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amplesalty · 4 years

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Christmas 2019: Day 9 - The Christmas Hope (2009)

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

Nine months of gestation!

On reflection, I can see that the past two entries on this years list have been a bit of a downer. Far too centered in talk of mental illness, depression and the like. Let’s perk things up a bit with...*checks notes*...shit.

Right now millions of people across the planet (or galaxy as it were) are enjoying/not enjoying the end to a very different cinematic trilogy. Me? I have a long overdue wrap up to attend to that started many moons ago thanks to a certain little film about a certain pair of shoes based on a certain song. Quite why I’m doing this know I don’t know. I can only suspect that I’ve seen one too many reflective social media posts now that we’re reaching both the end of a year and decade, perhaps I’m subconsciously wanted to sort out unfinished business, hence looking at stuff like this, Christmas Story Live and the Christmas Carol Musical.

The movie starts with Traci here recording herself singing a song before commenting ‘American Idol here I come!’. The camera pans all through her house looking at pictures of her daughter, soppy picture frames with ‘I LOVE YOU MOMMY’ written on them and no sign of a boyfriend/husband so she has the basis for a feel good story if she does make it on. Might need to jazz it up somewhere along the line if we’re to really tug at the audiences heartstrings but it’s a start. This actress would go on to play Vicky in the live action Fairly Odd Parents movies so that’s another tie in to a previous entry. Apparently there’s a third one of those and I’m not sure if I’ve seen it.

She literally runs into a couple on her way to work, knocking their teddy bear to the floor which they graciously give to her when she mentions that her daughter would love it. This is Nathan and Megan from The Christmas Blessing, sadly both recast. Actually, maybe that’s a good thing. Not sure I’d be able to take NPH seriously after all those H&K movies recently. Nathan is a bit more of a ginger this time around, rather than the dirty blonde thing NPH has going on. Megan is expecting and they have about a bajillion teddies so they don’t mind passing one along. Hey, someone probably got you that as a gift. Be grateful!

Meanwhile, the police arrest a drug dealer and find she has a malnourished baby in her apartment so in swoop child services to save the day.

Mr. T feels your pain.

I hope you weren’t getting too attached to Traci by the way because about fifteen minutes into the film, shortly after making a heartfelt promise to her daughter that they were going to decorate the Christmas tree once she got home from work and that she had a very special present for her this year, she promptly gets run over.

Have you ever crossed the road, and looked the wrong way? A car's nearly on you? So what do you do? Something very silly; you freeze. Your life doesn't flash before you, cause you're too fucking scared to think, you just freeze and pull a stupid face.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised given this is one of those melodramatic, Hallmark movies and this whole series has been overly morbid up to this point but it still kinda threw me. Here we are all nice and happy, Traci’s going about her day and there’s a nice Christian, soft rock Christmas ballad playing in the background and then BOOM, SUV to the face.

Then it cuts to her daughter, Emily, going through the Christmas decorations before settling on a angel which she ponders on for a moment before looking to the heavens as she’s having this moment of intuition.

But when child services pop their head in again to take her away, they find that all their usual helpers are fully booked for the holidays so what else can they do? One of the workers, Patricia, has no choice but to take her home. It’s not by the book but, damnit, it’s Christmas and we’re going to give this kid some degree of stability. By sheer coincidence, Patricia happens to be the mother of one Sean Addision who was the kid that died following a car accident the start of Christmas Blessing which caused Nathan to have his Dr Cox crisis of confidence moment. These movies are just ridiculous to how everyone's lives are so intertwined.

Like, up to this point, we met Traci who then bumped into Nathan and Megan, before going to work and having a young, troubled teen skip out on his bill but Patricia was in at the same time and tipped really generously to make up for it. That same kid then pretty much steals her bag following accident and also knew Sean who was mentoring him in one of those Big Brother mentoring programs.

Patricia’s husband, Mark, is played by James Remar, he of The Warriors fame and, more pertinent to this blog, he was in the Miracle on 34th Street remake and one of the segments in the Tales from the Darkside movie. Theirs is a very frosty relationship currently owing to the death of Sean, there’s no sense of chemistry between these two and I’m surprised they’re actually as close in age as they are, Remar only 4 years older. Feels like there’s more of like a 10-20 year gap. He gets on very well with Emily though, they have this instant rapport whilst Patricia is more distant which is understandable. She obviously has to keep things professional as she can’t get too attached to these kids and doesn’t want them getting attached to her, plus there’s probably ongoing issues from Sean’s death, maybe she’s not prepared to slip back into that motherly role again. Which you can tell by that dinner she serves; rolls of wafer thin ham, cherry tomatoes, carrot sticks and celery? That’s just what all the kids want.

At least she’ll read Emily a bedtime story, ‘I’ll Love You Forever’ which documents a mother who sings to her song that she’ll love him forever, even when he becomes a rebellious teenager who thinks it’s lame for her to do that. This leads to the very strange visual of him cradiling her in his arms on a rocking chair and singing it to her when she’s old and frail, a mirror image of how she first sang to him when he was a baby. This really hits Patricia in the feels as she felt distant from Sean as he seemed closer to his father, wanting to impress him by picking the sports and classes he thought his father wanted him to take. She even seems to partly blame her husband for their sons death as he switched around his work schedule to come home early for Christmas, which in turn led to Sean coming home early too. If he’d just come home on the day he intended this never would have happened! That seems grossly unfair. Even when she passed along a family heirloom in the form of her fathers watch, he was unimpressed and even managed to break it whilst horsing around with a friend in his room.

The massively tangled web of these characters comes into play again when Megan is going through some things and finds an old Christmas gift which sends Nathan into some sort of Nam flashback. Turns out Sean was holding it as he was wheeled into the hospital and Nathan had taken it upon himself to make sure it found its way to its intended destination but he just forgot about it over the years. I actually went back to check this and ,yeah, that is in the previous movie. I had this whole thing pegged as just a series of independent stories with loose connections throughout but no, apparently they had whole plot points planned out in advance.

Nathan and Patricia do interact several times as she takes the crack baby to the hospital to be checked up. There’s this strange level of frustration akin to An American Tail where Nathan keeps getting little flashbacks in his head but he’s never quite able to connect the dots.

But of course he eventually does and the present turns out to be, say it with me now, the broken watch! Perhaps more meaningful though is the accompanying note which reveals Sean intended to study social work at college because he wanted to help kids just like his mom. This seems to serve as a form of closure for her but I feel like you could already start drawing that sort of conclusion. I mean, the guy was already in that Big Brother program so you were clearly already having some sort of influence on him.

Strike two of the big overly emotional finale comes when it’s suggested Emily puts the angel atop the tree which promptly makes her bolt out of the room. Everyone is left thinking they’ve upset her but she comes back clutching a picture which she wedges onto the tree, a picture not of her mother as I had suspected but of Sean. She says he is her angel and she feels like whenever she’s felt all alone, he’s been there to help here. Awww.

The big showstopper though is the troubled kid finally coming good and, after realising who everyone is in this story, returns Traci’s bag to the Addison home. Inside was her camera and on that camera was the video from the very start of the movie. Turns out she wrote that song as a Christmas gift for Emily.

Though, I feel the writers fell short of a grand slam here. Near the end, Nathan shares the story with Megan about giving the gift to Sean’s parents and how it gave him his own little bit of closure after how much Sean’s death affected him back then. Megan goes into labour shortly afterwards and I was fully expecting them to decide to call the baby Sean but no such luck.

Christmas Blessing was lacking a little bit in the big emotional ending so it feels like this one is making up for that and then some. It’s not as cheesy as that song from Christmas Shoes but still delivers that overly sentimental feeling. Again, it’s something I am loathed to admit but it got to me a little bit. This whole movie has that same morbid energy as the other two but in a slightly different way, the first two felt like you spent the entire movie watching people who were on deaths door before something happened at the end to soften the blow. Here they just give you the death right up front and everyone is left to cope with the aftermath and reflect on how deal with it. It’s like an encapsulation of everything that Nathan has gone through over these movies, facing death in his personal and professional life but coming to terms with it.

You know what’s bullshit though? No sign of the eponymous Christmas Shoes anywhere. They’re even in the box of stuff that Megan finds the old Christmas present in. How can you make this your big conclusion and not bring them back? You brought them back the last one, you couldn’t have Megan tag along and give them to Emily at the end as some sort of passing of the torch? It was her destiny, Nathan got them for his dead mother, Charlie got them for his dead mother, those shoes have been robbed of their purpose in life.

#Christmas 2019 #The Christmas Hope

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