PRIDE, PREJUDICE & MISTLETOE
Darcy has always worked hard to prove herself. She returns home to plan a Christmas charity event.
Darcy Fitzwilliam (Lacey Chabert) is a founding partner at one of New York's fastest-growing investment firms, and she has recently floated the idea to her peers to drop the minimum investment requirements in order to attract more clients, clients who still want to invest for their futures even though they may not have millions of dollars in their bank accounts. She's been receiving some grief from her fellow partners due to this idea, especially from that two-faced pit viper, Austin Avery, who is all smiles and kind words when she's face-to-face with Darcy, telling her "friend" that she has nothing to worry about and she should just relax and go back home to Pemberley, Ohio for Christmas, because she'll hold down the fort at the firm over the holidays, then starts talking shit about Darcy to all of the other partners and attempting to poach her big fish clients before the poor woman's halfway to the fucking airport.
Darcy's returning home after a few years away to help her mother plan the town's annual Christmas charity ball, which is a very fancy affair, attended by all of Pemberley's elite, namely a bunch of haughty snobs with too much money who like to gather once a year to throw some chump change at a cause benefiting the less fortunate so they can all feel a little better about themselves on the other 364 days of the year. But Darcy's mother has already chosen the perfect caterer for the event: strapping young chef Luke (Brendan Penny), who has recently moved back to Pemberley to follow his own dream of open a restaurant.
Luke and Darcy have something of a past, being members of the high school debate team and sometime rivals, regularly butting heads over just about anything and everything under the sun, until they went their separate ways after graduation. So they don't exactly get along, and things grow even more awkward when Darcy learns that her sister is engaged to Luke's brother, meaning they're soon going to be family. Then for some unknown reason, Darcy's mother just decides out of the blue that since Luke's such a wonderful chef, he should probably just join forces with his old debate team partner and plan the damned charity ball together.
The old bat's not trying to meddle in her daughter's romantic life with this decision, either. She thinks Darcy should get back together with her old flame Carl, some stuffy douche bag with an arrogant haircut she used to date once upon a time, so she's certainly not trying to set her daughter up with Luke. And she can clearly see that Darcy doesn't really want to spend a bunch of time with Luke, and Luke's also a little busy trying to keep his new restaurant afloat in a rough economy, so he doesn't exactly have a lot of spare time for this crap, either. But the plot demands these two photogenic fucks spend time together in order to fall in love, so I guess that's settled.
I know this movie is called Pride, Prejudice & Mistletoe, but it really has nothing to do with Jane Austen's seminal romantic novel. It's based on a book entitled Pride & Prejudice & Mistletoe written by Melissa de la Cruz, which is a gender-swapped holiday riff on the original Pride & Prejudice, with Darcy Fitzwilliam standing in for Fitzwilliam Darcy and Luke Bennet standing in for Elizabeth Bennet, but after reading a little about de la Cruz's novel and this adaptation, I was rather shocked at how little Pride, Prejudice & Mistletoe resembles Pride & Prejudice & Mistletoe. The book's versions of Darcy and Luke are closer in characterization to their original literary counterparts, while the movie sands down all of their rough edges and just makes them both feel like amiable stock characters, which really misses the entire point of Jane Austen's novel. Elizabeth Bennet is clever and funny, but also judgmental and not easily trusting.
Melissa de la Cruz makes her Luke Bennet a talented carpenter who is always quick with a joke and just wants to build furniture and basically be left alone. The movie turns Luke into an ambitious chef who is generally pleasant and that's about it. And her Darcy Fitzwilliam is a single-minded career woman who doesn't really give a damn about other people and avoids coming back to Pemberley for Christmas every year because she doesn't want to become entangled in her family's seasonal drama involving the town's big annual soirée, only choosing to return on this particular year because her mother has fallen ill and needs somebody to help her plan the event. The movie makes Darcy a generally pleasant young woman who cares about the well-being of others, sometimes to her own detriment, and loves coming home for Christmas but just hasn't had the time over the past few years since she's been busy building up her clientele at the firm.
And the movie even removes the added bit of drama from the book of Darcy's mother's illness, which is mystifying. Her mother's perfectly healthy; she just doesn't want to have to plan the big party on her own. Do you see what I mean? The movie version of this story takes away every single element that makes the novel at all interesting because heaven forbid a movie made for the fucking Hallmark Channel challenge its audience in the slightest. Darcy's mother can't even be sick, because we don't to bum anybody out over the holidays, I guess. That's the thing that really gets to me. There are plenty of movies on this network that have been made involving plots with people dealing with various illnesses, both minor and major, so why was this one tossed away? Why was that particular element deemed unworthy of inclusion?
Here's a fun fact: in Pride & Prejudice & Mistletoe, the characters of Darcy and Luke have casual sex before they fall in love, which is a thing people do in real life. Of course that element doesn't make it into the movie, because people don't have sex in these movies. You can't even hint that characters in Hallmark movies have sex. It's simply not allowed.
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| The face of a grown woman who has no idea where babies come from. |
The party's a big hit, and that's all well and good, but the real story here is how close Darcy and Luke have gotten over the past several days (it's a much quicker romance than in Jane Austen's novel, which took quite a bit longer), and Luke decides he's going to tell Darcy how much he loves her while they share a dance, but she's called away by Carl, who I suppose is supposed to be this story's version of that prick William Collins, who proposes to Darcy in the kitchen, and... and Luke overhears the proposal, walking away with a broken heart before he can... before he can hear Darcy tell Carl that she really loves Luke and wants to spend the rest of her life with the once and future captain of the state championship-winning high school debate team.
The cheapest, laziest, most tired of all the third act romantic curve balls, stitched into the body of a dull and lifeless screenplay, Frankenstein-style, when the writer is too careless to actually think of anything even remotely original to do with their story's climax. I don't know if this garbage is in Melissa de la Cruz's novel, and I don't care, because either way, it didn't need to be in this movie. I never, ever want to see this fucking cliché again, but it keeps popping up, like a bad penny.
Not Brendan Penny, though. He's a decent sort who has his own affable charm that I find quite appealing in his work. The man's probably never going to win any awards for his acting abilities, but he gets the job done, especially in products like these, where an actor of his sort can excel. This goes for Lacey Chabert as well, one of those people who seems tailor made to act in Hallmark Channel movies. You're never going to see these actors turning in Academy Award-winning performances in major motion pictures, but they've found their niche in these smaller productions and can really flourish in this particular world.
In the end, about a minute after Luke runs off into the night blubbering like a baby because he was too stupid to stick around for another ten seconds to hear the lady he loves rebuff his romantic rival's advances, Darcy finds him and tells him she's chosen his goofy ass to grow old with, and she's decided to pull up stakes and move back to Pemberley since that goddamned snake Austin Avery has made life in New York City absolutely miserable for her, so she's taking over her father's local bank, because it's always better to be a big fish in a small pond. The reunited lovers kiss under the mistletoe and the movie mercifully ends.
Is this the only story these fucking movies can come up with? Our heroine decides that she doesn't want to live in the big city anymore, so she moves back home to that idyllic small town because that's where all the "real" people live and work and grow old and die. Fuck cities, because those places are just coffins for all the miserable masses, where they die a little each die without ever knowing the joys of living in a rural area, where you don't have high speed internet or supermarkets or sometimes even paved roads or convenient access to a fully-staffed hospital in case of emergencies. Small towns filled with bored cops with axes to grind and paranoid locals who aren't terribly welcoming to outsiders, where everybody has guns and is just waiting for an excuse for some stranger to wander onto their property so they can feel like Dirty Harry and blast that fucker into the infinite.
Small towns where Main Street is either dying or dead, and the only jobs to be had are in the stifling darkness of a coal mine or the soul-crushing killing floor of a slaughter house, places where coming home from work maimed or crippled is all too common, places where illegal drug use is skyrocketing due to all of these factors, with the lost souls too poor or stubborn to move away from their rotting communities turning to opiates to cope with the pain of chronic hopelessness and despair. Sounds like fucking paradise to me.
Oh god, I'm doing it again.
Look, I didn't hate Pride, Prejudice & Mistletoe. Honestly, I thought it was okay, so I can't give the movie a bad grade because it's a piss-poor adaptation of a probably mediocre adaptation of an eternal literary classic. As its own movie, divorced from all of that baggage, it's fine. I'm always going to be concerned with the somewhat problematic nature of some of these stories, and I hope that one day Hallmark Channel will try to burst out of their comfort zone and take a few fucking risks with the plots of their movies, but I don't know when that day will come. It has to come, though, eventually. Right? Things can't go on like this forever. Eventually all of the middle-aged white ladies who eat this shit up like pigs at a trough will die and the next generation of middle-aged white ladies, who grew up in a more diverse and inclusive world, will want something else for dinner.
I think I would have been more lenient on the movie if it hadn't tossed that third act bullshit my way. I am so beyond tired of that particular plot twist, and I don't understand how anybody writing a movie in 2018 would dare to include that. I just can't in good conscience recommend a movie that pulls this crap.
So fuck Pride, Prejudice & Mistletoe, I guess.
I Hate You! Kiss Me! - Luke and Darcy don't get along at all in the beginning, bickering like rival squirrels over an errant acorn, but by the end of the movie, they're chastely making out under the mistletoe and planning the rest of their lives together.
Assistant Chef Jen - Austin Avery is a grinning monster who succeeds in pushing Darcy out of the company she helped build from the ground up, and she never gets her comeuppance, so in this instance, the bad guy actually got exactly what they wanted with no consequences. Wow. That's got to be a first for one of these movies.
Small Town Salvation - Blah, blah, blah.
Third Act Shenanigans - This movie shenanigan'd me so I hard I was repeatedly flipping off my television like a crazy person during the story's last five minutes. I gave this movie the double gun salute as hard as I possibly could until it faded to black.
VERDICT: NAUGHTY AS FUCK
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