Schlocks-Giving!

A FAMILY THANKSGIVING

An attorney is magically transformed into a wife and mother by a mystical stranger.

Once upon a time, before their annual "Countdown to Christmas" became an all-encompassing entity that entirely consumed their autumn schedule, Hallmark Channel actually made a handful of Thanksgiving-centered movies, if you can believe it. I know it feels like the 24-7, Halloween-to-New Year's Day Christmas movie marathon has somehow been a part of this network's schedule since the dawn of fucking time, but the actual "Countdown to Christmas" is only celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and until a few years back, it was at least contained to November and December, before the merriment inevitably spilled out beyond its borders and infected the month of October like some deadly yuletide plague.

But before all of that madness was unleashed upon our world, the whole "Countdown to Christmas" was a pretty low-key affair, all things considered, with plenty of room to include at least a few non-Christmas-related movies on the network's schedule. And back in 2010, one of those lucky movies was A Family Thanksgiving, starring Daphne Zuniga.

Have you seen 2000's Nicholas Cage-starring The Family Man? Then you've seen A Family Thanksgiving. It's the same basic plot, with the single, career-minded individual given a glimpse of what their life might have been like had they taken a different path in the past via the aid of a vaguely supernatural fairy godmother type. In The Family Man, that magic plot device was played by Don Cheadle, and in A Family Thanksgiving, Faye Dunaway sleepwalks through the role of "Gina", the visibly bored angelic prankster who throws a monkey wrench into Claudia Parks' (Daphne Zuniga) perfectly scheduled life as a highly successful corporate lawyer on the fast track to full-fledged partnership if she can facilitate the sale of a beloved local parkland to a foreign company that will transform it into an eyesore of an industrial mill.

Claudia is perfectly content to do just this, because who gives a damn about a public park when there's money to be made and jobs to be created, am I right? But Claudia'a environmentalist, stay-at-home mom sister Jen, has begun a grassroots movement to save the park, since she takes her kids to the playground every day and thinks it's a pretty neat place. Claudia thinks her sister is a piece of shit because she doesn't have a "real job", choosing to stay home and raise her two children while her husband's out on the mean streets of San Francisco every day earning all the money, and as such she doesn't respect Jen's opinions about, well, anything, so when her younger sister begs Claudia to reconsider her defense of a company that wants to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, Jen's pleading is promptly ignored.

Early one morning, Claudia runs into some dick at her local coffee shop played by Dan Payne (a mediocre actor who's been in like, a million things), and he clumsily attempts to hit on her, but she shuts him down with a quickness and heads off to work, because she doesn't have time for this shit. This is the burden of the career-minded individual. They simply don't have time in their schedule for literally anything other than their work. When you're an employee for a company whose boss tells you in no uncertain terms that if you agree to work for him, that he is the only family you are allowed to have, your father, husband and 2.5 children, there's just no room for such frivolous things as romance or even free time of any sort. Seriously, Claudia's boss tells her this at one point in the movie. If she can't devote herself completely, mind, body and soul, to her law firm, then she has no place among their ranks.

And to be fair, Claudia is pretty on board with this policy, at least until Gina steals her from her comfortable, corporate life and drops her into a twisted parallel universe where she's happily married to that dick who tried to mack on her at the coffee shop and has a pair of children of her own. And worst of all? She's... she's... a stay-at-home mom. I know, it's too horrible to even consider, but this is part of the film's plot, and you'll just have to learn to deal with it. Becoming the one thing she despises more than anything else in the world is quite the harrowing experience for Claudia, as I'm sure you can imagine, finding herself trapped in a strange house with a pair of strange children who claim she's their loving mommy, and the younger one is just constantly shitting her pants.

That's not a joke. The fact that her youngest child, a daughter named Stevedore or something weird, just can't manage to nail that whole "potty training" thing is a subplot in the movie. This little kid is dropping bombs all the goddamn time, and it's the weirdest thing, because I think it's supposed to be a funny running joke, but it's not. It's just stupid. There are even accompanying fart noises every single time this cherubic little scamp shits her pants, and Daphne Zuniga comedically reacts to the surely horrifying odor emanating from this feculent goblin whenever this occurs, but it's just not funny. This is just such a pathetic, lowest common denominator attempt at humor, but I'm sure somebody who watched this movie laughed heartily every time adorable little Stevedore marched up to her beleaguered not-mother with a fresh load in her Pull-Ups. I hope to almighty God that I never meet that person.

The other kid, an older boy named Billy, leaves absolutely no impression on the viewer because he's a bland child actor who is given no quirks. This moppet got off lucky, because at least he won't be remembered throughout his life to friends and family as "that kid who couldn't stop shitting their pants in some terrible made-for-television movie about the lady from Spaceballs learning the true meaning of Thanksgiving or whatever thanks to the magical intervention of a meddling angel played by the witch who wanted to fuck Hart Bochner in 1984's Supergirl". I can't remember the last time I heard a fart noise in anything released by Hallmark. It's so crude.

Come to think of it, this whole movie is sorta crude, a little rough around the edges. Daphne Zuniga says "damn" and "hell" numerous times, which is the Hallmark equivalent of dropping an f-bomb. And there's even a scene where Claudia calls her sister Jen to tell her she can't make it to Thanksgiving dinner for the third year in a row, and Jen is introduced stepping out of the bathroom, toilet flushing behind her while she buttons up her jeans. I've never seen anything like that in one of these movies. It's such a bizarre thing, because there's nothing particularly remarkable about the moment in and of itself. It's just such a mundane, human thing to do, and I've never seen it before in anything made for the Hallmark Channel. Somebody even mentions "getting lucky" and "birthday sex" during a dinner scene, which just blew my mind. I had to double check to make sure I wasn't accidentally watching fucking Lifetime. I guess back in 2010, Hallmark was still figuring a few things out regarding their own standards and practices, because none of this would be allowed if A Family Thanksgiving were being made in 2019.

Unfortunately, none of that TV-PG "risqué" content does anything to help the actual movie, however, which is just a chore to sit through. None of the characters are particularly likable, for a start, which is a pretty big problem. Claudia has no personality of her own, being a simple collection of clichéd mannerisms with no inner life to speak of. She hates children and family and Thanksgiving until the third act when she just does a complete 180 degree turn for no other reason than the plot has dictated that Claudia has to be a completely different person for the climax of the film to work. The random coffee shop guy who plays her husband in Bizarro-world is just an empty suit who treats his not-wife like dirt and takes her for granted, then has the stones to tell her in a particularly touching scene that there's nothing "broken" about their family, and the only thing that needs to change is Claudia's attitude, since she's started expressing interest in re-joining the work force in an effort to find a sliver of personal fulfillment in her life, and this backwards-thinking asshole thinks that's just a step too far.

This is the guy Claudia's supposed to fall in love with? She does, so I guess so. After Gina steals Claudia away from her new happy life as a Stepford Wife, she goes back to work and sandbags the deal with the evil foreign corporation to save the park her sister Jen loves so very much. This gets her fired, so Claudia stakes out the coffee shop where she met the douche bag who is destined to be her husband, and they agree to start dating, because why not, right? The guy's name is Bill Mills, by the way, which would make Bizarro-Donna's last name Mills, as well. Earth-1's Claudia is Parks, and Earth-2's Claudia is Mills. On Earth-1, Claudia is trying to destroy the park to build a mill. On Earth-2, Claudia's trying to thwart the construction of the mill to save the park.Why is this a thing? That's not clever. That's not anything.

But that's just this whole movie in a nutshell, isn't it? A Family Thanksgiving isn't anything. Just a big empty thing taking up ninety-odd minutes of space on some network's schedule. The movie takes place during the Thanksgiving holiday, so there's no Christmas iconography to brighten up the scenery, and since the story is set in San Francisco, there's no colorful autumn foliage, either. It's just a drab, ugly movie with absolutely nothing to offer anybody with a working brain.  And the message the film conveys, that it's seemingly impossible for a modern woman to truly find happiness in this world unless she gets married and has children, is troubling, to say the least. An angel with reality-warping powers comes to our world to convince Claudia that she's only pretending to be happy, and that being a stay-at-home mother is what she really wants, and Claudia just kinda goes along with all of this. That's a little fucked up.

And despite A Family Thanksgiving having nothing to do with Christmas, if you look the movie up on iMDB, you'll notice that the movie's cheap-looking poster inexplicably features a giant Christmas Tree complete with festively wrapped gifts nestled underneath its ornament-laden boughs. What a cynical bait-and-switch tactic that is. Oh, well...

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody!