The Treeline Lodge at the center of Melissa Joan Hart's new Lifetime Christmas movie Christmas Reservations is the perfect destination for ski bunnies to whisk the family off to during holiday break. There is skiing in the Adirondacks complete with classes. Decorated Christmas trees are everywhere, including individual rooms. There is elegant dining and Christmas trivia, gingerbread house decorating, and snowman-building contests, complete with prizes. There is a Jacuzzi, and plenty of opportunities to find love at Christmas time among fellow guests and even the staff. There are so many things in Christmas Reservations I love. Thanks to Holly and her father, Tom (Michael Gross), I wish my Christmas was half as festive as that of the Treeline Lodge guests. What it lacks, though there are plenty of possibilities, is a fully realized story. Hart's Holly, along with former college sweetheart Kevin (Ricardo Chavira), is the main plot's focus. But it could be argued that all the other guests at the lodge share the B plot. There is Preena and her Dadi (India's mother's mother's term). Preena and Leo, together with their crush. Miles and Avianna, Kevin's children, hid the dog. Plus, the story of Tay (Markie Post), which involves shielding her sister's health scare and Tom's love story from her. And let's not mention the adventure of Kay with Olympic skier Duffy washed-up. Structuring any film around so many characters is ambitious, let alone a Christmas TV movie. Sadly, while meeting so many guests is a refreshing change, there is a reason why the majority of Christmas movies involve fewer plots. There are so many characters in every single storyline. There's hardly anybody's conflict. They all stick around and fall in love with Treeline. There are no climaxes in the scene and for anyone there is hardly anything at stake. Kevin and Holly also tell the audience that they were in college love (for what seems to have been a real, happy week). It's just as difficult for them to express what happened during that week as it's for me to clarify what's happening on-screen between them during the week viewers. They see each other, they're both puzzled about their history, Holly asks Kevin about it in front of all the Christmas Trivia guests, they have dinner, they seem to be in love for a couple of days and then agree that it can't work until the very last seconds of the film. There's a snowstorm which holds us in for a Christmas party, but there's no big event that everyone, including Holly and Kevin, seems to work towards or expect. Hart and Chavira have more than expected chemistry, but they're not the most magical Christmas couple ever. And, by disclosing Kevin's gender, the script sets the plot to be amazing. He's supposed to be about forty in the film, and in fact Chavira is about ten years older. He and Hart are closer in age than they appear to be, but there is no need to disclose the exact age of anyone- especially when audiences are unlikely to believe. But to switch to another instance of how thin the plots are, audiences should wait for Miles and Avianna to get caught hiding the dog they've found throughout the series. There never comes the moment on the monitor. Kevin just says it happened to Holly. Christmas Reservations will profit from deleting one or two storylines, improving the good stories. Gross is the ultimate father of the Christmas television movie. He deserves the love story of the B plot, too. Yet Tay has no need of a sister at all for his pleasure. The most superfluous story of Kay and Duffy, followed by Preena and Leo. College crushes are cute, but a simple conflict about colleges and American Christmas between Preena and her Dadi would have worked well. She's my favorite character in the movie talking of Dadi. Christmas Reservations really celebrates diversity in ways that I've never seen in a festive television movie, and it's great. There is a Bollywood dance and, thanks to a poem by Pablo Neruda, the Spanish heritage of Kevin is mentioned. But not giving Dadi a first name is somewhat insensitive. It's not a first name, it's a grandmother's title. Dadi is important in this film for entertainment, and everyone but Peena should call her "Hey you" because they don't call her anything. This rarely happens in Christmas films with other grandmas. Overall, the performance is good and watching a whole film of people doing festive things with very little conflict is not unpleasant, it's just unpleasant. Christmas Reservations applies to more than individuals keeping lodge quarters. Everyone has doubts in their lives about going forward. Yet smart wordplay is not making a film. Investing audiences in Christmas movies doesn't take much. Treeline has so many visitors, but they have hardly any travel worth investing in.
Review of Christmas Reservations
Christmas Reservations
(2019 TV Movie)
Clever wordplay is not filmmaking.
22 November 2019
Warning: Spoilers