God Bless Us, Everyone

It’s Countdown to Christmas and time for another remake of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This makes the third fantasy movie this year for Hallmark and half of its offerings so far. And that’s great, if, like me, you enjoy a little fantasy with your Christmas Romances. But you can stop now, Hallmark. This modern adaptation of the Christmas classic was well done. Ella Neezer is the worst sort of scrooge as the C.E.O. of a successful travel agency (Great Expectations Travel). It is in a huge high rise in New York City with a huge staff, so apparently that business model is not as defunct as I thought it was. Her latest crime against humanity is turning down a marketing campaign that highlights couples in love. “Why can’t we see a nice high powered single woman having the vacation of her life without anyone else around?”. This means that her staff has to work through Christmas on a new one, while she flies first class to Australia on a business trip (turning down, once again, her loving sister’s invitation to spend Christmas with her family in Utah.) Spending Christmas on an airplane suits her just fine as she has nothing but contempt for the holiday. But she is dragging along her personal assistant, Bobbi Cratchet (Emily Tennant), stuffed in coach, poor kid. Bobbi not only will not be able to spend Christmas with her loving family, but with all of the last minute duties Ella gives her, will not even have time to say goodbye to her little son, Tim, who struggles with severe asthma.

Once on the flight, she is barely keeping it together as the flight turns out to be a special Christmas edition full of merry holiday making with a relentlessly cheerful (and singing!) flight staff. All Ella wants is to be left alone peacefully wallowing in her solitude. But to her dismay, she finds herself seated next to her ex-fiancé, Jake (Tyler Hynes). 

Let’s skip to the ghosts. The first one, of course, is Christmas Past, the perkiest flight attendant ever played by Faith Wright, who is adorable. We get a glimpse of Ella and her sister Frances’s neglected childhood, her happy college days with Jake, and how they broke up over her workaholism on Christmas 6 years ago. She learns the reason why Bobbi was late for work one morning which caused Ella to almost fire her. She was in the emergency room all night with her son. Bobbie is struggling financially due to the company’s less than generous health plan. Ella starts to show a bit of humanity and remorse. But just a bit.

The Ghost of Christmas Present shows Ella what her employees and her family really think of her. Her employees hate her and conspire behind her back. Although her sister still loves her, the rest of the family is glad she did not join them for Christmas. Even the kindest of the people she comes in contact with only pity her. She sees that Jake, for some mysterious reason, is still hung up on her and doesn’t date. Up to this point, she is only partially seeing the error of her ways. She is still complaining and tries to defend herself (Why didn’t Bobbi tell me her little boy was so sick? Why did she “agree to skip Christmas”?) Christmas Present is like “Oh really?!” and sets her straight.  Enter Christmas Yet to Come. This ghost is played by a big black dude dressed in black complete with sunglasses. Unlike peppy and chatty Past and Present, he is very scary and does not say a word. It is Christmas a year from now and she finds out that she is dead! How? How did she die? We are not told but inquiring minds want to know. Jake is now a lonely librarian “like Donna Reed?!” And also poor little Tim is dead too! Jeez, Hallmark. Needless to say, Ella, threatened with death, finally sees the light, and makes up for her bad behavior.

I have to say that Erin Krakow did a good job in this one. She used to be more of a miss than a hit with me, but in the last couple of years, she has won me over. I am no longer on edge when I see her cast as the leading lady. That cannot be said about Tyler Hynds. He seems to have found a niche of playing tortured weak characters who have a lot of work to do on themselves, ideally in therapy. But I am happy to report that he played a normal good guy in this one and I liked him. The script provided nice dashes of humor both during the ghostly visitations and between them, when she was trying to process what was happening to her and interacting with Jake. On a final note, I have to say that I hated the roomy white athleisure lounge wear Erin wore throughout almost the whole movie. I’m sure it was comfy, but it did nothing for her at all. Despite that outfit however, on the Christmas Carol remake scale, this was a “God Bless Us Every One.”