on Christmas Eve, thus ruining the protagonist's love of the holiday, and leaving it to some poorly defined love interest to make them fall in love with Christmas all over again. Why can't they ever just die on some random date in June? Or maybe they can kick the bucket on Arbor Day. Nobody gives two shits about Arbor Day, so nobody would feel obligated to help some mopey dink rekindle their love for planting trees on some arbitrarily selected date in the spring.

Arbor Day Magic just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

Henry sends Carrie back to the world of the living to get started, and she gets to work right away, pretending to be a paying customer at Scott's restaurant and convincing him that she could use her skills as an event planner to help drum up a little more business. She flashes him her winning smile, and Scott just can't bring himself to say no, so he agrees to let Carrie try to save his business. She starts by helping Scott's precocious daughter Billy decorate the restaurant for the holidays, and she has a lot of fun doing this despite her stated distaste for all things Christmas. So maybe Carrie's just a liar.

The movie initially tries to paint her as some kind of selfish shrew of a woman, because she's placed her career first over any potential romance, but she's a pretty decent person from the beginning. She chit chats with Henry the bus driver at the gas station pretty easily despite his being a complete stranger, and is never rude or curt in their conversation. Sure, Carrie's locked in a petty vendetta with this Lynette woman, but as it turns out Lynette is just awful, so who can blame Carrie for wanting to screw Lynette over before Lynette surely screws her over? That's just how business works.

Carrie buried herself in her career because that's what she learned from her father, a distant figure who was always on one business trip or another and never made time to just be her dad, not even on Christmas. He would buy her a bunch of expensive gifts each year, hoping that extravagance would make up for his absence, but it just ended up sending her the wrong message, one she's sadly taken to heart in her adulthood. But she's hardly Ebeneezer Scrooge.

As it turns out, saving Scott's operation isn't terribly difficult; Carrie just convinces him to change up his menu slightly and gets him a gig catering an art gallery premiere. That's all it takes to get business booming at Scott's restaurant, cleverly named "Scott's Restaurant". And her mere presence has miraculously brought him out of the funk he's been drowning in since his wife (Insert Name Here) died, even inspiring him to get back behind the piano to try and finish the song he abandoned after the tragedy. Just to be clear, the song he plays, the song that becomes a major plot point during the film's climax, is a garbage fire. It's one of the worst songs I've ever heard. But Carrie sure seems to love it a whole lot.

She also seems to love Scott a whole lot, which is a bit of a problem, considering she's an angel-in-training and not exactly on the market for a lasting love affair with a still-living middle-aged man. Besides, Carrie is way out of this clown's league. She's a complete knock-out, and this guy is the poster child for "dad bod". For the love of all things sacred, the actor who plays Scott, Paul McGillion, portrayed the father of Rachel Boston's character in Ice Sculpture Christmas, and that was two years ago. He's ten years older than Lindy Booth, and he looks twenty years older, and she's supposed to be into this doughy loser? I guess the heart wants what the heart wants, but she can do so much better.

Besides, Carrie can't really hope for a happy ending with Scott, since she's already kinda dead. And he's also started dating Carrie's nemesis Lynette, whom he met at the big art gallery premiere. I don't know why Lynette would want to date this deflated beach ball of a man, either. He has nothing at all to offer a superficial career gal like Lynette, but the plot needs more drama and the film's three writers couldn't think of anything more believable than "shallow, image-obsessed young beauty wants to date over-the-hill widower raising daughter alone while trying to save struggling restaurant he owns after sharing two words with him at party". In what reality do these writers live? Did Paul McGillion pay them to write this movie? Because that's the only option that makes any sense to me. He's a kid in a candy store having two beautiful young women compete for his affections in this movie.

This guy is not cut out to be the romantic lead of anything. 

After hearing the news of Scott and Lynette's impending nuptials, Carrie decides her work here on Earth is done and she meets Henry in Central Park for her rendezvous with destiny as she's already earned her wings and is ready for that big heavenly promotion. She had originally promised Billy, who already knew she was an angel because I guess kids can just spot these things, that she would stay for Christmas, but seeing as how the man she inexplicably loves is slamming hams with her arch enemy, sticking around somehow no longer feels quite appropriate.

While out on a Christmas Eve date with Lynette, Scott learns that she knows Carrie, because Lynette just can't help but share that she regained the big fish client that Carrie had initially stolen from her several weeks prior, and she feels like celebrating. Being in a car accident and therefore unable to plan your big event will get you to shop around. But Lynette feels a little bad about the whole thing, because she's having dinner with the man of her dreams (seriously?!) and toasting her good fortune while poor Carrie is lying in a coma in some hospital downtown.

Carrie isn't really dead, after all. That's the twist. Carrie thinks she's dead. Henry flat-out told her she's dead. But she's not dead. She's been lying comatose in some hospital bed for the past two weeks, and her once-estranged father has been at her side the whole time, praying for a miracle. Henry informs her of this news while she's standing on the verge of a wall of light, waiting to cross over to the other side. Suddenly we're watching a deleted scene from Mulholland Drive for ten seconds as Carrie's cherubic face is bathed in a nimbus of blue-white light, and I'm almost convinced that I'm watching a good movie.

But why did Henry keep this information from her? Because he didn't want her believe there was any hope for her and Scott as a couple. Seriously, that's his rationale. He figured if Carrie chose to help Scott of her own free will for selfless reasons, then she would become a better person. That's all well and good, but she didn't choose to help Scott of her own free will. She was assigned to help Scott by Henry as a mission to earn her way into Heaven, which is the exact opposite of a selfless reason. She didn't choose to help Scott for Scott's sake, but for her own.

And a few scenes earlier, Carrie tells Henry that she loves Scott and little Billy and wants to stay, but Henry tells her that's an impossible request because she's dead and doesn't belong on the earthly plane. She breaks down and tells him that's horribly unfair, because she's finally found true love only to be denied by circumstance, and Henry basically tells her to get over herself, because she's dead and things are tough all over, knowing full well that he's lying to her face.

Standing in the light, Henry tells Carrie that it's okay for her to cross over because Scott and little Billy are going to be just fine without her, which by the way is another fucking lie, because as soon as he learned Carrie was comatose, he abandoned Lynette in the middle of dinner and took Billy and his keyboard down to the hospital to keep the vigil with Carrie's father at her bedside. He's weeping and praying for her to come back to him, and Billy's heart is breaking as she's holding Carrie's hand. So Henry's just completely full of shit, because they certainly don't look as though they're gonna be fucking fine if Carrie dies in front of them on Christmas Eve.

Carrie's father signs the waiver giving the hospital staff permission to shut off her life support since they've run an exhaustive battery of tests and have concluded that there's no hope for recovery. He just wants his little girl to be at peace and tells Scott and Billy that it would take a true miracle for Carrie to come back to them. At least, he should have said the word "miracle", but instead he says "Christmas magic", which is just an awful phrase to say out loud. I know it's the title of your damned movie, but that just doesn't sound like natural dialogue for people to recite in a serious situation. The old man should have just said "miracle", because that's the appropriate term to use when you're looking for a miracle.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Hearing a challenge, Scott plugs in his keyboard and plays his now-finished song for Carrie as the doctors shut off her life support apparatus, which is just a small oxygen mask over her face. That's it. She's not intubated or anything like that, which would make sense. Shutting off a machine that's just blowing oxygen at your nose isn't going to kill you, at least not in the short term. That's not really "life support", man. This movie just keeps fucking everything up.

At least when Ted McGinley was in a coma in Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, they taped a little plastic tube to the side of his mouth and wrapped a bandage around his head to make him look like he was actually injured and in a fucking coma. In Christmas Magic, Lindy Booth's just lying in a bed, looking perfectly fine, like she's in the middle of a refreshing nap.

So Scott sings his song, or rather he awkwardly lip-syncs his horrible, horrible song, which Carrie hears through the boundaries of life and death, and Henry, who is actually Scott's dead father, by the way, tells her not to return to her body because only the pain of living awaits her there, and that beyond the light only peace and serenity await her, and how the fuck exactly did this creep become an angel? He tricks Carrie into helping his son get his life back on track, then tries really, really hard to keep her from returning to him as a living, breathing woman, despite both Carrie and Scott being very much in love and eager to build a life together.

During the climax, he keeps telling Carrie to go into the light, weirdly implying that this may be her only chance to do so. What's that all about? He acts like the possibility of Carrie dying a contented old woman who has lived a lifetime of unselfish joy with the love of her life would be a bad thing, and I don't understand why. If she dies in forty years, she automatically goes to hell?

This is the point where the movie completely lost me. I don't think the writers or the director intended this, but the climax of the movie absolutely paints Henry as the villain of the story. He's done nothing but lie to Carrie throughout the entire movie, and in the end he tries desperately to keep her from the man she loves, also trying to deny a second chance at love to his own son, attempting to convince her to abandon him in favor of a chance at peace in the great beyond that he warns may never come again. What exactly went wrong, here? It's confusing as all hell, and it completely sinks the movie.

Sure, Christmas Magic wasn't exactly a work of art before this climax, but it wasn't an insulting mess, either. But this climax is a horrifying miscalculation, from the twist of Carrie not being dead coming completely out of nowhere due to a stultifying exposition dump from Lynette at a romantic dinner with Scott, to kindly angel Henry's abrupt transformation into Al Pacino from the conclusion of The Devil's Advocate, to Scott's putrid song calling Carrie back from the void and saving the day. It's just five solid minutes of "what the fuck am I watching", and it's incredibly difficult to watch.

So Carrie wakes up, reconciles with her father off-screen (!?) and is discharged from the hospital a few hours later (?!?!) in order to spend Christmas Day unwrapping presents with Scott and Billy at Casa de Walker. I guess she just moved in with them, because love. It's like the movie hits "fast-forward" after Carrie wakes up, because within thirty seconds of her opening her eyes in the hospital, she's wearing comfortable pajamas and sitting by the Christmas Tree with her brand-new family, laughing and hugging and living the dream. Then she kisses Scott, I die a little inside, and the movie ends.

Christmas Magic is dreadful. The story shows initial promise, but it just kind of meanders around for about half of its total running time, completely glossing over Carrie's task of saving Scott's restaurant, dismissing this crucial plot by having Carrie wander into an art gallery and tell some guy we've just met to hire Scott to cater the big party he's planning, which she knew about because... because. And that solves that problem. And suddenly Scott loves Christmas and starts making shitty music again. Then Lynette just shows up out of the blue and wants to have Scott's babies because she's Carrie's enemy and that would really steam Carrie's clams to learn that Scott's courting her, of all people, even though this subplot makes absolutely no sense. And little Billy just knows that Carrie's an angel, because kids know these things.

None of this stuff is handled very well, but our cast does an admirable job of trying to make the audience care about all of these fumbled elements with their good-natured performances and generally strong chemistry despite the movie's best efforts to sabotage itself at every turn. Then the climax hits, and this movie just fills its diaper. There's no cleaning up this mess, and it's a shame, too, because... okay, maybe it's not such a shame. Christmas Magic wasn't going to be a very good movie even if it managed to stick the landing, which it certainly did not do.

But Lindy Booth is still an angel.

Calling All Angels - Carrie is more of an angel-in-training, but Henry is a full-fledged angel, so we're on the board with this trope.

Mommy's Dead - Mommy died on Christmas Eve, and her death snuffed out Scott's passion for making music, which was really for the best, because he wasn't a terribly talented musician in the first place. I'm pretty sure his late wife was just being polite when she told him she liked his songs. That's just what wives do. They lie to spare their fragile little husbands' feelings.

Scrooged - Carrie had no time for Christmas when she was alive because her career always came first. She had to die to find the spirit of the season once again, which is a bit more extreme than what most characters have to endure to have their love of Christmas rekindled, but I didn't write the damned movie.

VERDICT: JUST GO INTO THE LIGHT