OUR CHRISTMAS LOVE SONG
After plagiarism allegations, a country star spends Christmas with her estranged family.
Today's feature shares some eerie similarities to the movie I reviewed yesterday, the name of which I have already forgotten. A Gander Mountain Christmas, I think it was called... Tater Salad Christmas, maybe... but I'm getting sidetracked. Our Christmas Love Song is about a country music star at a crossroads in her life, returning home to her quaint hometown to spend the holidays with her family, and finding not only that elusive spark of creativity hidden among the inviting comforts of home, but also rekindling a dormant love affair with the one that got away. Only the "one that got away" in this movie owns and operates a local tavern and isn't a snow plow-driving mayor. Aside from that, these two movies might as well be identical twins. Or at least fraternal twins. Maybe Irish twins.
Shit, that's racist, isn't it? Is it no longer permitted to use the phrase "Irish twins"? I apologize for referring to the films Our Christmas Love Song and A Baxter Mountain Christmas as "Irish twins" to any Irish or Irish-adjacent folks who may or may not be reading this holiday-oriented blog post.
My point stands that these two movies are very, very similar to one another. Both Our Christmas Love Song and Sweet Mountain Christmas (that's the name!) even showcase the singing talents of actors known for their musical prowess (Alicia Witt and Megan Hilty, respectively) specifically playing country music stars, despite neither artists being previously associated with the genre. Sure, the two films aren't exactly alike, but isn't it just a little bizarre that both of these movies were produced and released by two different networks (Hallmark and Lifetime) in the same year? It's like a Deep Impact/Armageddon or a Dante's Peak/Volcano kind of situation, only not nearly on the same cinematic scale. Now I'm not suggesting one movie plagiarized another in any way, although it's a little funny that the concept of plagiarism itself is a major plot point in Our Christmas Love Song, isn't it? A little too funny, perhaps? Is Hallmark Channel trolling the producers of Sweet Mountain Christmas? The world may never know.
But the answer is yes. Yes, they are. Allegedly.
Our story's protagonist, Melody Jones (Alicia Witt) is coming home to Madison, Indiana for the holidays, but not because her career is in a rut. Far from it, in fact. Her latest single, a self-penned holiday ditty called "Heart of Christmas" is tearing up the charts, and she just performed her brand-new hit song at The Grand Ole Opry, so Melody's star is most definitely not in decline. The problem lies with some uncanny similarities between her new song and a song written and performed by her old friend and musical mentor, Connie White (Karen Kruper), called "Heart of Tennessee". Connie's husband/manager Burt (some asshole) points out these similarities and immediately calls Melody's manager, threatening to sue her client if she doesn't pony up some serious dough by Christmas Eve.
But Melody actually wrote her song when she was a teenager, even performing it at Madison's annual Christmas concert a few years before moving to Nashville to pursue her dreams of country music stardom. Only she can't find the sheet music proving her song's provenance, and surmises it must be somewhere back at her childhood home, so Melody heads to Madison for the holidays, getting to spend some quality time with her loving family along the way.
Enter Chase Madsen (Brendan Hines, the guy who played Superian in Amazon's beloved and recently canceled The Tick), proprietor of The Green Dragon Tavern, Madison's favorite local watering hole and Melody's former flame. They broke up once upon a time because... I... I don't really remember. I guess he just didn't want to interfere with her career? The point is Chase stayed home in Madison while Melody moved to Nashville, and neither of these goofy bastards has managed to find a lasting love with anybody else in the intervening years, which might be a tiny hint that these two are meant for each other, after all.
These two actors have an easy rapport with one another, and as a viewer you immediately believe that their characters have an adorable shared history. It doesn't hurt that Brendan Hines has an affable sort of poor man's Paul Rudd charm that can sell some pretty banal dialogue, which he must do pretty frequently in this movie. He actually outshines Alicia Witt on more than one occasion, who still does admirable work throughout, but there are a few instances where her line delivery lands a little flat and/or disingenuous. At least she never attempts a shaky "country" accent in this movie, unlike some other actors I refuse to mention. I can't really blame Witt for these small issues, however, because as I just mentioned much of the film's dialogue is pretty plain and unimaginative. Most of the other actors struggle to leave an impression because their characters are just woefully underwritten.
Case in point: Melody's manager, a character whose name I literally can't remember. She's featured in two early scenes, has maybe five lines of utterly perfunctory dialogue that serve almost entirely as exposition for the benefit of the audience alone, since Witt's character obviously already knows everything her manager is telling her, then she's never seen again. Melody mentions offhand late in the movie to somebody that her manager is back home, spending the Christmas holiday with her own family, and that's the last we hear about this complete absence of a character.
Now I'm not going to say that Danny in Sweet Mountain Christmas was a completely three-dimensional character, but the story, coupled with the actor's performance, gave Danny some much-needed depth and made him feel like he had a semblance of an off-camera life. And it didn't take a great deal of effort to flesh out this tertiary supporting character who helped enrich the entire movie in a small way. And unfortunately, this is where Our Christmas Love Song comes up short time and time again.
Melody and Chase feel alive and vibrant whenever they're onscreen, but basically nobody else in the movie manages to do so. Connie White is a major presence in Melody's life, the person who took Melody under her wing and started her career in country music, and the movie wants us to believe that these two have a deep and close relationship, but that bond never materializes onscreen. Even during the two scenes in which these actors share screen time, their characters never feel like they're on the same level. And sure, some of the blame for the lack of depth in Connie's character can be placed on the shoulders of the actor portraying her, but the screenplay simply didn't have much to offer the actor in the first place, and the director seemingly never tried to wring a better performance out of his actor on set, so it's really just a failure all around.
When these two characters come together, we're meant to feel the years-long bond they have shared, but it ultimately just ends up feeling like one actor (Witt) trying to engage with the flimsy material and turning in a believable performance despite the shortcomings of the story, and another (Kruper) just reciting her memorized dialogue and not looking directly at the camera. This is pretty par for the course among the supporting actors in Our Christmas Love Song, I'm sad to say. Although the movie is often lovely to look at, so that's a mark in the "plus" column. There are some genuinely lovely holiday landscapes to be found, and nearly every featured location is festively decorated without appearing garish. Sure, there is some dodgy-looking fake snow scattered here and there, but it's hardly a deal breaker.
And the movie features all of the hits: Christmas Tree shopping, a cookie-baking montage, A town-wide Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, tree trimming, etc. The only thing Our Christmas Love Song is missing is an ice skating scene, and I was genuinely surprised when I realized that had been left out, because otherwise I would have won my game of Hallmark Channel Christmas Bingo.
Our Christmas Love Song even ends in a distressingly similar manner to Sweet Mountain Christmas, with Melody forsaking the opportunity to perform with country music legend Hunter Hamilton (who?!) on Christmas Eve in order to perform a duet with Chase at Madison's big holiday concert, telling her beau that she's moving back home where she belongs, still intending to record and tour with new music while building a new life with the one who (almost) got away, finding that she can have the best of both worlds without sacrificing any of the benefits of either.
Oh, and she finds the sheet music for "Heart of Christmas" behind a framed gold record hanging in her late father's study thanks to remembering the words to some shitty rhyme he apparently used to say all the time, presenting this evidence to Connie and her greedy goober of a husband, who calls off his threat to sue, and Melody sets her old friend up with the opportunity to sing with Hunter Hamilton on his nationally televised concert in her stead, because she's the bigger person in this scenario. And it all works out in the end, because Melody's family is streaming Madison's annual Christmas program live on the internet, so that Melody's fans around the world don't miss out on the premiere of her latest, fresh out of the oven holiday single, "Your Name Here", another uncomfortably similar element shared between this movie and Sweet Mountain Christmas.
Come on, man. There's no way this is entirely coincidence. No fucking way.
Either way, in this clash of titans, there is always a winner and a loser. Deep Impact served as a more highbrow, intelligent answer to the loud, boisterous inanity of Armageddon, just as Dante's Peak was a more leisurely paced, "realistic" take on a cataclysmic volcanic eruption, as opposed to the frankly ludicrous melodrama of Volcano, with its ham-fisted answer to racism being covering everybody in volcanic ash so that nobody can tell the color of anybody's skin. So is Our Christmas Love Song the Deep Impact to Sweet Mountain Christmas's Armageddon? The Dante's Peak to its Volcano?
Probably. But I had more fun watching Armageddon, so... there's that.
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