The Christmas special has long been an integral part of the American holiday season. These schmaltzy, formulaic television movies peddle in an overt sentimentality for an America that used to be but never truly was. These Rockwellian spectacles made up of heart land values emerge once a year to aid the general public as a kind of comforting white noise to accompany decorating the Christmas tree or baking cookies. These films are tokens of an ideology that exists only as a fetish object to be consumed annually as part of a commercial holiday ritual. Christmas In My Hometown (1996) is one of these films.
Christmas In My Hometown (later re-titled A Holiday For Love) is one of those Christmas television movies that came out at the advent of the Hallmark movie and is credited with helping to establish that formula. But Christmas In My Hometown itself draws on a number of tried and true formulas that have merely been updated and spruced up for the nineties. In Christmas In My Hometown one sees elements of The Music Man (1962), Nobody’s Fool (1994), and of course Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. These well tread narrative tropes are then dressed up in the cultural values of Merle Haggard’s classic song “If We Make It Through December”, giving Christmas In My Hometown a sense of classic working class Americana.
The film follows corporate executive Jake Peterson (Tim Matheson) who, on December 22nd, is dispatched to the tractor factory in his hometown of Athens, Nebraska to assess the extent of what will be necessary layoffs. But this hapless Scrooge wasn’t counting on falling in love with single mother and factory manager Emma Murphy (Melissa Gilbert) nor reconnecting with his estranged father Happy (Jack Jessop). With encouragement from Emma’s inexplicably mature and aptly named teenaged daughter Noelle (Michelle Trachtenberg) Jake decides to save the factory and pursue this unlikely romance.
This premise could really be any Christmas movie, it just happens to benefit from a solid cast who are able to elevate the mediocre material. Trachtenberg is especially essential to elevating the film with her scene stealing performance. At the helm of the cast and crew is veteran television director Jerry London. London, who directed the underrated erotic thriller Victim Of Love (1991) as well as Shogun (1980), possessed ample experience in making the schlockiest of productions palatable.
The end result is a holiday movie of little consequence that is as paradoxically watchable as it is predictable. Christmas In My Hometown is not likely to become a perennial favorite, but as a fresh discovery and a one-off viewing experience it is sure to effectively evoke that “Christmas spirit” corporations are always talking about.
