Before I mix it up with the other dozen Christmas TV movies showing this week, I wanted to highlight A Welcome Home Christmas, shown this morning, as having being particularly amusing with a mind-bending turn into magical realism at the end. It is not really unique in anything that occurs in it, but I think it shows that after years of these films that we are reaching an interesting point where now that all of the standard Christmas movie genre plots have been run through, we are now starting to get those really interesting weird experiments in combining plot beats and mixing up standard expectations. Albeit within a certain standard template, but A Welcome Home Christmas really feels like a mega-mix mash-up of every possible idea in the genre (except for the fantasies about Royal Princes one), which I guess makes it kind of the One Missed Call summation of its genre of Christmas TV movies? Though that might be too great a burden to place onto it!
This film was made in 2020 and in a way it shows itself to be a transitional film since its main structuring element is the one that involves members of the armed forces overseas who may or may not (but of course they will be, as a third act 'surprise') be home for Christmas. That felt like a major trope of Christmas TV movies in the mid-2010s to 2019 or so, but has almost disappeared now, with this film the only one of the 25 or so new films shown so far this season that has used this premise, and that may be because it is slightly on the older side for these films which are often made and aired within the same year.
Anyway, the plot of this one involves a lady working as an army counsellor at a centre that welcomes returning veterans home from overseas, and tries to help them reintegrate into life back in the US. Finding them jobs and a purpose to life now that their service is over, as well as helping with any residual traumas from their previous life. The latest returnee of course is going to be the man that she will inevitably fall in love with, and they initially bond over working on an Army Christmas charity drive together when they need to drum up funds themselves rather than getting a budget from their sympathetic General O'Toole (first name later revealed to be Peter, to humourous effect
). But they end up being so successful that General O'Toole manages to drum up funding in the end anyway, which suggests that he was either apathetic towards the whole enterprise until his heart was re-warmed by a cup of hot chocolate (about which there will be more to say!)
or it was all some sort of elaborate test? Because he wanted to create the circumstances in which the couple would have to use their soldierly skills to bond and work together as a team to organise the Christmas charity drive? (which may be reading too much into that character, but then the second half of the film contains so many characters acting ambiguously about what they know and how involved they are in the situation - including a certain famous character who may have been behind it all! - that I could easily believe on looking back that perhaps the General was in on everything too!)
Anyway, this charity drive involves
both a cute-but-sad kid with parents both deployed overseas being used as a blunt tool to coerce various shopkeepers through a combination of guilt and cuteness to contribute to the charity drive (though she really needed to have been subtler about it than dancing around waving the cheque above her head in happiness
right outside the store they have just left! If I were that shopkeeper, I would have immediately cancelled that cheque just on general principle for them doing that!) and then dives into the bulk of a Christmas TV movie of all the logistical work that goes into dressing every square inch of every single surface with Christmas lights and tinsel. This is where A Welcome Home Christmas ties in with all those other 'I'm an itinerant big city Christmas planner who has to come home to my small town and do all of their Christmas preparations for them'-style films, as the charity event is being done on an industrial sized town scale rather than a single home or business one to the extent that it goes from improbable that just two people are doing everything to actually having to get them able to mobilise a
literal army of helpers and town council members to get everything done (which reaches quite amusing proportions when the inevitable giant Nutcracker props are being lorried into the giant hanger where Santa's grotto is being set up for the big climactic scene of the film!)
But there are still moments of intimacy for all that (which ties the film in with those smaller scale 'saving the family home/business together'-type plots) where our main couple have a burgeoning, though of course always circled around until the last possible moment, romance by doing Christmassy things together. At first just the practical things for the charity drive, but we soon get to find out that the returned veteran has rented a rather luxurious but rather cold, house where he is still living out of boxes (and worst of all has put up
no Christmas decorations at all, which may seem like nothing in the grand scheme of things but when you have seen enough of these films where the set decorators have usually been working overtime to Christmas-up everything beyond the realms of anything one single person could realistically do (or afford the electric bill to keep running!) to then be presented with an image of an un-decorated room makes Michael's living room seem as austere as a room in a Bergman film! And it feels like an intentional meta-joke to have committed, albeit briefly and soon rectified by a woman's intervention, the ultimate sin in this genre!), which means we soon get to the key scene in these films: the couple bonding over dressing a Christmas tree together! Which in my family I remember only ever led to arguments and my mother letting me have the illusion of putting baubles on the tree at first, only to surreptitiously later in the evening come back and 'fix' it so it looked actually presentable! (There you go TV movie producers, there's your free plot set-up for a Christmas film - the drama that comes from a child's traumatic realisation that they only
thought they were good at Christmas decorations when in fact their mother was behind the scenes pulling strings for them all along! Change it to a mid-30s career woman realising that her mother was actually organising all of her high profile Christmas planning contracts for her as an overly elaborate way of getting her to come back to the hometown for Christmas, and I think you'd have a neat twist on a couple of tropes right there!)
Back to the actual film: there is a transparent, but kind of nice in how flimsily anti-dramatically obvious it is from the moment it gets introduced, padding of the romance by Michael casually stating when fixing Chloe's car's heating for her (that's another one of those minor but surprisingly ubiquitous tropes by the way: couples bonding over car engines, usually with a twist to show that the woman is as much if not more of a gear-head than the man is, to prevent it being about him having to do anything so crude as to 'save' her from a breakdown situation. Sometimes its the guy who has broken down and the girl has to stop and help!) that he had to leave someone behind who meant the world to him when he decided to leave the Army, but rather conveniently for the plot/annoyingly for actual human behaviour not saying anything more than that. Which Chloe takes as meaning that Michael was, and still is, in love with another woman, but of course it is screamingly obvious that its not that at all. I was actually wanting to shout at the screen "it's a truck. He had a special humvee or something that saved him in Afghanistan and likes to refer to it as "Her", but he had to leave it behind!", but it turns out to be something different but within the same ballpark, as:
the "she" he left behind was his service dog of over a decades companionship. Which I should have cottoned on to sooner than I did, given all the lingering shots of him hugging a dog in the black and white framed photograph that is lingered on a number of times. It does allow for Chloe and the General to turn that late-dawning knowledge into the inevitable last minute one-two combo of touching reunion and perfect Christmas gift rolled into one!
So that is a bit of Shakespeare misunderstanding-style drama that is so low key as to be as untroublingly anti-dramatic as possible, with the primary drama of the centre of the film more revolving around a
best hot chocolate judging contest (which apparently all US towns have? This is where this film bridges into more modern Christmas TV movie tropes, as there have been
entire films based around that 'hot chocolate' trope! Though surprisingly none of which have featured Hot Chocolate's "I Believe In Miracles" on the soundtrack to this point as far as I am aware) in which Chloe's mother has to compete, although her being unable to control her mirth at General Peter O'Toole's name might count against her when he turns up as one of the Judges for the contest! Luckily he sees the funny side and apparently delivers the deciding vote that wins it for Chloe's mother, and they both gleefully arrange a date together whilst the rest of the runners up all look on grumpily in the background!
That turns out to be a double date with Michael and Chloe (though they are both still pretending to be 'just good friends' of course), who inevitably have to get up in front of the entire restaurant and do a surprisingly professional singer-quality impromptu Christmas song duet together, to rapturous applause!
We get another brief complication of the Colonel at Chloe's Army office wanting her to spend a bit less time on Michael's single case (and charity work for the entire town in general) to actually mentor some of the other returning veterans on her docket (which is this film's equivalent of the third-act crisis "the boss is forcing me to return to the big city to work over Christmas, and the romance is probably not real so I might as well go" that many of these films feature), though that gets quickly defused with the help of Michael doing some behind the scenes deus ex machina fixing with Chloe's latest client.
And then we get to the
really mind-bending scene as after the film has been resolutely down to earth for the majority, we get to the big Christmas Eve Santa's grotto scene where, after a brief panic over the hired Santa being unable to come because of an ill reindeer and the apologetic person on the other end of the phone says that they can put them on a waiting list to be first to get a Santa after Christmas (which rather misses the point!), the Santa surprisingly turns up. But he rather suspiciously seems to know all of the kids names beyond just those that Chloe had primed the agency about ahead of time, and even has a suddenly appearing present to give to the obviously on the breadline mother along with her child (we know she is on the breadline because Chloe gives her and her daughter a hot chocolate 'free of charge' earlier in the film, which they both gratefully accept, as if they had never seen a cup of hot chocolate in their lives before!). Then things get even more suspicious when the precocious young girl from earlier, whose only wish from Santa was to have her parents back for Christmas, gets her wish.
And then the film goes all in by "Santa" pretty much revealing he is the actual Santa Claus in his discussion with Chloe, before she gets a call from the agency saying that they actually have a Santa if she wants one now, before she and Michael get to look on incredulously and see the shadow of the actual Santa disappear in a puff of CGI and tinkling bells!
And then after that shocker, which kind of makes me wonder why a major figure like that was taking a minor supporting role in a very low key story in which his presence was not particularly needed or necessary plot-wise, things go disconcertingly back to down to earth again, with a Christmas day family scene back in Michael's now fully furnished to within an inch of its life living room, the reunion of Michael and his dog, and the long delayed kiss between the couple: by which I mean both between Michael and the dog, and then between Michael and Chloe!
Very cute, and I think I was so overwhelmed by the sheer barrage of different story strands by the end of it that I was kind of bludgeoned into finding it impressive. So I may just be addled as to the quality, but I think this may have to be my pick so far to represent the TV movies of the season.
(EDIT: Actually on re-watching them over the weekend, it may just be because Marley Shelton makes a brief appearance as her Planet Terror character in a pre-zombie apocalypse hospital in Death Proof. So that usually makes me think of Death Proof as coming first in a double bill!)