Today's Feature: REUNITED AT CHRISTMAS
Samantha's divided family all return to Nana's house to relive their lost Christmas traditions.
Samantha (Nikki Deloach) is a novelist living in New York City, dating genial Simon (Mike Faiola), a successful local television correspondent who hopes to soon land a cushy weekend anchor job down at the station. Samantha's happy with their current, semi-casual relationship status, and Simon claims to be just peachy keen with their situation as well, but he's been secretly dying to propose to his lady love since they first met last Christmas Eve, and he plans to pop the question during their upcoming romantic holiday getaway at picturesque Aspen, Colorado.
But Samantha's late grandmother has other plans for her favorite granddaughter, as she's informed by her father that, according to Nana's last will and testament, she requests that her beloved family gather at her old home in Cedar Creek for one last Christmas together before the house goes up for sale in the new year. It was Nana's wish that the people that mattered most in her life would make a few new happy memories together at the house where they experienced so many magical Christmases together once upon a time, and maybe even bring them all a little closer together since they began to drift apart after Samantha's mother and father divorced when she and her sister Annie (Lisa Durupt) were teenagers.
We learn all this, as well as Samantha's reticence to write her second novel, a Christmas romance (at the behest of her publisher), during an awkward exposition dump as she walks hand-in-hand with her beau Simon down a busy city sidewalk one chilly December evening. There are always better ways to relay information to the audience than the dreaded exposition dump. When a character basically stops acting like a living, breathing human being and starts mechanically spewing a bunch of information that the other character with whom they're conversing should have really picked up naturally through prior conversations during the course of their relationship, you know the writer just couldn't think of a better way to insert this information into their narrative, and this is a prime example of Lazy Screenwriting 101.
It's even worse when the exposition dump begins with the phrase "as you know", which is just incredibly insulting to the audience's intelligence. If the other character already knows this, then why are you telling them again? Because the audience doesn't know, and the writer can't be bothered to get even slightly creative when they know they have to convey this information to the audience in some manner. At the very least, you can always toss the necessary exposition out as a quick burst of narration from our protagonist. Sure, that's not much better, but at least it's slightly less common than just throwing out a bunch of facts in a graceless block of dialogue that no actor could make sound even a little authentic. Sure, that's not a huge problem, not really, not when I've seen just how bad these movies can get in the past. But the exposition dump is just a little too common, and I always hope and pray that the screenwriters can get a tad creative in an effort to avoid this nonsense, and my heart always sinks a little when they don't even try.
Samantha tells Simon that she's going to have to take a rain check on their lovely Aspen Christmas vacation, and he seems pretty chill about the whole thing, even asking if he can tag along with Samantha as she returns home to Cedar Creek to spend one more Christmas with her slightly estranged family.
I'd like to take this moment to share how happy I am with this Simon character. In basically any other Hallmark Channel original movie, he would be the snobbish boyfriend who thinks he knows better than his significant other regarding what she wants out of life, making a bunch of decisions for her that only serve to drive a wedge between them, giving her the excuse she finally needs to kick him to the curb in favor of her old flame, with whom she's recently reconnected during her holiday homecoming.
That... doesn't happen in Reunited At Christmas. There is no old flame. Well, there is Paul, the asshole fiancé who left her high and dry just days before their wedding several years before the events of this movie, but we never meet the guy, so he doesn't count. No, Simon never has to unwittingly compete for his lady love's affections in the movie. He's her man, and she loves him. That's a pretty rare thing for these flicks, and I was astonished when I realized that the narrative was never about to introduce Samantha's old high school sweetheart drinking hot cocoa at the kooky local diner while she and Simon are having an argument over something or other.
It never happened. What a wonderful surprise.
Of course, the movie still has to adhere to a certain formula, so Simon proposes to Samantha almost immediately after they arrive in Cedar Creek, and she barks out a not-so-enthusiastic "yes" in a panic while her family is watching at the door. She's not so excited about the idea of getting married, not after what happened between her and Paul, and not after seeing her parents get divorced when she was a teenager. I get that.
As a quick side note, there's a scene in the middle of the movie where Samantha, her sister Annie, and their mother are out shopping for a Christmas Tree, and their mother lets it slip that she's been casually dating some guy for a few weeks. Her children give her shocked expressions, and she reminds them that she's a woman with needs who doesn't spend all her time sitting alone at home, knitting and watching Murder, She Wrote. She tells her daughters that she's just trying to move beyond her divorce, and get back out on the dating scene.
That's all well and good, but the scene presents all of this in a very bizarre way. The dialogue seems to treat their parents' divorce as a very recent thing, when it actually occurred when Samantha and Annie were teenagers, and they're both now in their mid-thirties. They act surprised when their mother, who has been divorced from their father for at least half their lives, tells them that she's dating somebody else. It's like the movie slips into Bizarro World for this one scene, and I don't understand why it's there, especially since the end of the story strongly suggests that their mother and father may rekindle their long-dormant love affair, with no mention of this other guy, whoever the hell he is.
Now it's always scary committing to something bigger than yourself. And considering her past, Samantha being a little hesitant to get behind an engagement, even to what is ostensibly the man of her dreams, makes perfect sense. Between that, her writer's block, and the sheer weight of emotion that comes with spending the holidays in the home of her beloved late grandmother, maybe Simon should have held off on the romantic proposal. But there probably would never have been an ideal moment to pop the question, so the whole situation is a real catch-22. Samantha would have to deal with her complicated feelings regarding Simon, her parents, and marriage in general eventually, so perhaps just getting it all out in the open was really the best thing for everybody.
Of course, the movie has to spend the majority of its remaining time mining drama out of Simon and Samantha's shaky engagement, because even though there's no love triangle in Reunited At Christmas, there's no way things were ever going to go smoothly for this cute couple. If they just got engaged twenty minutes into the movie, were happy, and spent their Christmas holiday together at her grandmother's house with no real bumps in the road, there wouldn't be much of a movie. So I understand why this is all happening, and it never really strikes any false notes.
Samantha's issues with marriage come from a real place, and her views on commitment make perfect sense from her point of view. Simon knows he's nothing like that wretched bounder Paul, but he also understands that he can't just keep telling her so in hopes that his words alone will convince her to marry him. That's not how life works. Samantha needs to have the time to work through her issues before she can risk her heart in such a manner, so I have no problems with this plot. It all works pretty well, at least for the most part.
There are a few minor hiccups, chief among them the film's climax, where Simon finally chooses to leave Samantha at the big community dance on Christmas Eve because he feels the pressure of the whole "will they or won't they" scenario is only hurting them both, so he tries to do what he thinks is the adult thing by walking away. Thirty seconds later, Samantha just realizes that she wants to spend the rest of her life with Simon, so she chases after him, catching him at the family home before he departs for New York City to tell him that she wants to eat Christmas cookies with her beloved future-weekend anchor every year for the rest of their lives.
It's a completely unnecessary dramatic flourish that the movie didn't need in order to tell a satisfying story, but it's not a deal breaker. I mean, they could have just had this mutual epiphany at the dance without the added bullshit, but whatever.
The movie ends with the whole family coming together to unwrap gifts on Christmas morning, where Samantha's father declares that he's not selling the house, and is in fact planning on moving in to fix the place up a little, because it's what his dear mother would have wanted. He even begins to patch things up with his ex-wife, and the hints of a renewed romance begin to show between the pair. Simon and Samantha tell the gathered family that they're thinking of a Christmas wedding next year, and they all live happily ever after.
Except for Nana. She's still dead.
Also, Samantha's writer's block is finally gone, and she's even decided on a title for her future holiday bestseller: Christmas Reunited, which really should have been the title of the movie, as well. That's loads better than Reunited At Christmas, isn't it? Am I alone on this? Why wasn't that the title? The movie was decent. The lead actors had good romantic chemistry, the story was never really insulting, and I only got bored and momentarily drifted off into the dark corners of my mind once or twice while watching the movie, so that's pretty good for me.
There was a black couple introduced late in the narrative, and they each had names and a life that didn't involve Samantha or Simon in the least, but they were only introduced to serve as a cautionary tale for our protagonists, having fallen in love while young adults, but drifting apart for four decades, only coming together recently to spend the rest of their lives together while lamenting all the time they've lost in the interim. They're not really characters so much as plot devices, which is almost more insulting than them not being in the movie at all. But as far as my tropes go, they technically don't qualify. As for the other tropes...
Mommy's Dead - Sure, it's Samantha's grandmother, but Nana's death is literally the axis around which this whole narrative revolves, so it counts.
Small Town Salvation - Samantha and Simon needed to get away from the hustle and bustle of New York City and reconnect thanks to their time spent in the charming little hamlet of Cedar Creek.
Little White Lies - Our romantic couple choose not to tell the family that their engagement may not be as legitimate as outward appearances may suggest, and the secret comes out during the film's climax, when Samantha's mother convinces her daughter that even if her love with Simon doesn't last a lifetime, choosing love is still worth the risk.
Third Act Shenanigans - The weak falling out between Samantha and Simon at the big dance, as well as Samantha's not-so-hurried rush to find him before he leaves for New York City, just felt like an unnecessary contrivance. The plot would have been just fine without this pointless narrative swerve.
VERDICT: NICE
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