THE HEART OF CHRISTMAS
A terminally ill boy's family celebrates Christmas early, and their neighbors follow their lead.
What's this? A made-for-TV Christmas movie starring Candace Cameron Bure, made in 2011 for UP TV and not the Hallmark Channel, which also calls itself "the heart of Christmas"? Since watching Candy Cams's holiday movies is like my version of collecting fucking Pokémon, I had to check this out. But The Heart Of Christmas isn't really a Candace Cameron Bure movie, with her role being a relatively minor one in the narrative. She's really only involved to bring the cable television world's lesser equivalent of "marquee value" to the project, using her character as more of a plot device to tell the movie's actual story. As for that story...
The Heart Of Christmas is based on the true story of Dax Locke, a two-year-old boy who died of leukemia in 2009. After fighting this illness for over a year at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee, Dax's doctors regretfully informed his parents that the cancer was aggressively spreading and they were out of options. With four to six weeks left to live, Julie and Austin Locke took their boy home to Illinois to make the most of the time they had left. After realizing that Dax wouldn't live to see another Christmas, his parents decided to give their little boy his very own Christmas on Halloween of that year. They decorated the house inside and out, and even wrapped presents for Dax to open under the tree. The Locke family's neighbors witnessed this heartwarming act and started decorating their own houses, and soon the whole neighborhood was awash with the glow of Christmas two months early, all for the benefit of one special little boy who was running out of time.
The story of Dax Locke spread online via a blog his mother Julie wrote during the course of her son's treatment at St. Jude, gaining national attention during the holiday season of 2009. It's the kind of bittersweet story that is both uplifting because it shows how people can come together for each other and see a light in the darkest of times, and heartbreaking because there is no happy ending for this poor child, who died before he ever had the chance to really live. But a community of generous people made it their mission to ensure that Dax Locke's final memories were happy ones, and that's a rare gift.
The thought of losing a child, of being explicitly told that your son or daughter has an expiration date, is the single worst nightmare of every parent. The struggle of keeping a brave face for your child, doing everything you can to fill their days with love and joy while you watch their health decline, knowing that there's nothing you can do to help them get better, that feeling of utter helplessness, is something no parent should ever have to endure. But it happens every single day.
The Heart Of Christmas is not a good movie. The actors who portray the parents of Dax Locke deliver unnatural performances that feel like they've been ripped right out of the "dramatic reenactment" segments of any random true-life medical drama you might find on TLC during a lazy Sunday afternoon, and most of the supporting actors are a little worse than that, if you can believe it. The movie's story feels fractured because it follows the structure of the real Julie Locke's blog to a slavish degree, presenting a series of events with no narrative connective tissue in a perfunctory, matter-of-fact quality that saps any dramatic energy from what the viewer is being shown.
I know I'm supposed to care about the trials and tribulations of the Locke family, but The Heart Of Christmas doesn't tell its story well enough to ever forge any kind of meaningful connection with them as they struggle with their young son's terminal illness. I empathized with them on a purely superficial level, just as I would empathize with anybody in a similar situation. The experience of watching this movie is like seeing a story on the evening news about a young child who was killed in a hit and run while walking home from school one afternoon. You feel bad for the boy's parents in the moment, and you wish this horrible event had never occurred, but it tends not to stick with for very long. Your brain moves on from generalized tragedy relatively quickly.
The Heart Of Christmas is clearly aiming a little higher than that, but the final product never even comes close to hitting its intended mark because it's just not particularly well-made. The movie feels like a lame slideshow, complete with emotionless, wall-to-wall narration provided by the actor who portrays Julie explaining everything that's happening onscreen when the smarter decision would have been to use this narration sparingly (if at all), since we as an audience would theoretically learn everything we need to know about the scenes we're watching simply by watching the scenes themselves. As such, the narration feels like an intrusion upon the story, provided by a movie that doesn't trust its intended audience enough to understand what they're seeing without a whole lot of hand-holding.
Candace Cameron Bure's character exists in The Heart Of Christmas as a framing device, being a one-dimensional wife and mother who is too busy working full-time to be as present in the lives of her husband and children as she wants to be. Stumbling upon the Locke family and their neighbors decorating the house with festive Christmas decorations while taking her children trick-or-treating on Halloween, Cameron is very curious as to what exactly is going on in her own neighborhood. One overly friendly neighbor gives her a business card with the web address of Julie Locke's blog printed on it and tells Cameron to read the whole story online in lieu of a face-to-face explanation (which just seems rather lazy to me), with the ominous caveat that once she reads Julie's powerful words her life will be forever changed.
Going home, Cameron sets aside some time that she's not supposed to have and reads the Locke family story from beginning to end, with the movie occasionally cutting away from its primary story to quick shots of her reacting to the blog while reading along on her laptop. At the end of the movie, Cameron's character has been shaken to her core by Julie Locke's story, and she realizes that she's been taking her family for granted all this time, so she resolves to take the lessons Dax's parents learned the hard way to heart, changing her ways and never taking a moment with her own children for granted. She also decides that she needs to drag her family to church more often, because they all need to get right with Jesus.
I forgot to mention that The Heart Of Christmas is also a faith-based movie.
It's not as overt with its sermonizing as some other, similar movies I've seen in the past, but these folks sure love praying. In every other scene, somebody is asking Julie or Austin Locke to pray with them for one reason or another, and there's a lot of generalized "God is good" phrasing tossed about throughout the movie, and it eventually reaches a point around the third act where I began to feel the story really trying to sell the BIG MESSAGE regarding the everlasting love of Christ a little too aggressively. I don't want to come down on the movie for trying to spread this message, because a lot of people out there do believe in the big man upstairs, and their faith often helps them through the roughest moments in their lives. I'm just saying that if I'd known in advance that The Heart Of Christmas was a faith-based movie, I wouldn't have watched it, because this kind of story isn't really my cup of tea.
When Candace Cameron just randomly interjects that her family is going to begin going to church every week while telling her husband how they need to stop taking everything for granted and start spending more time with their children together as a family, it just feels a little disingenuous. Of course she is the sister of Kirk Cameron, the one-time child actor and eternal self-righteous Christian fundamentalist who once famously argued that God had to be real because bananas are perfectly designed to be held in our hands, willfully ignorant of the fact that the bananas he used as an example, the bananas we buy in grocery stores everywhere, are the result of generations upon generations of selective breeding of wild banana varieties. In other words, those banana-shaped bananas we all enjoy were bred into existence by intelligent farmers, and not by the guiding hand of a benevolent deity.
But bigoted fundamentalists like Kirk Cameron don't let silly things like facts get in the way of their nonsensical religious arguments. Facts just get in the way when you're trying to force the world around you to conform to your narrow-minded worldview. And unfortunately, Candace Cameron Bure is just as much a believer in the same worldview as her brother, she's just generally a lot quieter about her beliefs because she knows people in general don't really want to to hear about any of that tired shit when they're trying to waste a few hours watching a frivolous movie.
At the climax of The Heart Of Christmas, Candace Cameron returns to the Locke family home along with all of their other neighbors to sing carols and wish little Dax a merry Christmas, and she even shares a quiet moment with Julie Locke where, with tears in her eyes, she gets to tell this person she's never met and whose story she had only familiarized herself with earlier that same day that her beautiful blog has miraculously saved Cameron's entire family in a matter of a few hours, which... sure, why not?
I don't want to belittle the very real and very sad story of Dax Locke, and I also don't want to trivialize anybody's pain. My heart breaks for this poor child, as well as every child who suffers and dies before their time. But this movie does a terrible job of dramatizing this particular story, leaving the audience with nothing substantial to hang onto when the story ends, so it finally resorts to presenting a series of photographs of the real Locke family onscreen in its final minutes in an effort to really twist the knife and leave its audience crying their eyes out when faced with the true face of this tragedy, since nothing else presented before this cruelly manipulative montage could get the job done.
But maybe I'm coming at this whole thing from the wrong angle. Maybe I'm just too cynical to interpret the movie's closing moments as anything else. Surely the people who made The Heart Of Christmas weren't trying to do anything other than show its intended audience the very real boy behind the story they were telling. But after sitting through this poorly acted, poorly made, thinly-veiled ninety-odd-minute commercial for Jesus Christ and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, that final slideshow of little Dax Locke and his family's smiling faces during happier times just felt so cold and calculated, a last-ditch attempt to make people feel something so that they would come away from their experience watching The Heart Of Christmas thinking they'd just seen something profound, and not merely an egregious example of emotional terrorism.
I don't know if sharing this is a good idea, but I feel like I need to explain where my mindset is regarding this movie. One month ago, I lost my dog of thirteen years. He was a pug I named Bucky, because I wanted to think of him as my sidekick, the four-legged Bucky Barnes to my cynical, fat and balding Steve Rogers. Life wasn't always easy with Bucky. He was often pushy and greedy, and I had to clean up more of this dog's messes than I care to remember. But he was my sidekick. He was my pal, a constant, welcome presence in my life. I was never really lonely because I knew Bucky was always around.
Four years ago, he was diagnosed with diabetes, and for a while I thought we were going to lose him. The diabetes caused him to quickly develop cataracts, and he went blind. But we did manage to regulate his blood sugar in time, and he even got his sight back after eye surgery. Over these past four years, he's been plagued by a series of health problems, but he got through every one of them without fail. Bucky was the strongest, most stubborn dog I've ever known. He never made a noise when somebody stepped on his foot, he never complained when I had to inject him with insulin twice each day, and he never acted like he was in any pain, even at times when you knew he had to be.
In October, his health began to rapidly decline. For a brief window, maybe a week or so, I thought he was beginning to improve, that he would beat the odds one more time and I'd have one more Christmas with my friend. I dared to hope, if only just for a moment, that I wouldn't have to say goodbye to this brave little dog so soon.
But in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Bucky's body just gave up on him. I'm not sure exactly what it was that brought this on, but something inside of him was clearly just broken. He couldn't eat, he could barely walk, and he began barking strangely, a distressingly high pitched sound that clearly meant he was in tremendous pain. I knew he was running out of time, and I couldn't do anything for him. I lay next to Bucky on the floor that final night, comforting him as best I could until after dawn. Neither of us slept.
I had to say goodbye to him in the veterinarian's office the next morning, and I held him and looked into his eyes while he was given that final injection. He needed to know that he wasn't alone in those final moments. He needed to know that he was loved. The memories of watching this brave, stubborn little dog suffer so greatly while I sat by, unable to help him, feeling so hopeless as his body failed him and he couldn't understand why, of watching him slip away before my eyes on that cold morning, have haunted me every night since.
I kept seeing Bucky's face while watching The Heart Of Christmas this morning. I remembered the sleepless nights, the endless worrying, the futile prayers for some kind of miracle to spare him this misery. I don't want to compare my loss to the loss of Julie and Austin Locke, but Bucky was part of my family. He meant more to me than most people. I wanted one more Christmas with him. One more birthday. One more warm summer afternoon. On that final night, when I knew that in a matter of hours Bucky was going to be gone, that soon I would be living in a quieter, darker world without this noisy little pug in it, I couldn't help but think of all the things he wasn't going to get to experience again. All the seemingly inconsequential moments that make up a life, those little things that fill in the margins in between all the big events, were all already in Bucky's past.
As I watched this cloying, hollow movie tell its story in such a ham-fisted manner, I kept reliving those final days with Bucky, and those painful memories colored my perception, and accordingly, I almost gave The Heart Of Christmas the benefit of the doubt. I have some small idea as to what the real Locke family has gone through, so I feel for them and I mourn their loss. But this movie is a cheap, manipulative ploy made by careless journeymen who were depending on the audience's own baggage to carry their incompetently told story across the finish line, and I can't forgive them for that.
To take a story like that of the very real Dax Locke and present it in such a blunt and artless manner should be a crime. There is no heart in The Heart Of Christmas. I feel like I've been hit by a fucking truck after watching this devious facsimile of heartwarming holiday cheer wrapped in the cloak of a real-life tragedy like a bullet-proof vest. How could anyone possibly say anything untoward about this touching story? Don't you know it's based on actual events? What kind of monster could hate The Heart Of Christmas?
Damn the producers of The Heart Of Christmas for trivializing this genuinely affecting story with their rotten little movie. Damn them for so boldly counting on their crass little product to manipulate the hapless souls who watch it, tricking them into thinking they're watching something of substance because the underlying story speaks to the inherent goodness within us all, and hoping that will be enough to make people overlook just how much is actually wrong with the movie itself.
People will give it a pass because it's based on a true story, and because they believe the message it preaches is a worthy one, and because they don't want to actually think about what they've just watched. They'll sit through The Heart Of Christmas and they'll cry when the movie wants them to cry, and after it's over they'll move on with their lives. But I can't move on, because what I've just watched has poured salt on an open wound in my psyche. And the movie almost fooled me, I almost gave it a pass myself, but my eyes were opened during that final montage of photographs featuring the real Dax Locke. I saw exactly what The Heart Of Christmas was trying to do, how it was trying to control my emotions in such a casual and thoughtless manner, and I hated the movie for this.
How dare this movie try to make me care for the simplistic and vacant story it had told by throwing reminders of a real tragedy in my face, telling me with its claw hammer-to-the-skull approach that I was supposed to be invested in the terribly written and executed fictionalized narrative I had just watched because a real kid died back in 2009. Forcing me to cry for the tragic loss of this real family in the final moments of your vapid little screed about how all families need Jesus in their lives so he can carry them through their darkest moments is too much for me. I can't do this anymore.
I hate what The Heart Of Christmas has done to me today, how it's twisted up my own grief in an effort to make me care about the criminally ineffective way it presented its own story. I should have just watched another brain-dead romantic comedy on Hallmark Channel this morning. I should have listened to my instincts and stayed the hell away from this movie. But I made the choice. I watched The Heart Of Christmas, and now I'm so angry I can barely see straight. My grief keeps circling around to rage directed at this movie for using that grief to nonchalantly pull my strings with its sad bastard bullshit.
But I guess I've been saying again and again how disappointed I've been at so many of these movies for refusing to deal with real emotions when they build stories about tragedy and loss. This is what I get for blowing all that hot air. This is karma coming back to bite me in the worst way, trying to force me to wallow in my own misery. I feel like I've let this whole thing get away from me today, like I've just been rambling for paragraphs without making any kind of cogent points. I've become unreasonably angry at a cheap made-for-television movie, and it's clouding my judgment. How the hell did this happen? Why am I letting this get under my skin?
It's Christmas Eve, and I'm so sick and tired of this manufactured bullshit right now that all I want to do is burn Christmas to the ground.
Maybe I should.
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