CONFESSIONS OF A CHRISTMAS LETTER (2024)

The town of Holly Falls has a competition every year for the best Christmas letter written by a resident. The winner is almost always Sue, a nasty woman used to getting her way. She also lays down silly rules about neighborhood decorations (absolutely no lawn ornaments!). This year, Settie Rose is determined to win the prize so she hires a novelist named Juan Sanchez (whose novel her book club is reading) to write her family letter for her. Juan, who lives in Puerto Rico, is suffering through writer's block so his abuelo and his uncle encourage him to head off to Connecticut and take the job. By coincidence, he shares an Uber from the airport with Settie's daughter Lily who is coming home for the holidays after a brief stay in Italy. Lily is a bit of a lost soul, cheery but without aim or purpose. When neighbors see the two arrive, Settie passes Juan off as Lily's Italian fiancé. Juan is game enough to go along with the charade. Lily's gay brother Jack got married during the year, but isn't crazy about being part of the letter. Also in the family are Settie's mom and dad, and Settie's long-suffering husband Paddy. Juan soon discovers as he interviews family members for research that Settie's big problem is that she wants her imperfect family to be seen as perfect in the Christmas letter, so maybe if he can get her to own up to that flaw, she can produce her own winning letter.

This Hallmark Christmas movie has a bad title and a ridiculous premise—the letter writing competition is such a dumb idea, I almost tuned out after ten minutes—but I ended up liking it. One interesting thing is that the romance story becomes a side plot with Settie's growth as the main focus of the film. Angela Kinsey, the brittle Angela on The Office, is Settie and though I didn’t like her much at first (Settie is single-minded and oblivious), I eventually did. Lillian Ducet-Roche is wonderful as Lily; maybe because she's not the primary character, she had a bit more breathing space to create a more realistic Hallmark heroine. Alec Santos is fine as Juan; it also took me a while to like him as the actor seemed uncomfortable in the somewhat ill-defined role, but like Kinsey he grew on me. I didn't immediately recognize Paddy, the husband, as Fred Ewanuick, whom I loved as the doofus Hank in the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas. He's good here, but he sort of vanishes in the last half-hour. Jake Foy is handsome as Jack, the gay son, but has little to do besides representing diversity (as does Jeff Avenue, who despite having virtually no lines, does double diversity duty as Jack's Filipino husband). Brian Baumgartner, also from The Office, has a totally needless cameo as a mailman. I liked that the grandfather (Jorge Montesi) and uncle (Javier Lacroix) speak a fair amount of Spanish (with subtitles), and the uncle gets one of the funniest moments early on when he worries that Juan is heading off to a Misery situation, as in the Stephen King movie. Recurring scenes of the family dressed in Christmas onesies as dictated by Mom are amusing. After a rocky start, this ends up being a Hallmark film I could recommend (though a better title might be Christmas with the Roses, a line that Juan actually says in the film). Pictured are Ducet-Roche, Kinsey and Santos. [Hallmark]