Hallmark
Rating: 🎄🎄🎄🎄
Description: Michaela (Lindura) is a rigid accountant who steps in to help her brother care for his young son Danny (Omi Fitzpatrick-Gonzales) while Danny’s military mom is deployed over Christmas. When Danny is assigned to create a holiday scrapbook for his mom, Michaela reluctantly accepts help from his free-spirited substitute teacher, Bryan (Morgan), whose creativity clashes with her need for preciseness and control. As they set out to capture festive moments for the scrapbook unexpected mishaps turn into meaningful traditions – and sparks begin to fly. Through Danny’s project, Michaela learns to embrace imperfection and open her heart, while Bryan rethinks his future as a traveling substitute teacher. Starring Lindura and Brendan Morgan.
Overall Review: Merry Memories was enjoyable, with a good story and some thoughtful character development. It wasn’t perfect, but there was enough here to earn that fourth tree. My biggest complaint involves the dad.
Now, I understand the premise. Mom is deployed, Dad is busy with work, and the aunt has stepped in to help care for their child. It’s a perfectly reasonable setup, and it gives the movie an opportunity to explore the aunt’s relationship with the family and set up her love interest with the teacher.
But did we really need to make Dad look quite so uninvolved? At one point, the man didn’t even know who his child’s teacher was.
I’m sorry, what?
I understand being busy. I understand relying on family for help, especially when one parent is deployed. But there’s a difference between portraying a father who needs some support and portraying a father who seems vaguely aware that he has a child living in his house.
I suspect the intention was to emphasize how important the aunt had become to the family. Unfortunately, instead of elevating her role, it occasionally made Dad look like a deadbeat. And that’s a shame, because the story didn’t need to diminish his parenting to demonstrate her value.
But here’s something the movie did particularly well: it gave the aunt a recognizable personality trait and actually committed to it. Throughout the movie, she’s constantly saying things like “I’ve got this” or “I’m good.” It’s her default response to just about everything, whether she actually has things under control or not.
And I loved how the other characters picked up on it. They knew her well enough to anticipate exactly what she was going to say, and sometimes they said it right along with her. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of consistent character writing that makes the relationships feel authentic. These people weren’t just sharing scenes, they felt like people who actually knew one another.
It also gave the movie a nice thread to carry through the story. Rather than introducing a character trait in the opening act and forgetting about it twenty minutes later, the writers kept returning to it in a way that reinforced who she was. That’s the kind of attention to detail I appreciate.
Despite my frustration with Dad’s apparent lack of involvement in his own child’s life, I enjoyed this one. The characters were engaging and the writing had enough thoughtful touches to make it stand out.
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