MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS
Noelle comes back to sell her late mother's house and learns about the hired electrician.
There's no hired electrician in Memories Of Christmas. Dave (Mark Taylor) is a general contractor, and he was never hired by Noelle's (Christina Milian) late mother to do anything. Dave volunteered to help his neighbor put up her extravagant Christmas decorations each year before she died, and just kept the tradition going after her passing because he knew that's what she would have wanted. So not a hired electrician, but a volunteer contractor. That seems like an important difference to me.
Noelle lives in San Francisco, and she works as a... my mind is drawing a blank. She's not a lawyer, I know that much. She works in finance, maybe. The company she works for does stuff, I'm sure. Big stuff. Big, important stuff, and Noelle is right there at the forefront, making that big, important stuff happen, along with her co-worker, some dink named Rex who is too dumb to actually do his job without Noelle's constant assistance. Rex is pretty worthless, and he seems to recognize this, but I guess he's so naturally charming that he's managed to coast by on that alone so far in his life, and he has no desire to actually learn how to do anything to change that. There are a lot of Rex-type dudes out there in the real world. Like, a whole lot of them, and they're all just the worst, aren't they?
Noelle is always working so hard at whatever it is she does, really burning the midnight oil every single day, that her suspiciously kind boss basically orders her to take a vacation this holiday season, so Noelle flies back home to,,, I don't know what the hell her hometown is called. The movie never told me, so this isn't my fault. It's near Detroit, that's as specific a description as I ever received. Anyway, Noelle is flying back home to finally pack up her late mother's house and put it up for sale, having let the place sit empty for nearly a year and a half after her untimely death, putting this unenviable task off for as long as possible because who really wants to have to do this?
Going through everything in your childhood home after your parents have died, knowing that despite any nostalgia you may hold for everything within, it will all have to go, can be emotionally devastating, because it's always difficult to let go of the past. All these cherished reminders of the people you loved and lost won't mean much to the folks who buy this junk at yard sales or thrift stores. And that's just the stuff you know is worthy of actually selling. A lot of these things will end up in trash bags piled up on the sidewalk, waiting to be carted away to their own depressing final destination. Clearing out the house of a loved one after they're gone can be an overwhelming, traumatizing experience.
Not that Memories Of Christmas really gives a shit about any of that. Noelle supposedly stayed away from her childhood home for so long because she was dreading the experience of having to take her late mother's life and pack it all away in boxes for strangers to pick through at the local Goodwill, but she never seems to have any real problems with actually doing it as soon as she's back home. There are a few brief scenes that follow Noelle digging through her mother's belongings, briefly smiling as she glances at an old pitcher or a pair of ice skates that bring back warm memories, but the viewer almost never feels any meaningful connection between Noelle and the house in which she supposedly spent her entire young life with her beloved mother, because the movie never bothers to illustrate that connection.
We never once see Noelle wax nostalgic thinking about all the good times she spent in this house with her mother, the town's resident "queen of Christmas". We never see her cry when she comes across a reminder in the house that her dear mother is truly gone. We never see any evidence that Noelle really cares about this house at all. The movie tells us many times how much everybody in town loved Noelle's mother, and Noelle tells people how much she loved her mother, but those are just words with no emotional weight behind them. Memories Of Christmas is far too distracted with getting Noelle and Dave together for a little climactic canoodling under the mistletoe to ever bother to invest any emotional currency in Noelle belatedly dealing with the loss of her mother, which by any reasonable estimation should have been the sentimental core of the narrative.
But we don't get any of that messy bullshit with Memories Of Christmas. We just get another rote, by the numbers romance between two pleasant people who come from slightly different worlds, allowing the magic of small-town living to slowly whittle down their resistance until they just finally kiss and get it over with before the final fade to black. There's no reason to expand upon any of this, because you already know everything that happens in the movie. If you've read any of the reviews I've written thus far this month, then you know exactly what happens in Memories Of Christmas. All of it. And none of it matters, because you'll never be invested in any of the characters in Memories Of Christmas. They're all just two-dimensional pieces of colored paper that exist solely to complete a mundane holiday jigsaw puzzle.
Of course Noelle has to save the cozy lodge that has served as the home of her late mother's annual holiday charity ball, a party that raises money for a scholarship fund that sends one lucky underprivileged high school student to college each year, because an evil developer is going to buy it up in the new year and turn it into condominiums or an office park or whatever. And Noelle uses her business know-how and corporate connections to save the place just in the nick of time, but not after putting on the best holiday ball this town has ever seen as a tribute to her mother's memory.
And of course Rex shows up in town to help Noelle pack up her mother's belongings, but really to get his colleague to help him close a big business deal, since he's incompetent and can't do anything without her help. And Dave sees Rex and Noelle together and wrongly assumes they're a couple, and he goes and sulks for ten minutes, until Noelle tells Rex to go home because she's not interested in holding his sweaty hands at work anymore, and she and Dave reconcile right at the end, just in time to celebrate Christmas Eve together in her childhood home, which she has agreed not to sell after all, choosing to stay and make a new life for herself and blah, blah...
There's a moment late in the film, right before the big charity event begins, when Dave's nephew, who is trying to get into college on a hockey scholarship, gets rejected by his chosen college. Dave puts his hand on the boy's shoulder and tells him not to give up hope, that he'll have to fight and scratch and claw in order to make his dreams come true, and if he just believes and tries hard enough, he'll find another way to get into college with his perseverance and can-do attitude. Then in the next scene, his nephew is just awarded the annual charity scholarship because there's literally nobody else in this movie they could have given it to.
We get this big motivational speech about how you have to fight for your dreams and never, ever under any circumstances give up, then this kid's just given a scholarship ten minutes later, with no build-up and no fanfare. Because of course he is. This is the kind of shit I'm talking about. The movie presents a dramatic obstacle in one scene, then immediately removes that obstacle in the next scene because it doesn't want to have to deal with any messy complications. We're sold the story of a woman who has buried herself in her career in order to avoid having to process the death of her dear mother and the consequences that inevitably arise when she's forced to come to terms with this loss, but we're never actually given that story, because the movie didn't want to bother with any heavy emotional baggage when it's so much easier to just present another cookie-cutter romance in an idyllic small town to its intended audience.
I don't like Memories Of Christmas. This movie insulted me with its cowardly bait-and-switch antics. I have no use for a product like this when it clearly doesn't even give a damn about itself. At times the Hallmark formula, which is a very real thing, is such a restrictive framework that these movies have to work around in order to build a worthwhile story, but sometimes the formula isn't the problem at all, because sometimes the movie fails to properly utilize that simple framework. There are plenty of movies made using this formula that manage to showcase very real hopes and fears, with stories following people who are going through some pretty traumatic life events portrayed in a sober and adult manner. We all know that's possible, since I've seen my share of those movies since I started this whole Schlock-Mas thing.
But when a movie like Memories Of Christmas arrives with a premise that seems tailor-made to basically make the world cry and can't even bother to make any of its own characters feel like they give a damn about anything they're experiencing, how am I supposed to be bothered to care? You give me nothing and expect me to make something out of it? That's not my fucking job. These movies are meant to be emotionally manipulative by their nature, that's how they're designed. They want to turn your screws and make you feel something while you sit on your couch for two hours with your beverage of choice. A simple, universal emotional experience. That's what these movies are supposed to be. But when they fail to engage on that basic, lizard-brain level because they're just too goddamned lazy to try, you tend to come away feeling more than a little cheated.
When a Hallmark Channel original movie fails at its core directive to deliver a simple, universal emotional experience, then there's a serious problem, because this shit has been perfected into an easy-to-follow recipe over the years, to the point where you wonder how anybody could possibly fuck things up so spectacularly that a viewer can come away feeling like they've been personally screwed over by the movie they just watched. But Memories Of Christmas is one of the absolute hollowest experiences I've had watching a movie since I began this feature back in 2014. I warned myself not to think that the worst was behind me after I watched Christmas At Graceland, and I was right to do so, because Memories Of Christmas somehow dislocated its crooked spine and limply crept under the bar set so precipitously low by that previous experience.
I liked the guy who played Dave, though. He deserved a better movie than this.
I don't know how this movie managed such a dubious achievement, but it's happened, and I feel stunned into a near-catatonic state of apathy, like I've pulled a reverse-Grinch and my heart is somehow three sizes smaller than it was this morning. So congratulations to Memories Of Christmas for being a completely worthless holiday viewing experience. You did it, buddy! You finally hit rock bottom!
Mommy's Dead - Noelle's mommy is dead, but trust me, she doesn't care.
Small Town Salvation - You know the drill. Fuck it.
VERDICT: I'LL SEE YOU IN HELL
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| I have gazed into the abyss and now I can see the strings upon which we all dance! Life is meaningless and pain is god! |
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