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| Mirrorverse Man watches Lacey, while she stares you down |
Watched: 06/08/2025
Format: Hallmark
Viewing: First
Director: Amanda Tapping
Job: News reporter/ Housewife
Location of story: San Francisco and Bay Area 'burbs
new skill: being a mother
Man: Tyron Leitso
Job of Man: Advertising creative
Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to alternate timeline
Event: School Christmas Pageant (very overdecorated)
Food: Mushrooms and what I think was Captain Crunch
In 2015, Lacey Chabert made four movies, three for Hallmark. Two of those Hallmark movies were Christmas films. In 2015, she is on her way to building her own legend.
The first Christmas movie selection for 2015 was A Christmas Melody, the Mariah Carey movie, which we previously covered.
Our selection today was Family for Christmas (2015), one of the movies in which Santa is not just a jolly old elf making toys - he's a chaos agent who uses his reality-warping powers to wreak havoc with an unsuspecting person, hoping he can make people hook up. Santa in Hallmark-Land does not care about toys or children, he cares about making strangers decide to make it.
Santa is a freak.
Previously, Santa gave Chabert "courage"/ "the inability to stop herself from escalating an already bad situation" in A Wish For Christmas. This time, Santa finds a perfectly happy career gal/ news reporter (Chabert) who gets a friend request from her college sweetheart she dumped to become a successful reporter. Meanwhile, she's being offered jobs in NYC, getting the most understanding breakup in Hallmark history, and stealing her assistant's ideas for stories.
Apparently Chabert ponders that Friend Request and what could have been with this ex-boyfriend SO HARD, her pondering becomes a Christmas Wish. One she did not explicitly make, but Santa still says "yeah, but you really wanted to know".
She awakens to find herself in a life where she's a housewife married to Man, and has two adorable, well-behaved daughters and a giant dog that would have given Andre a run for his money.
I've oft commented upon Chabert's comedic chops, and this movie puts them to great use. As a Child-free American up until Magic occurs, she has no idea what she's doing, where she's supposed to be, etc... And, it's funny! She doesn't know her own kids. She doesn't know how to fit in with pals in the 'burbs. Nothing she's doing would have been a priority for her 24 hours prior. Her casual dismissiveness of the priorities of others, when that's all she's worried about for a decade as far as these people know, is good stuff.
The movie does a few things that are maybe a bit different.
First, there's a late pivot where she feels her old instincts kicking in and she has a chance to land a reporting job. While we all know she'll make the choice to remain a stay-at-home mom, because Hallmark, there's some decent tension built up in the movie. Not often do we see a Hallmark heroine veer off course. Usually it's just a misunderstanding at this point.
Second, she doesn't exactly get the happy ending of staying with her family in Timeline B. Santa, in fact, winks it out of existence, including her children. It's some real WandaVision shit and the implications are staggering.
Instead, she's returned to Timeline A, where she's a news reporter. The happy ending is that she has reached out to Man, and when he's in town, has coffee with him. We can assume now they can start on a domestic life, just, like10 or 11 years delayed. It's not a 100% happy ending, which is *weird* for Hallmark. But they wisely cut it short before exploring any of the implications of the story or what happens next.
The read on this is obviously "she'd be happier as a mom, with no job". And then you get to shake your Comm Studies 101 finger at the movie and tut-tut it for being misogynistic. Because, in many ways, that is what the movie is saying.
Except...
1. In Timeline B, the point is that she and Man made a choice for her to stay home. She wanted to do this. It's a Hallmark movie, so there's not much focus on Man, but he gave up his college dreams, too. When Chabert was leaving for SF in Timeline A, Man was staying home to finish a novel, not write ad copy. But in Timeline B, the dream changed, and while she takes care of home and hearth, he became a corporate shill as someone has to pay bills. They'd clearly come to some hard decisions *together* - making suburban bliss their life. There's a bit of a speech about it by Man (which folks online took as yelling? But which is exposition. And shock that she's abruptly changing the deal.)
2. What the movie is offering Chabert's character is a chance to see what she left behind by walking away from Man, and that life is maybe more than just making the local news. Curiously, the film doesn't offer her that specific life of domestic bliss at the end. Instead, she's offered a chance to see what some version of her life will be going forward if she rethinks things. But it still won't be the two kids and a mini-van, I'd guess. She is picking up again in Timeline A where she left off the night before, but with the vision of this other life (if she were a Starfleet Captain, she'd start playing a flute).
I think what may seem to be missing here, deviating from the usual Hallmark formula, is an explicit statement from Chabert about what's missing at the beginning, telling a pal "gee, I will never know love". Yes, Chabert's character is feeling success in her career, but when even her boyfriend is like "baby, we knew one of us was leaving. But we had a good time, right?" and it's at least a momentary realization that she has no one. And that happens just as the guy she dumped in college is saying hello.
But... her character doesn't have any regrets, really. It would not occur to her to feel that way. She needs Santa to warp reality and show her the joys of a 2500 sq. foot house and a 120 lb dog.
Writing to make sure you're pleasing comm studies majors is absolutely a thing you can do. But I think writing something that acknowledges what many feel - that their home life is incomplete without a personal life. After all, we have no problem in other movies vilifying the boss who wants the guy to work weekends, and we make lots of jokes about wishing we'd spent more time at the office on our deathbeds... so, let's be careful out there with our easy point gathering.
Is it stupid?
I mean, no. Not really. It's fine. My understanding is that this is basically a rip-off of the Nic Cage movie The Family Man, which I haven't seen. I do think, for Hallmark, it's got some nuance that these movies would normally carefully avoid, and online comments lead me to believe that was frightening to some viewers.
Curiously, this was the last IMDB entry for Man actor Tyron Leitso. I am guessing he decided to move on with his life rather than becoming a Hallmark regular.
Chabert is pretty solid here. As I say, her comedic scenes work, and I think the movie dared to let her convey things through subtext (whether the audience can handle subtext is another story). But in general, while I wouldn't hand this over as a typical Hallmark film because of the ambiguous ending, I think it's clear that the director, Amanda Tapping (who is also an actor), worked well with Chabert to give her a chance to do some acting.
Chabert in a cocktail dress in the first act is a thing to behold.
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