No Festival, but a Fancy Dress Ball

Ummm. It’s a good thing this girl is an antique dealer and not a detective. She, Amelia, is a successful and well-known owner of a fine antique shop in London. She is looking to expand to Paris or Amsterdam but needs more capital to do so. To that end, she is on a mission to find the other half of a valuable locket her dead mother bought for oodles of money. Once the two pieces of the locket are reunited it will be worth lots more. Lots and lots. Like Sotheby’s level. The locket was supposedly made for Queen Elizabeth I by her true love, Robert Dudley. More importantly, she wants to find this for her mother’s sake because it was her mother’s fondest desire and she worked hard, unsuccessfully, to do so.

As the movie opens, Amelia has learned that the other half of the locket may be in Massachusetts. The locket was given to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and passed down. Her descendant gave half of it to her forbidden lover when they were sadly parted. He was a poor carpenter and she was a rich Lady and he left for America to prove himself worthy of her. We know he did because he founded a whole town in Massachusetts called Wilmaton, Wilma being his lost love’s name. Why, I wonder. She tragically died in a fire back in England and Jacob changed his name to James and married another woman named Jane.

So off Amelia goes to Massachusetts to find the half of the locket that James took with him. She meets the sheriff who is the love interest. The little town of Wilmaton, which Amelia soon discovers has antiques coming out the ying-yang that she can appraise for free, is, like all Hallmark small towns, not thriving. Amelia gets involved while having all kinds of adventures seeking out the locket with the help of the sheriff. She gets arrested breaking into the town archives, meets James and Jane’s only living ancestor, Enid, finds a portrait obscured by smoke damage, goes to Boston to have it restored, finds out someone is spying on her, and Enid’s place is ransacked. Is someone trying to beat Amelia to the locket? All indications point to “yes”.  And throughout we have little tidbits about how different the English language in the U.K. is different from in the United States. Like “jumpers” and “chips” and how “Featherstonehaugh” is pronounced “Fanshaw.”

**spoilers**

The reason I say that Amelia is not a very good detective is that 40 minutes in she all but ignores a big clue that Enid puts in her hands referring to it as a “family legacy.” It is a sampler embroidered by James’ wife Jane which unusually features an original poem. The poem provides all of the clues to where the locket is and also discloses that James and Wilma were actually reunited in America. I know this because I put my DVR on pause and read the thing. If only Amelia had read it. And it is not the only clue she  ignores either. She is not helped by her new friends not sharing important little nuggets of information and just casually dropping them in random conversation. Maybe Amelia’s lack sleuthing skills is why this movie was not on Hallmark Mystery.

Despite Amelia’s lack of detective skills, this was a pretty harmless and mildly entertaining effort that kept me interested watching Amelia run all around looking for clues and then ignoring them. They find the other part of the locket, finally, and save the town. I was really interested in who the locket belonged to. I would have thought it was Enid’s, she being the only descendant of the original owner, but apparently, the current owner of the property where it was found had a share in it as well. The miracle is that it was all worked out without lawyers. After all the to-do about it, it is very vague as to whether anyone actually got any money for it. I think what happened is that Amelia donated her half to the town and the other half was donated to the town by the co-owners, uniting the the two halves and saving the town by making it a mecca for lovers and antique enthusiasts. I hope that they erect a statue to those three women because it was surely one of the most selfless and generous acts of charity in the history of Hallmark. If that is what happened. It surely rates a least a plaque, anyway. Or maybe Amelia gets her new antique shop in Wilmaton rent free in perpetuity.