User Reviews

Every year the American cinema and, to an even greater extent, the American TV movie industry, turn out Christmas movies by the dozen. Christmas may officially be a religious festival, but most of these films lack any explicit religious content. They are generally sentimental feelgood comedies celebrating the virtues of seasonal goodwill towards one's fellow man and of having a good time. There must be a market for films like this, because here in Britain (and I am sure the same is true in America as well) there are specialist movie channels that show nothing else over the holiday season. Their interpretation of "holiday season" can be generous; last year one such channel began showing these movies in late September. Christmas comes but once a year, but when it does it lasts for months.

"The Christmas List" is a classic example of this type of movie. The main character Melody Parris is a thirty-something shop assistant working on the perfume counter of a department store in Seattle. (I call Melody a thirty-something because she gives her age in the film as 35, but Mimi Rogers was actually 42 at the time). As the theme song from "Friends" would have it, Melody's life seems to be stuck in second gear. Her job's a joke; she is bullied by her boss and has been passed over for promotion in favour of a twenty-something airhead. Her love life, if not quite DOA, is not in the best of health. Her boyfriend George is a pompous, self-obsessed bore who won't commit to her. Melody writes out a Christmas list, listing not just the presents she wants but everything she wants in her life, and a colleague puts it in Santa's mailbox at the store. And then Melody starts getting everything she wanted, although not always in the way she expected. The main plot concerns her relationship with David, a handsome widowed doctor, and her growing realisation that she needs to choose between him and George.

So who is responsible for the sudden change in Melody's fortunes? God? Santa Claus? The fairies? The implication running throughout the film is that some supernatural force is giving her a well-deserved reward for being such a nice person. The problem was that, to me at least, she did not come across as nearly such a nice person as the scriptwriters obviously wanted us to believe she was. In fact, as played by Rogers she came across as just too smug for her own good, and I felt that she treated George just as badly as he treated her. (A lady who will deposit a plate of food in a gentleman's crotch in a restaurant, is never going to be an easy person to live with). But then, George and David's gold-digging fiancée Faith are not so much people as plot devices, characters who can be safely dumped in order to provide the required happy ending. (Faith, incidentally, is played by Marla Maples, at the time the second Mrs Donald Trump, so some might feel that her casting as a gold-digger is appropriate. Although the story is supposed to be set in Seattle, and was actually filmed across the border in Canada, she plays the role with her original Georgia accent).

I note that most of the reviewers on this board have given the film ten stars, so it must have its admirers, but I must say that I am not one of them. The plot is cheesy and sentimental, the dialogue trite and banal and the acting, at best, second-rate. Christmas may be the season of goodwill, but I will make an exception for the people who make films like this one which give Christmas a bad name. 3/10.