Hallmark Holiday/ Paul Watch: A Newport Christmas (2025)

Watched:  11/02/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dustin Rikert

Pal PaulT worked behind the scenes on A Newport Christmas (2025), and had nice things to say about the production, so I wanted to get to this movie when it aired.  I did not expect it to air in early November, but I have a broken foot, anyway, and had been laid up all weekend, so here we go.

From time-to-time, Hallmark's willingness to indulge in Christmas Magic has included Time Travel of the Somewhere in Time variety - people falling in love after one of them gets time-shifted, sometimes someone from modern times going into the past, and sometimes someone from the past coming to the here-and-now.  This movie is the latter, with a Newport, Rhode Island heiress of 1905 coming to 2025.

I was messaging Paul a bit as the movie rolled along asking him questions and I did mention to him that it was very odd that this Hallmark Christmas movie had some of the tightest time travel logic I'd seen on display in a time travel movie in a while.  

Our Hero is Ella, played by singer and stage actress Ginna Claire Mason.  After being told she will meet the man her father intends for her to marry, she gets in a dingy and sees a comet, something something portal, and she finds herself in the same boat in 2025, now owned by Man, here played by Hallmark fixture Wes Brown.  

Very swiftly, Ella demonstrates she actually is who she claims to be, impressing Man's boss (Talia Robinson) and another co-worker, and they go with buying she is in fact a timelost Ella (which is a relief as a viewer even if it's an insane logical leap).  However, they all begin to notice artifacts around the mansion, now a museum, are changing now that Ella has departed the early 20th Century.  

Ella was to become the heart of philanthropy in Newport, but as she remains in 2025, things are vanishing and the good she did, inspiring folks, may disappear (there's your stakes!).

The best thing Hallmark seems to have done here is recognize having a tight story with stakes beyond "will they or won't they?" is key.  Yeah, they work in the current tropes.  Ella helps organize a Christmas event, for example.  And as a "royal" (or as close as we get in the States) she's very concerned for her subjects those in need in a hand-wavy way.

It is nice they set the movie in Newport - but this is shot in Buffalo, NY, mostly (they did clearly go to Newport for some scenes).  And the house they have doubling for the mansion is fabulous.  I'd love to be in it.  It is still not a Gilded Age Newport mansion.  I don't know if they hoped to get one and couldn't or budgets meant they were just shooting in Buffalo no matter what, and it doesn't matter.  

Of course the movie doesn't recognize issues like race which would be highly noticable to a Newport socialite from 1905, but it does have a loop of inspiration in Ella seeing a woman as a boss in Robinson's character, that same boss was originally inspired by Ella.  

Like I say, this one has a sort of clockwork precision to handle the time travel stuff that I don't normally associate with Hallmark movies, but it keeps the stakes at the forefront and the story cruising.  

I'm always more interested in figuring out what's going on at Hallmark than I am in the movies themselves.  I guess Hallmark is releasing fewer movies and putting more money into the ones they are choosing to make.  It's a gamble, because the Hallmark audience seems finicky and weird, wanting the comfort of a Hallmark movie, but refusing to agree on much else.  That said, the movie A Biltmore Christmas got mentioned a lot on the Hallmark Reddit when I was frequenting it during ChabertQuest, and this is certainly in that same wheelhouse.  So dipping back into that same well is a good idea, even if trying to do period stuff is a major budget challenge.

Just for the record, I would never go back in time.  I love functioning toilets and flu shots and what little social progress we've made.