ANGELS AND ORNAMENTS (2014)

Corrine is a musician who works in a musical instrument store; her boss Dave is an old friend of hers, and we catch on quickly that he's sweet on her but would never show it because she clearly has never seen him as boyfriend material. However, Christmas is coming up and she is fresh off a break-up with Tim, who keeps calling her hoping for a second chance. We also know a bit about Corrine's background: her grandfather Henry, overseas during WWII, sent her grandmother songs instead of traditional letters. The last one she got was on a Christmas Eve before he was reported killed, and when she died, she gave the song to Corrine as a keepsake, which she treasures. Her favorite tree ornament, also from her grandmother, is of a group of carolers, and one night, when a group of carolers comes to her door, she notices that the front-and-center singer, Harold, is wearing the same snowflake scarf that one of the ornament carolers is wearing. Wouldn't you know that, a couple days later, Harold winds up as a seasonal worker at the music store. This is when the movie takes a fantasy twist: Harold is actually an angel who has been assigned to get Corrine and Dave together. If he succeeds, he'll win his wings. We know there is some interesting backstory to Harold (we get some details when he converses with Jerry, an angel who has would up as a hot dog vendor on the streets of Manhattan), and you'll see the reveal near the end coming a mile away. At any rate, Harold has his hands full since Dave is a little gunshy because of his own failed romances, and just as it looks like Corrine is starting to see Dave in a romantic light, that rat bastard Tim comes back in the picture. Can Harold get everything set straight before midnight on Christmas Eve?

I give this Hallmark holiday movie a few extra points for its somewhat original plot. Yes, it's stolen from It's a Wonderful Life but it does have a couple of nice variations, and, in its plotpoint involving an old song written by a dead loved one, even borrows a bit from the climax of The Bishop's Wife. The mostly Canadian cast, none of whom I remember seeing before, is fine: Jessalyn Gilsig is a notch more believable and sincere than most Hallmark heroines; Graham Abbey grew on me as the blandly handsome nice guy with a hidden sensitive side—he loves literature and writes poetry (which becomes a plotpoint near the end); Sergio Di Zio (pictured at left, to the right of Abbey) is the angel; he gives what feels like a mildly eccentric performance in the beginning—he seems like a 1950s guy from Brooklyn who might be gay—but I got used to him fairly quickly. One weakness: it's set in New York City but it never feels real for a second, not even in the outdoor street scenes, shot in actual cold weather (actors' breaths can be seen), probably in Canada.

Now I need to discuss the SPOILER that you'll see way ahead of time: Harold the angel is actually Henry the grandfather, assigned to help the granddaughter he never knew. It's a cute twist, but one that has loopholes that are bothersome. One of the cosmic angelic rules, we hear from Jerry, is that Harold cannot tell Corrine who he really is, but he gives her an awful lot of clues, and of course she figures it out eventually. But far worse is this wrinkle which is never explained: Harold/Henry is a somewhat bitter angel who has never gotten over the loss of his own true love. But if Henry died in the 1940s and his wife died some years later (we don’t know when but it was when Corrine was a young girl), why weren't they reunited in the afterlife? Nothing is made of this until the final moments of the movie when, as Henry wins his wings, he also finally gets to see his wife, looking like she did as a young woman. So does God make you jump through some angelic hoops before he lets you see your loved ones in Heaven? That must be a theological tenet I've never heard of before. Still, this movie mostly worked—I even got a smidge teary at the end. And as Hallmark's Christmas movies have gotten more and more bland and predictable in the last couple of years, this stands out head and shoulders among the more recent films. [Hallmark]