Review: 'Hope At Christmas'

There are a few well-worn premises for most made-for-Hallmark Christmas movies, and in those cases, what really matters is whether you ultimately get caught up in the gentle, warm feelings of the movie. If the acting is strong enough to draw you in and if there's nothing about the script that breaks the mood, the perfect Hallmark movie is the television watching equivalent of drinking a comforting cup of Irish coffee. When it's over you just feel relaxed and a bit better about the world for at least a little while.

"Hope At Christmas" is a pretty straightforward telling of the "single mom tries to decide between the big city and a comforting small town" movie genre. Sydney (Scottie Thompson) is a woman still feeling unsettled from an unexpected divorce. The movie opens with her interviewing for a job in advertising, but that part of the story is so thin it almost doesn't exist. It's really just an excuse to send her and her daughter Rayanne (Erica Tremblay) to Hopewell, North Carolina for the holidays. Sydney's grandmother has just passed away and she's inherited her grandmother's sprawling home. She fully intends to sell the home and settle into the big city. But she has fond memories of the holidays she spent there as a child.

So when she stumbles into the familiar local bookstore "The Book Bea," she's reminded of what she loved about the town. And she finds another reason to think about sticking around when she meets the local fourth-grade teacher Mac (Ryan Paevey). You can pretty much write the movie from there. Neither one of them are looking for a relationship, but they keep getting thrown together. And there's a crisis at bookstore and Sydney steps in to help...etc....etc.

"Hope At Christmas" works even though Thompson and Paevey don't have any obvious on-camera chemistry. But they don't not have chemistry if that makes sense. Or to put it another way, their lack of strong chemistry isn't a distraction, because they are both strong enough actors to successfully fake it. And really, faking it is an integral part of everyone's holiday plans.

Luckily, everything else about the movie works as planned. Erica Tremblay is wonderfully precocious as daughter Rayanne and Colleen Winton is charming as the long-time book owner Bea. The setting is holiday perfect and every scene moves along at just the right pace to suck you in.

I'm not sure I enjoyed "Hope At Christmas" enough to recommend Hallmark commission a sequel movie for next season. But if you're looking to spend a couple of warm and fuzzy hours plopped in front of the television, this is a good place to start.

 

"Hope At Christmas" premieres on the Hallmark Movies And Mysteries on Tuesday, November 20th, 2018.