A TIMELESS CHRISTMAS
Charles Whitley travels from 1903 to 2020 where he meets Megan Turner and experiences a 21st Century Christmas.
Time travel. That's why I decided to watch this damned movie. I'm a sucker for time travel stories. The concept of time travel in movies usually pushes the filmmakers to get a little more ambitious than they usually would, to step outside their comfort zones and try something a bit different. At least for a few minutes, when the plot inevitably brings a character from the past into "the future", meaning our present, because everybody's looking at the bottom line, and these clowns have to rent those costumes and vintage cars by the hour.
A Timeless Christmas is particularly underwhelming on that front, as we really only see two indoor locations in the distant past of Cutter Springs, New York in 1903: a brief scene in a very plain-looking auction house and the palatial estate of one Mr. Charles Whitley (Ryan Paevey), which also serves as the primary location for the rest of the story set in the year 2020. And in 2020, Whitley's house has become a museum, preserved almost to the smallest detail for over a hundred years, which is awfully convenient, if you ask me.
Whitley is a self-made millionaire, a futurist and inventor who owns a steel mill in Cutter Springs and has found a mortal enemy in local rapscallion Edward Moran, a rival industrialist who also has eyes for Whitley's beloved fiancé, Eliza Parker. Never mind the fact that Whitley has no time for his bride-to-be, or Christmas, or frivolity of any kind. He's a stuffed shirt who thinks only of the future and building his legacy in this picturesque little town that we never really get to see, but it's really lovely and we'll just have to take people's word for it. Whitley wins an inoperative ornate clock at auction and brings it home to repair, intending it to be a gift for Eliza, a perfectly wonderful lady he doesn't really care all that much about, but a person his age is expected to be married with children, so he chooses to play the part and enter into a marriage of convenience with somebody for whom he feels essentially nothing more than a benign fondness. I'm sure that will work out just great.
Cracking open this clock, Whitley realizes the device doesn't work because one of the springs seems to have been deliberately cut, which certainly seems odd, but he replaces the sabotaged spring and gives it a good winding after reading aloud the inscription engraved on the side of the timepiece, something about finding your true love when you wind the clock during something called "the Christmas moon", which isn't really a thing. I had to look it up since the movie kept making a big deal out of this supposed phenomenon, but there's really no such thing as a "Christmas moon". Somebody in the movie explained its significance as being the second full moon in the month of December, but that's just a Blue Moon. Nobody calls a Blue Moon in December a "Christmas moon". They just call it a Blue Moon. But in A Timeless Christmas, the "Christmas moon" is a magical occurrence that, when coupled with the winding of a magic clock, will bring somebody to their true love, wherever (or whenever) they may be.
Sure. Why not?
Whitley sips a glass of sherry one chilly December evening, thinks briefly about how much he hates that bastard Moran and can't wait to crush him like a bug in the new year after he marries a woman he doesn't love and ensures he and his new bride will surely be miserable for the rest of their lives as they remain together out of a sense of propriety, winds his newly-repaired clock, stares at it for a moment, then promptly passes out, waking up in his office the next morning... in the year 2020! Holy shit! That stupid-looking clock actually worked! Whitley wanders downstairs in a daze to discover a gaggle of oddly-dressed strangers loitering in his house, being led on a tour by a woman he's never met before who claims to be his beloved maid Rosie, but Whitley will have none of this madness, storming off to fetch the local constabulary forthwith.
The "maid" is actually Megan Turner (Erin Cahill), director of the Charles Whitley Museum and great-great-granddaughter to Whitley's actual beloved maid. She thinks this guy's crazy and wants him locked up or something, but as he's being dragged off by the sheriff he implores Megan to find the secret compartment in his office, hidden under a rug, where he stored his old journals and a random blueprint. Amazingly, nobody in over a century has ever found this "secret compartment", despite it standing out like a sore thumb among the floorboards of Whitley's office. The seam where the supposedly hidden door lies has a gap of around 1/4 inch surrounding it on all sides, for pity's sake. Nobody has moved this rug in one hundred and seventeen fucking years? I don't buy it.
And when the sheriff loads Whitley into the back of his SUV, the man acts like he's hopping in his horse-drawn carriage for a trip to the local market. It's a damned automobile with anti-lock brakes and satellite radio and heated seats, and he doesn't seem to give a single shit about this miracle of the modern age into which he's firmly ensconced. This just bothers me. A Timeless Christmas never really bothers with a lot of the fish-out-of-water shenanigans that you would expect with this kind of plot. Even Journey Back To Christmas, for all its numerous faults, played with this trope to greater effect.
Whitley briefly watches TV, loses interest, then falls asleep. He grows outraged when he's informed how much money his pizza dinner with Megan actually costs. He marvels at the wonder of the smartphone for ten seconds. That's basically all we've got to work with in this movie. Whitley talks and acts like a stuck-up prick, which I guess is supposed to signify that he's "from the past", but that's pretty much it. He doesn't have any backwards views regarding women or minorities, because despite being more period accurate, these character flaws would make him less than an ideal romantic foil for his maid's descendant, and movies like these can't afford to give their leads any real nuance.
Charles Whitley gets along quite well with the 21st Century, sort of like Hugh Jackman's similar character in Kate & Leopold, even though that movie was much better in terms of character development, production design, wardrobe, screenplay, acting, directing, etc. Although Kate & Leopold posits that Leopold must return to his rightful time period in order to preserve the space/time continuum, and according to A Timeless Christmas, Charles Whitley just disappeared one December evening and everything basically worked out for the best regardless. That's got to be a blow to the old ego.
Whitley realizes that after his disappearance, his steel mill shuttered and his assets were all seized by the government since he had no heirs, and his only remaining legacy is the Charles Whitley Museum, which is strangely beloved by many. He even learns that his arch rival Edward Moran went on to marry Eliza Parker, and they spent 66 blissful years together. In Whitley's absence, Moran became an adored philanthropist and cornerstone of the Cutter Springs community, building a vast legacy that includes a library, a university, and a steel mill that remains open to this day, being the town's primary employer. Whitley learns all of this and admits that he gravely misjudged the man he believed to be his enemy, even finding himself cheered to know that Eliza found the love of her life after all. Forgetting about returning to where he supposedly belongs, Whitley looks around and thinks perhaps he can make a home for himself in the 21st Century, if he can find that special somebody.
Meanwhile, Megan finds that dreaded clock Whitley has been searching for in a display case at the university as she's waiting for an interview for a tenured teaching position. Oh right, Megan comes from a family of teachers, and her parents expect her to follow in their footsteps, but she likes running the museum, and it doesn't matter. She decides in the end to remain at the museum, and her parents are thrilled because all they want is for their daughter to be happy, and they both think she'd be really happy if she jumped that hunk Chuck Whitley's bones on Christmas Eve. There's no real drama in this sub plot, because there's no real drama in any of the film's plots.
Only Megan ever learns the truth about Charles, and nobody's ever at all curious about this strange dude and where (or when) he might have come from. Whitley never has any real trouble adjusting to life in the year 2020, despite being over a century out of step with everybody else. He never has any great urge to return to the year 1903, and in the end when he decides to finally stay it doesn't really land with any weight because he has no reason to return. It's all just so... amiable. No big drama. No real stakes. Just a guy from 1903 who falls in love with a gal from 2020, and then they stay together. That's it. Don't bother to wonder how this guy's going to build a life for himself in the 21st Century without any proof of identification or a social security number. Christmas magic brought him to the love of his life, and that's all that matters.
That's it, really. That's all there is to A Timeless Christmas. It's a threadbare plot competently directed and acted, and... and I actually enjoyed it. I'm still not sure why, to be honest. It's really not that great of a movie. But I enjoyed the experience. Ryan Paevey and Erin Cahill had really solid romantic chemistry, and they carried the movie on their shoulders like heroic firefighters rescuing unconscious victims from a burning apartment building.
The scene where Whitley learns what happened to Eliza and Edward in his absence is what really turned me around. You can watch a range of emotions cross Paevey's face as his character comes to grips with the fact that the man he believed to be an underhanded scoundrel to be a truly beneficent figure and the true love of his one-time fiancé. Whitley realizes that the legacy he thought to be building for himself in 1903 didn't really matter, because his true legacy lay in the future all along. It's actually a pretty damned good scene, and it really makes up for a lot of the movie's earlier shortcomings.
The final scene, when Whitley decides to stay in 2020 with Megan, is also quite good. He tells Megan he finally understands why the clock's previous owner cut the spring that he repaired. He surmises that the cut spring served as an insurance policy, to prevent the clock from working and potentially whisking the previous owner away from the love they found once upon a time, then he snips the spring himself and asks Megan what she's doing for New Year's Eve. It's a sweet moment, and a pretty fine way to end a movie like this. I was happy with A Timeless Christmas, not really despite the lack of drama, but actually because of it. The movie told the story it wanted to tell without any bullshit, and it told the story well enough. Bully for you, A Timeless Christmas. You managed not to ruin my day.
It's a Schlock-Mas miracle!
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