Swiss Miss? I Don’t Buy It.

This one has a dumb title (Merry Swissmas was the title it had when I decided to watch it). The plot did not look all that interesting either. The only reason I decided to watch it was because I have really come to appreciate Jodie Sweetin. She has a natural down-to-earth style in both her acting and her looks that I like.

Jody plays a successful architect and head of her own firm that travels the world for her job. She decides to visit her mother, who has just bought and is renovating an inn in Switzerland for a family Christmas with her brother and his wife and family. She is not told that Mom and her best friend have conspired to invite her estranged former best friend to the inn as well, in an effort to force a reconciliation. Jodie’s first love painfully dumped her and it took her a while to recover from her pain. To add insult to injury, her former best friend started dating him soon after.

Although I didn’t entirely understand Jodie’s anger that her best friend took up with her old boyfriend, I thought potentially ruining Jodie’s Christmas was a very dirty trick. Now, having said that, apparently her friend dated him behind her back without having a conversation and hopefully getting her blessing first. That was the terrible part, to my mind. The family’s constant manipulations to get them back together were annoying in the extreme. But she handles it with good grace, and, in fact, the two women are eventually reconciled. Then the old boyfriend shows up unexpectedly and it turns out her best friend didn’t tell her she was now engaged to him.

The actor who played the love interest for Jodie didn’t bowl me over. Especially at first. He played a single father/widower who is torn between his attraction for Jodie and his desire to protect his young son from further heartbreak after his mother died. He improved as the movie went on. It ends with a “happy for now ending”, but I don’t buy Jodie’s plan to stay in Switzerland with her new love and his son at the same time she has a thriving business in Chicago that requires worldwide travel.