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It’s interesting that the last batch of ‘Countdown to Christmas’ movies included The 5-Year Christmas Party, which took place over the course of five years and was more charming than expected. This new batch includes Our Holiday Story, which takes place in the present but tells a ten-year love story through flashbacks … and boy can you feel thos ten years slowly chug on by.
The story begins as young couple Gavin (Gavin Langelo) and Joanna (Sydney Scotia) are set to meet up for the holidays at Joanna’s parents’ house, with Gavin’s parents also due to arrive on Christmas Day. Gavin arrives first, and Joanna has to call him with the unfortunate news that her train has been delayed, then cancelled and she’s going to be a little late. She’s only about three hours away and Gavin offers to come pick her up, but she insists he stay there — with the people he’s just meeting for the first time — and she’ll find a way there before Christmas (mind you, this is supposed to be about three days before Christmas so if she can’t make a three hour trip before then…). Before she hangs up, she warns Gavin not to ask her parents … and her phone went dead. Apparently she has a habit of not charging her phone regularly (and it makes the most bizarre sound when it shuts down). Feeling a bit awkward and stranded himself, Gavin tries to make some small talk with Dave (Warren Christie) and Nell (Nikki DeLoach), asking them how they met. It’s a story they seem more than eager to share even after ten years (and, of course, you have to know this is the question Joanna was trying to warn Gavin not to ask). And for poor Gavin, and the rest of us, it takes them about 72 hours to fully tell the story. During one of their breaks, Gavin admits that he is ready, after nine months, to tell Joanna he loves her, and when Joanna finally gets a ride home, she tells the man driving that she wants to tell Gavin she loves him. And when she finally arrives and Gavin gets his moment … she bizarrely freaks out, making him think that her tardiness and crazy reaction means she doesn’t love him so maybe he should leave (and tell his parents not to come as well, because that would be really awkward if they showed up and he wasn’t there). But can Dave and Nell quell Joanna’s fears and get Gavin back for Christmas? The real question is — do we care?
Most of this season’s Hallmark Christmas movies have been very enjoyable, some more than others but there haven’t been any real dogs … until now. That may be a bit harsh, but this 84 minute movie feels like it would never end, and the way the story bounces back and fourth between the present and ten years earlier, and no real sense of what day it is in the present, it begins to feel a little like Inception without the crazy visuals. I honestly paused it halfway through, not even knowing it was only halfway through, thinking it had to almost be over. It was like a fever dream that was never going to end. Part of the problem as well is that there really seems to be no attempt at making the actors look younger or older. DeLoach looks exactly the same in the past and present. Christie occasionally has a few flecks of grey on the sides of his head when his hair is shorter and in his beard stubble, but it’s taken so long to get to the end that his hair seems to have grown out to the same length it was in the past AND lost all of its grey (stubble included). The solution to making Scotia, who is 26 in the present, look 16 in the past is … a ponytail. At some point you’re going to exclaim, ‘Am I taking crazy pills?!’, because the train this story is running on keeps jumping the track.
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Now, on the plus side, most of the performances are just fine. Christie has to play Dave as absent-minded (always misplacing his phone and being easily distracted), passionate, and a bit short-tempered when his request for funding from the town for the Christmas event his family had founded years ago is being denied (unaware that the woman he ‘met cute’ on the train is the same woman in control of the money). He does them all well, and through his performance you can see that Dave clearly loves both his daughter and his wife. DeLoach is also fine as Nell (who is Joanna’s step-mother, by the way), clearly in love with Dave and sees Joanna as a daughter, but she has a habit of doing a weird thing with her mouth every time she’s supposed to show some kind of consternation, becoming unintentionally comical when she’s eating a slice of cucumber. The director really should have brought this ‘face pulling’ to her attention (and if you’ve seen any of her other work, is this just a thing she does? Let us know in the comments below). Scotia is also good as Joanna, actually being the more adult person in the household, guiding and pushing her dad to not give up on the Christmas event and to keep pursuing Nell even after they keep passing by each other in town and especially after he finds out who she really is. Her reaction to Gavin about to declare his love is insane, but that was just a badly written moment that Scotia had to deal with, and she did the best she could. Langelo does the awkward stuff with Dave and Nell really well, and he was totally convincing when he told Nell and Joanna’s mother how he felt, and you do get a little pang in your heart for him when she freaks out on him. So the four main actors, and the supporting cast, all do wonderful jobs so the interminable feeling of this movie never ending is not their fault at all.
The production design is also very good, very Christmasy, and director Jason Bourque manages to juggle a lot of moving pieces. All of the good work put into the film is just let down by Joie Botkin’s script that loses its focus by all the storytelling and time jumping to the point where you have no idea when anything is happening (Botkin also wrote the much more enjoyable His & Hers). Our Holiday Story is not a complete trainwreck, but it is saved by some winning performances from its lead actors. This one may only be for the fans of Christie and DeLoach.
Our Holiday Story has a run time of 1 hour 24 minutes, and is rated TV-G. The film is available On Demand and is streaming on Peacock.
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