CHRISTMAS PERFECTION
A handsome mannequin in a Christmas display comes to life and begins dating an attractive ad exec.
Do you recognize that log line? You should, because it's also the log line from last year's A Perfect Christmas, and I knew this line sounded familiar when I sat down to watch Christmas Perfection on Lifetime this morning, but I just thought there were two holiday movies with similar names and premises out there. Maybe this movie would get things right where the last movie got so many things wrong.
Alas, apparently my television provider's viewing guide must have just confused the two movies and plastered A Perfect Christmas's plot description under Christmas Perfection, because this movie has nothing to do with mannequins coming to life, or even concussed, lovelorn women hallucinating mannequins coming to life. I suppose it's my fault, really. I should have recognized the wording of that descriptive text, but I didn't, and now I guess it's shame on me.
Shame on me.
Christmas Perfection is the story of a lady named Darcy who paints greeting cards or some shit. She's a perfectionist in both her professional and personal lives, nitpicking every single minute detail, driving her family and friends nuts in the process. She's a bit of a handful, folks. I guess when she was growing up, Darcy's mommy and daddy used to yell at each other quite a bit, and so she would often call her best pal Brandon and they would go wandering around the big city (I don't know what city this is supposed to be, and I don't really care) in search of fun things to do in an effort to distract Darcy from her miserable home life.
One particular Christmas morning, Darcy and Brandon are out on the town avoiding her bickering parents when they happen upon a magical little shop that they both swear wasn't there the day before. In the glimmering store windows, Darcy sees an inviting miniature village on display, and her eyes light up with delight as she promises herself that one day she will experience the perfect Irish Christmas for herself, or die trying.
Look, her mother's Irish, and I guess she had a few magical holidays back in her homeland before fucking off for the U.S.A. to marry some local bozo for a green card, and Darcy was so enchanted by her half-drunk mother's "Christmas In Ireland" stories she slurred every year after Darcy's father took off for the local tavern for a bit of holiday cheer that the impressionistic young lady couldn't help but dream of the perfect version of her favorite holiday in Ireland. I guess it helped her cope with her parents' disintegrating marriage or whatever, but I do find it odd that she's so fixated on the whole Ireland thing. Why does her perfect Christmas have to be in Ireland, a place she's never been?
The magical little shop on the streets of the big city is owned and operated by a creepy British lady who has a habit of leering at people like she wants to unhinge her jaw and swallow them whole, but maybe that's what she's into, and who am I to kink shame?
After a disastrous Thanksgiving with her family and Brandon that doesn't go exactly as planned, which is enough to ruin fragile Darcy's entire evening, she breaks one of the buildings in her own miniature village collection while setting the whole thing up because she's a clumsy idiot, then she hits the mean streets after midnight to get some air (she's probably trying to score some drugs but this is a family movie, so instead it's just implied) and soon finds herself standing in front of that very same magical little shop she found as a child, with the same creepy British lady sitting behind the antique cash register, not having aged a day. The creepy lady sells Darcy a new "Irish post office" to replace the one she busted, and I don't understand what the difference is between a regular post office and an Irish one, but these weirdos seem to know, and I guess that's just going to have to be good enough for me.
The creepy lady then hands Darcy a figurine she believes will be a perfect fit for the young woman's village, a figurine that looks suspiciously like Darcy, down to the long coat she's currently wearing. Darcy sees nothing strange about any of this, and accepts the creepy lady's gift without a second thought, placing her new acquisition in the center of her own village as soon as she gets home.
Then she falls asleep and wakes up inside of her own village, transformed into an idyllic little place called "Christmas Town", populated by familiar faces from her old life, only now they're all Irish, because Darcy's perfect Christmas just has to be Irish, and that's that. Darcy now lives with her parents, who are still together and cloyingly kind, and she wakes up to presents under the Christmas tree, and a hearty breakfast of Belgian waffles and hot cocoa, and in the afternoon she goes for a horse-drawn carriage ride with the Irish version of her boss at the greeting card company, some grinning simpleton named Todd, who is her boyfriend now, and at the end of the carriage ride he gives her a necklace.
Todd then brings Darcy to the local weaving mill, where she picks out the colors she wants for her new Christmas sweater, which his slaves weave for Darcy before her very eyes. Then they go riverdancing at the local pub, and the village mayor, who is Darcy's friend Carmen but also Irish, reads that classic poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" to the village children, then there's a little pageant with singing and dancing, then Darcy falls asleep in her big, comfortable bed...
Then it all starts over again, because every day is Christmas Day in Christmas Town, and every Christmas Day is exactly the same.
The same series of events occurs to Darcy every day, down to the letter, and Darcy is surprisingly cool with all of this, despite the fact that as it's presented, this magical little town is right out of a horror movie. Everybody is happy every moment of every day, and they keep repeating the same pattern with no deviation, because "everything is as it should be". I understand that the plot has set Darcy up to be something of a control freak who wants everything to be just so, because she had very little stability in her early life, which screwed her up a little more than she'd be willing to admit, so life in Christmas Town, this place where nothing ever changes and there are no shocks or surprises, is meant to appeal to Darcy's innate desire for dependability.
I get that, but this place is still terrifying, and I don't understand why anybody would be tempted to stay here more than one or maybe two days before losing their fucking mind. This premise feels like the plot of a lost episode of The Twilight Zone, and that's sort of a problem because this premise is just right for a 25 minute-long short film, but it's not nearly strong enough to sustain a feature-length narrative. The whole show runs out of gas after forty minutes, and then it has to coast on fumes for an additional fifty minutes before it finally, pitifully rolls to a stop.
Brandon pops up in Christmas Town after searching Darcy's apartment the next day, which is an attempt to liven the plot up a little bit, but he doesn't stick around long enough to accomplish anything of consequence. After experiencing a few days of life in Christmas Town, Brandon rightfully confronts Darcy and asks her how she could enjoy living in this shallow fantasy, they have a brief argument, during which he proclaims his love for Darcy, she rejects his advances because she doesn't want anything to change between them despite feeling the same way, then Brandon rejects the false reality he finds himself in and the town spits him back out into the real world. I don't even understand why the writers bothered tossing Brandon into the mix if they didn't have any ideas as to what to do with him once he found himself trapped in Christmas Town. It ends up just feeling like a waste of everybody's time.
Darcy, having just seen her oldest and dearest friend consumed by a black hole in the middle of town, runs to the comfort of Irish Todd's arms, further immersing herself in this unsettling new world the creepy British lady conjured for her, firmly embracing the horror of her magical situation for a while longer. Darcy eventually rejects Christmas Town slowly and entirely on her own, gradually growing bored with the routine and attempting to change things here and there, only to be rebuffed at every turn by the too-nice villagers, who want things to remain just the way they are. Todd proposes marriage and the citizens of Christmas Town dub Darcy "Miss Christmas" and throw a big party with her as the guest of honor, but Darcy gets on her soap box and tells these cheery lunatics what's what, finally reaching her breaking point.
I have no idea why Darcy drones on and on with this speech about how Christmas is special because it comes once a year and that change is a good thing that must be embraced and not shunned, when, for all intents and purposes, the population of Christmas Town only exists to bring Darcy's own fantasies to life. They're not real people with lives of their own when Darcy's not around. They're automatons, wind-up toys set in motion by the whims of a magical madwoman to perform specific tasks from which they cannot deviate under any circumstances. Darcy's speech is wasted on these people, because they can't even truly understand what she's saying, and as soon as she leaves Christmas Town, they will all cease to exist, anyway. Mayor Carmen isn't going to embrace the spirit of Darcy's words and tell her fellow citizens that there are going to be a few changes in Christmas Town after Darcy leaves, because Christmas Town only exists for as long as Darcy wants it to exist.
As Darcy finishes her rant, a hole opens up in the floor and swallows her up, depositing her back in her own house a few days after Thanksgiving, still wearing her festive "Miss Christmas" dress. Rushing out to meet Brandon, she finds him eating breakfast and he claims he never thought he was going to see Darcy again since she seemed so content to remain in Christmas Town, but she tells him that he's a silly goose and they make out in his kitchen for a few minutes while his shredded wheat gets soggy. When Christmas does roll around, Darcy and Brandon are now a happy couple, she invites her boss Todd and her pal Carmen to dinner, and they hit it off like a house on fire. Darcy even encourages her estranged parents to be a little nicer to each other for the holidays as she finally embraces the perfection of an imperfect life.
So I guess the Christmas Town stuff really happened, since both Darcy and Brandon remember it all, not to mention the "Miss Christmas" dress she was wearing when she woke up in her house. That means the creepy British lady is still out there, playing her little games with the lives of unsuspecting mortals without consequence.
I felt nothing while watching Christmas Perfection. Honestly, I felt nothing. I didn't love the movie, nor did I hate it. I don't even like or dislike the movie a little. The movie just washed over me like a wave of apathy, leaving me almost disturbingly indifferent to the whole damned thing. Christmas Perfection just happened for about an hour and a half, then it ended and my mind began to try and delete everything I just watched, so I've tried to hold onto the plot and characters, but now I'm just sitting here wondering why I should bother. The movie wasn't bad, but it wasn't approaching good, either.
The premise is a decent enough one, I think, but not for a feature-length film, as I've already said. And it really would work better as a subtle horror story, with our heroine slowly realizing that her so-called fantasy world is in fact an unchanging nightmare from which she seemingly can't escape. I kept waiting for something sinister to happen in Darcy's perfect world, maybe for some glassy-eyed caroler's grin to waver as she passed by on the winding cobblestone roads of this village that looks like it was conjured from the pages of a fairy tale, some hint that not all was as it seemed in Christmas Town. But everything was as it seemed in Christmas Town. It was just a super nice place where everybody was always happy and every day was Christmas Day.
Darcy needed to be slowly suffocated by the existential dread of being trapped in this perfect world, with these perfect people who all seem to be fixated solely on her well-being and her happiness. There needed to be a twist, dammit! Maybe something similar to the plot of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, but with a holiday flourish. That might have been okay. It would have been something, at least, which is more than what I got out of Christmas Perfection. Is it well made? Well enough, I suppose. Is it well acted? Not really. Did I care at all about what I was watching? Not in the least.
Do I even have feelings anymore, or did this movie kill them all? Can tomorrow's movie please be better than Christmas Perfection? Please? I Don't know how much more of this I can take, and ... oh no, it's only been seven days. How is that possible? How have I been doing this for seven measly days? It feels like two weeks, at least. Man, this is a lot harder than I remembered.
Christmas In July! - I guess Christmas Perfection filmed in Ireland, which is nice, because there are some lovely vistas on display from time to time, but they clearly didn't film in the winter, which is very noticeable. There's a little fake snow strewn about in a few scenes, but it just looks like piles of soap flakes, which it probably really is.
Christmas Magic - The creepy British lady did have magical powers, and she used them to teach Darcy a lesson about how there is no such thing as a perfect Christmas.
VERDICT: REMEMBER FEELINGS?
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| Oh god, it's on every chasnnel! |
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