COMING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS
An estate manager tries to bring a family together to celebrate Christmas in their estate.
Danica McKellar is between jobs when Coming Home For Christmas begins, because the pet shop she worked at burned down under mysterious circumstances just before Thanksgiving. The owner of the place skipped town after he was unable to collect on the shop's insurance policy, leaving his two employees high and dry for the holidays, not to mention all the poor animals that burned alive that awful night. We never get to meet the other employee, so maybe they died in the fire, too. It doesn't really matter.
What's important is that Danica McKellar loves Christmas a whole lot, and she's not gonna let a small thing like being jobless at Christmastime ruin her holiday fun, so she hangs out at her mom's house over the weekend and trims the old lady's trademarked Balsam Hill Christmas Tree instead of looking for work or anything constructive with her time. But opportunity comes a-knocking when Danica's real estate agent sister, let's just call her Beth, presents her cash-strapped sibling with the chance to become the manager for Ashford, the estate she's arranging to sale, which is the home to some shitty local blueblood family named Marley.
What is an estate manager? They manage the estates of wealthy people, organizing the domestic staff and handling the day-to-day administration of running a large household. Danica didn't even know this job existed until her sister brought it up, and she graduated from college with a major in Art History, so she's clearly qualified to be an estate manager. You can tell she was an Art History major because she can't help but talk about how swell all the art is everywhere she goes. She says nothing of substance regarding any of this art, however, because the screenwriter clearly didn't want to actually do any research regarding art, or the history of art, or anything like that. So Danica just kinda looks around every now and then and says something to the effect of "Wow, look at all that great art. I know about great art because I'm an Art History major. Golly, you sure have some swell art in your home."
The job is obviously only temporary, since the eldest Marley son Bobby has decided to sell Ashford in the new year in order to find a more reasonable space in which his elderly grandmother Pippa can live out her twilight years, since dwelling all alone in the giant estate is becoming more physically taxing as she gets older. But Pippa fucking hates Bobby's guts for making this decision, because she always told herself that she would die in Ashford before she would even consider leaving, and she sees Bobby's actions as a betrayal of the highest order. Also, Bobby hates Christmas, because he's a rich asshole who doesn't have time for that merry bullshit.
Does any of this make any sense? I honestly can't even tell if I'm typing coherent sentences at this point, or if I'm just tapping out a big old mess of word salad. Have you ever picked up some random fantasy novel off a shelf at a bookstore and just read the jacket copy? You're assaulted with a bunch of made-up words that don't immediately make any sense to you, so you end up putting the book down after you've finished reading, somehow feeling as though you actually know less about the book than before you picked it up? That's kinda how the paragraphs above are reading to me. I'll continue assuming that these words are making some kind of sense, but you go ahead and inform me if I'm just typing paragraphs of gibberish here. I need to know if I'm losing my mind or not this holiday season.
Danica takes the job because she needs the money, and she introduces herself to Pippa, but the old bat just slams a door in her face because she's cranky, and that's funny, I guess. Bobby tells Danica to just keep her head down for the next three weeks until he can sell the damned house and be done with this whole mess, but one of Danica's duties is to plan the legendary Marley family Christmas Gala, which has been a tradition in this rotten fucking town that goes back all the way to... I dunno, 1970? Maybe earlier. I wasn't really paying attention to any of the specifics regarding, well, anything that happened in this movie.
Danica invites all the wayward children of the Marley family back to Ashford for Christmas, and all these haughty rich motherfuckers spend the holidays under the same roof for the first time since they were haughty rich motherfucking children, and they all remember why they used to love Christmas so much in the first place after Danica's childlike exuberance for the greatest holiday ever proves to be highly infectious. They all drink Folgers coffee, too. Because that's a thing insanely rich people do is drink the cheapest, blandest fucking coffee you can possibly find. The movie just shoves a big old can of Folgers fucking Crystals in the center of the frame while the kindly chef pours her new boss Danica McKellar a steaming cup of that rancid brown water to wake up her senses after a long night of being yelled at by a cantankerous octogenarian woman wearing giant orthopedic shoes.
When Danica presents Pippa with her theme for this year's (perhaps final) Christmas Gala, Pippa practically bursts a blood vessel with excitement when her estate manager utters the words "silver bells". That's her idea for the theme. Silver bells. She doesn't expand upon those two words at all, but I guess she doesn't need to, because the song "Silver Bells" coincidentally has special significance for the Marley family, since it was Pippa's late husband's favorite song. Or maybe it was Bobby's late mother's favorite song. It might have been his late father's favorite song.
Have I mentioned that I wasn't really paying attention to any of this? It all just passed right through my brain, never even attempting to take up residence in my grey matter. I wasn't dicking around with my smartphone or reading a book while trying to watch this movie. I just stared at the screen the whole time Coming Home For Christmas was playing, but none of the minutia ever stuck around in my memory. I remember all the major beats of the plot, but all the little things, the stuff on the margins that's supposed to fill in the empty space and make it all feel lived-in and real, didn't register. Or maybe it wasn't there to begin with. There was just nothing compelling about any of these characters. They all felt too much like types and not people. I'm starting to feel like Neo after he becomes "The One", seeing this artificial Hallmark world for what it truly is: nothing but endless lines of manipulative code underneath a thin veneer of holiday cheer.
But the gala's theme is "Silver Bells", and Pippa just loves it, which is good news, because if Pippa hated that theme, she probably would have brained Danica with a paperweight or something. This old lady is volatile.
As Danica decorates the house for the gala, she convinces Bobby and his brother Kip Winger (Andrew Francis) to help her find a suitable Christmas Tree candidate on the property, instead of going out and buying one, which would make more sense to me, but I'm not an estate manager. Now neither Bobby nor Kip has ever chopped down a tree before, and they both make a big deal out of this fact as they wander through the woods surrounding their massive house, and so when the perfect tree is finally located, you'd expect something funny to arise from their combined lack of experience in this area, some kind of humorous scene following these two fancy lads as they try to get their hands dirty for a little manual labor. Instead nothing happens.
The movie awkwardly cuts to commercial as Kip wields a small ax, then when the movie returns, Danica's doing something completely different, and this tree is never mentioned or seen again, so the previous scene might as well have never even happened. The perfect opportunity is presented for something, anything to happen that might be slightly funny, and the movie just completely ignores it in favor of nothing else. What's going on? Has the movie just given up entirely?
Bobby arbitrarily falls in love with Danica McKellar in the movie's third act, and he makes a play to profess his true feelings for her at the big Christmas Gala, but he inadvertently walks in on his brother Kip Winger asking Danica to accompany him to Athens for New Year's Eve, because there are few things more romantic in this world than ringing in the new year from a critically economically depressed foreign capital. Do these people even watch the news? Athens is basically hell on earth right now.
Either way, Danica turns down Kip's offer, since she loves that board-stiff asshole Bobby, and Kip gracefully steps aside, telling Danica to follow her heart. Then Kip takes his ticket to Athens and gets the fuck out of town immediately, because he'd rather spend his holidays in the company of a coterie of high-class Greek call girls with enough champagne to drown a small army than hang out with his boring family for another minute, and I think he might just be onto something. Unfortunately for Bobby, he crept away right before he could hear Danica turn down Kip's generous offer, because that's just how this shit works. The love interest always manages to overhear a conversation between the object of their affection and their romantic rival, and they always walk away at the exact wrong moment.
But on Christmas Day, Bobby takes a chance and shows up at Danica's mother's house, where Danica, her mother and her sister all look obnoxious wearing identical pajamas as they sip hot chocolate by the fireplace, and he explains to Danica that not only is he not selling Ashford after all (which really upsets Danica's sister, who was counting on the commission from that sale), but he's moving in to take care of Pippa the way she took care of him after his parents died when he was a kid, which is nicely poetic, I suppose. He also wants to spend every Christmas from now on with Danica, because she makes Christmas worth celebrating, and he loves her and all that great crap.
That's sweet, right? It would be, if either of these lead actors had absolutely any onscreen chemistry at all, which they don't. The two actors don't even look like they particularly like each other when they share the frame, which really strangles the half-baked love story in its crib.
I liked the head butler. I think his name was Garland. Maybe it was Gerard. When he introduces himself to Danica McKellar early in the movie, she asks him his name, and he pauses for a moment like he forgot his own name and had to really think to remember it, which illustrates how dehumanizing working at Ashford for so many years has been for this poor man. He has trouble calling Danica by her first name in the beginning, because he's never before been allowed to be so informal with anybody in a professional capacity in his life, which is a nice, believable character trait.
He also pronounces "Poinsettia" the way I pronounce it, so obviously Garland's the best character in the movie, and a very intelligent man, to boot.
Everything else in this movie I describe with a profound shrug, because none of it left any impression on me. I guess Coming Home For Christmas wasn't a bad movie, and if I had seen it closer to the beginning of the month, I probably would have been much kinder to it, but on December 22nd, I just can't muster any enthusiasm for such a trite and tedious story told in such a direct, bare manner. And the product placement in this move was just painfully intrusive, shoving big logos right in the center of the frame at seemingly random moments to trick viewers into buying incredibly expensive artificial Christmas Trees or incredibly cheap instant coffee, among other things. Shameful.
Just keep cranking 'em out, boys!
Scrooged - Danica McKellar opens the hearts of the cold Marley family to the joys of the holiday season through her annoying enthusiasm for all things Christmas.
Christmas In July! - Half of the time, the movie tries really hard to disguise the fact that it was filmed over the summertime, but then you're just presented with a scene featuring two characters standing in front of a big picture window that reveals a bright, green world beyond. Sometimes the production designer tries to hide all the big, leafy trees in the frame by shoving a few flocked artificial branches in the foreground that hover over our actors as they stand on a pile of white foam padding while wearing thick coats and hats, sweltering under direct sunlight at midday, and I just want to turn on the air conditioner because I feel hot for them.
VERDICT:
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| This reaction perfectly encapsulates my feelings regarding Coming Home For Christmas. |
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