JOURNEY TO PARADISE (2010)

Channel 7 in the small town of Paradise, Wisconsin is known as Paradise 7 and has been in business for years, run by the Collins family. But as Christmas approaches, trouble is brewing. A larger Wisconsin media company apparently wants to muscle in and Lucy Collins (Hannah Fager) wants to bring in a new associate producer to pump up their ratings. During a holiday station party, a handsome guy from Chicago arrives at the studio. Lucy assumes he's there about the position, though we can tell from his behavior that he's there for some other reason. Still, Joe McNamara (Matt Koester) goes through an informal interview and Lucy decides impulsively to hire him on the spot. The family even offers him temporary use of a small apartment above the studio. The family and staff all love Joe, except for Lucy's obnoxiously protective brother Mike who doesn't trust him and has frequent altercations with him. Mike may be onto something; we see Joe clandestinely watching videos that Lucy had made and sent to her fiancé while he was in the military—we know that she is no longer engaged and that it's a topic that has made her less interested in celebrating Christmas. Soon, we discover that Joe has his own unresolved pain; when he interviews a pastor on TV about a Christmas event, Joe goes off on a tangent, questioning the idea that God is truth and has all the answers, and making the interview go off the rails. Despite all this, sparks fly between Lucy and Joe, but they're both going to have to reveal their past secrets to each other if they want to build a relationship.

There are a lot of problems with this low-budget, almost amateur movie, but I slowly warmed to the film almost despite itself. As a Christmas romance, it's more religious and dramatic than the kind that Hallmark shows. It was produced by Salty Earth Productions, whose mission statement is to provide "entertainment […] to share Christ, Jesus with the world." Oddly, however, the explicitly religious material feels shoehorned into the story—there are only really two or three scenes in which God or Jesus are even brought up. The one scene that doesn't work at all involves Joe walking through the small town, thinking about his conflict while an awful country song about Jesus being the reason for the season plays and images of the Bible and of nativity sets are superimposed over the visuals. I don't object to the content (duh, it’s a Christmas movie!) but the sledgehammer style feels so out of place in what is otherwise a relatively thoughtful narrative about dealing with loss and building a new life. I like the fact that at the end, Joe's spiritual quandary is still not completely resolved.

Other good and bad things here: the two leads are both fine, though they have not gone on to work in many other films. Matt Koester has done stage work and has appeared in couple of other Salty Earth productions, but I'm surprised that Hannah Fager, who looks and acts the part of the TV-movie Christmas heroine to a tee, has no other acting credits on IMDb. On the other hand, the rest of the cast is almost uniformly amateurish (though Daniel Koester, Matt's real-life brother, shows promise as the aggressive Mike). The story idea, which I don’t want to spill too much about, is original and interesting, but important plot points are ignored or brought up so late in the proceedings that they feel plopped in at the last minute. One more draft of the screenplay would have been beneficial. Worst of all is the dog puppet that the weatherman insists on carrying and using all the time. Though fairly serious in tone (what with its themes of spiritual searching and dealing with guilt from the past), there are many moments of humor, not all of which come off. At 2 hours, it's way too long, but for reasons I can't quite articulate, I have a soft spot for this local Wisconsin production, and I'd watch it again. [Amazon Prime]