A HEAVENLY CHRISTMAS
A workaholic becomes an angel-in-training, and she's not a stellar recruit.
Kristin Davis is an angel. I mean Kristin Davis plays an angel in A Heavenly Christmas, which is the movie I watched earlier today. Davis plays Eve Morgan, a career-minded gal in Chicago, Illinois who has allowed her personal relationships to wither on the vine while single-mindedly focusing on her goal of becoming partner at the financial firm for which she works. She's so absorbed in her work that she has to fit a visit with her brother and young nephews in between meetings at Christmastime. But she tries to make up for her continued absence in the lives of her cherished family by ordering her beleaguered personal assistant to buy them extravagant gifts- which is nice, don't get me wrong -but expensive baubles can't hope to replace the void her unavailability has left within the hearts of the people she loves.
Then one evening after working late, Eve slips on the sidewalk while engaged in a business-related phone call and cracks her head open like an egg on the unforgiving concrete. So she's dead (or is she?!).
Waking up in Heaven (which looks suspiciously like a slightly redressed and brightly lit hospital set), Eve is greeted by Pearl, her guardian angel, who must have really been lying down on the job considering how her charge just died, but that's just water under the bridge. Pearl informs Eve that she is, unfortunately, no longer among the living (or is she?!), and now that she's no longer bound to her mortal form it is Eve's fate to become a "Christmas Angel", which I guess is a special kind of angel that only works at Christmastime, so I guess they get the rest of the year off, and that sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me.
Eve's first holiday assignment is a one-time aspiring musician and current owner of a Chicago-area diner named Max Wingford (Eric McCormack, the once and future Will Truman), a decent guy who has been dealt a bad hand as of late. Three years ago, Max and his sister were a musical duo and had just won a knock-off televised talent show called "America's Got Music" and were set to record their debut album for a major record label when tragedy struck: Max's sister and her husband were killed in an automobile accident, leaving him with custody of his niece Lauren, and they've been making it work alone ever since. Lauren knows her uncle still has music in his heart and sees how sad he still is when he thinks she isn't looking, so one night she prays for somebody to help Max find his way back to his passion and bring back his smile.
Little does Lauren know that her prayers have just been answered, and it only took the death of one strange woman to make that happen, because God works in mysterious ways. Returning to the land of the living with a little occasional guidance from Pearl as to how to accomplish her mission, Eve ingratiates herself into the lives of Max and Lauren, getting to know them both while trying to wrap up her duties and get Max back onstage by Christmas Eve, since Christmas Angels apparently can't work past midnight on December 24th, otherwise God would have to pay the angels overtime, then the unions get involved and it's a huge mess.
Unfortunately, Eve can't help but kinda, sorta fall in love with Max since he's such a cool and charming dude, and that's a no-no for angels, since they're dead and fraternization with the living is frowned upon by the big man upstairs. Pearl tells Eve she shouldn't bother getting attached anyway, since after her job is done and she flies back up to Heaven or wherever, Max and Lauren will forget all about Eve and the time they all spent together. The lessons they learned along the way will remain, but the memories of that nice lady who helped them learn these lessons will fade away before sunrise on Christmas Day, which is a bummer for Eve, since she'd been writing "Mrs. Max Wingford" over and over again in her Trapper Keeper for several days now, with a cute little heart dotting the letter i in "Wingford".
A few days before Christmas, Eve finally convinces Max to audition for a big Christmas Eve concert downtown, and she also shows him that he should be fighting for Lauren, who is supposed to go live with her grandparents in Florida after the new year. Max thinks this is the best thing for her, since he's a single guy who spends most of his time running a diner, and he believes that her grammy and grampy have a point when they assure him that they can provide Lauren with a more traditional upbringing down south. But that's all bullshit because Lauren's happy right where she is, with the staff of the diner who have become her family over the past few years, and the kind-hearted uncle she loves more than anybody in the world.
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| This guy. |
Eve opens Max's eyes to this truth that's been staring him in the face the whole time, and on Christmas Eve he tells Lauren's grandparents that he's keeping his niece in Chicago, where she belongs. The old folks are surprisingly chill about this, since Max was so forceful and eloquent while explaining to them how Lauren has everything she needs with him, and as such they didn't really have any kind of cogent counter-argument to offer, so instead they roll over and show their pink bellies to Max in a sign of supplication.
Having finished her assignment with time to spare, Eve is told by Pearl that it's time to come back to Heaven to get fitted for her new wings and halo, but Eve is sad since she's fallen in love with this Max fella and his niece Lauren and doesn't want to go anywhere. It's this moment when Pearl drops the bomb on Eve and informs her that she isn't really dead but in a coma in the hospital...
Didn't I already watch this movie? A career-focused woman dies at Christmastime and becomes the guardian angel of a down on his luck guy who used to dream of being a musician but gave that up after somebody he loved very much was taken from him, so now he just owns a restaurant and is raising a little girl all alone in the big city... there's a big twist when it's revealed that she isn't really dead and her angelic supervisor has been lying to her the entire time... I've seen this movie. I watched it last year and it was called Christmas Magic.
A Heavenly Christmas has the exact same fucking plot as Christmas Magic, and the latter was made in 2011 while the former was only made in 2016, so did the writer of A Heavenly Christmas just rip off Christmas Magic? If so, he obviously learned from the earlier film's mistakes, since A Heavenly Christmas is actually pretty good.
For starters, Eric McCormack is miles better as a romantic lead than that doughy putz Paul McGillion. Eric McCormack has charm and wit and actual screen presence, and he also doesn't look like he should be playing Kristin Davis's father, which is a relief. McCormack has the comedic chops and the dramatic range to play Max Wingford as a man who is using humor to mask the very real pain that's been hounding him since his dear sister died several years back, putting on a brave face for his niece Lauren because he knows she's counting on him now to be whatever she needs him to be while they find their way past this terrible tragedy together. It's a pretty damned good performance, but Eric McCormack's a pretty good actor, so it's not a big surprise.
And Kristin Davis is just an effervescent force of nature in this movie, effortlessly likable from her first moment onscreen, which might be slightly problematic since I think her character is supposed to be a little more cold and detached before she becomes a guardian angel, but I don't really care because I think it's impossible to be mad at Kristin Davis. She's simply one of the most inherently endearing actors out there, the kind of person whose performance could elevate just about any rote material through sheer force of will, instantly brightening up your day when she turns on that thousand-watt smile.
Am I gushing? I think I might be gushing. I've loved Kristin Davis since I first saw Doom Asylum when I was maybe eleven years old. Doom Asylum is one of the most intentionally ridiculous and entertaining slasher movies I've ever seen. It's a movie where the final girl unironically and repeatedly calls her boyfriend "mom" because her mother is dead and he's secure enough in his masculinity that it doesn't bother him a bit. It was actually his idea, come to think of it. Kristin Davis has a supporting role as Jane, one of the final girl's friends who wears a very tight one-piece swimsuit throughout the movie for some reason and my younger self couldn't help but take note of this fact.
Have you seen Doom Asylum? You should see Doom Asylum. Arrow Video recently put it out on blu-ray and it was an instant buy for me. Having watched it recently for the first time in over twenty years, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it didn't just hold up well, but I actually enjoyed it more now than I did when I was a younger
God, I hate "Hungry Eyes". Do you remember "Hungry Eyes"? That awful song that hit it big because it was in Dirty Dancing? Somehow I remember all the lyrics to that aural nightmare, and I don't know why. It's echoing through the darkened recesses of my mind as I type and I can feel it slowly eroding my sanity. God damn you to hell for conjuring this putrid earworm into existence, Eric Carmen!
In Christmas Magic, the big twist that Lindy Booth's character wasn't really dead completely torpedoed the movie for me, but in A Heavenly Christmas, it didn't bother me at all. Most of this is probably due to the fact that the story kept playing coy with the possibility that Kristin Davis's character might actually still be alive. Pearl never tells Eve that she's dead, only that she's in Heaven, and when Eve decides she wants to stay with Max and Lauren, Pearl doesn't turn into a villainous fiend who tries to drag her charge through the pearly gates against her will. Pearl actually knew this was going to happen, since it was part of the plan all along, much to Eve's surprise.
The real twist is that Max's sister and Pearl were working together the entire time to give Max a reason to carry on with his life, and they both knew that the chance to resume his musical dreams wasn't going to be enough to get the job done, since without love what's the point? Eve fell in love with Max because he was easy to fall in love with, and that love is what inspired him to try again with his music. So it's a very sweet twist that makes me go "awww..." and not a malicious twist that makes me want to drown myself in whiskey in an effort to forget I ever saw this movie.
But Pearl warns Eve that when she returns to her body, she and Max and everybody else she interacted with while an "angel" will forget ever having met, so she'll have to start over from scratch with Max and Lauren. It's a tough break, but unfortunately one of the few rules by which all angels must abide, so Eve chooses to go back anyway and take her chances that they'll find each other again because she believes that they're meant to be.
Waking up in the hospital a few days before Christmas, Eve is a changed woman. Despite not remembering her out of body experience, she has conveniently retained all the character growth she had experienced, making more time for her family and less time burning the midnight oil at work, allowing somebody else to take the open partner position at the firm because she realizes she doesn't really want it anymore. Attending a Christmas Eve concert with her brother, Eve experiences déjà vu when Max takes the stage and sings a song he wrote just a few days earlier (when he and Eve were together) and actually finds herself singing along despite having never heard the song before, at least as far as she knows.
After the show, Eve introduces herself to Max and they both fall into an easy rhythm, as if they knew each other in a past life. The next day, Max and Lauren visit Eve at the impromptu Christmas Day party she's decided to throw at her apartment, and as they find a quiet moment together and kiss for what they believe is the first time, Pearl and Max's sister (sorry I keep calling her that, but I can't remember her name) look on, satisfied in a job well done.
So A Heavenly Christmas is a really good movie, with great performances and a story that is, let's say litigiously close to that of an earlier movie I've seen, but it improves upon that particular story in just about every way, correcting essentially every issue I had with Christmas Magic with a pair of fantastic lead performances to boot. Although having sat with the movie for a few hours now, I can't help but wonder if perhaps the story would have worked even better if Max's sister was the only "Christmas Angel" in the movie.
Since she and Pearl were pulling everybody's strings the entire time, I feel like the movie would have been more thematically satisfying if Eve had never "died" and was just visited by Max's sister as a guardian angel to help put her life on track while working as a Heavenly matchmaker to get Eve and Max together for the holidays, always operating behind the scenes to remain hidden from Max and Lauren since it's forbidden for angels to visit those they've loved in life. Think of the dramatic potential there, with Max's sister setting Eve up with her brother but unable to make her presence known to Max lest she break the rules and be forced to return to Heaven without accomplishing her mission of love. I guess I'm saying that the perfect version of A Heavenly Christmas that's in my head would be mostly Christmas Magic but with a dash of Angels & Ornaments thrown in for good measure.
Either way, A Heavenly Christmas is just a wonderful little movie, and any real complaints I have are just nitpicks, so I can recommend this one without reservations.
Christmas Magic - There's angels everywhere in this movie. They're walking through walls and teleporting and shit, and it's all pretty magical, let me tell you.
VERDICT:
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| One look at you and I can't disguise/I've got hungry eyes... |
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