FILM FOCUS: WINDOW WONDERLAND

Back in November, when I was perusing the list of upcoming made-for-TV Christmas movies (as one does) I was particularly excited about the Hallmark Channel's Window Wonderland.  When I was a kid one of my chosen future careers, among architect, ice cream man and Disney Imagineer (which they put as “Engineer” in my junior high yearbook, thinking I just couldn’t spell), was window dresser.  I was inspired by Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show-- I wanted Rhoda’s job but Mary’s apartment.  

Creating elaborate holiday window displays still sounds like a pretty terrific job, though I don’t think full-time “window dresser” is really even a profession anymore.  It's all farmed out to corporate sponsors and celebrity guest window designers.  Even in Window Wonderland the heroine describes herself as a “visual merchandiser.”  

I have to admit that I only half-watched this movie.  I did a late-night Christmas cards cram session and watched the movie at the same time.  I would pause every time they unveiled a new window display and then just sort of listened to the rest while writing cards, only glancing at the screen occasionally.  My lack of full comprehension of the plot might actually jazz up this recounting of it, as the movie itself, I’m obliged to report, was rather dull.

Window Wonderland is, like every other movie of this type, set in New York but filmed in Canada and stars a mix of semi-recognizable D-List American actors and totally unfamiliar Canadian ones.  Chyler Leigh plays the female lead.  I knew and somewhat liked her for her role on the very short-lived spinoff That 80s Show, in which she sported a mohawk.  In this movie she looked lovely but didn’t bring the energy or magnetism that Autumn Reeser showed in Love at the Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The male lead was played by Paul Campbell, a Canadian actor, and he was one of my biggest obstacles in enjoying this movie because both the actor and the character came across super gay.  Which would not have been an issue except that the whole movie was predicated on his romance with the female lead.   I'm not one of those who says gay guys can't convincingly play straight roles, it's just that either he's gay and wasn't trying to play it straight or is straight and the director told him to camp it up for some reason.  It didn’t help matters that he was playing a window dresser with a fondness for outlandish sweaters.

Naomi Judd played the mother of the heroine and added a much-needed zing in both performance and character, playing a sassy, semi-Southern truth teller type that keeps critiquing her daughter’s makeup.  

Not even Naomi's red hair and facelift can rescue this movie

I can’t remember the characters' names so I’ll just called them Girl and Boy.  Girl and Boy are rival “visual merchandisers” who work at a fictional department store in New York (really Toronto).  When the head “visual merchandiser” quits unexpectedly they engage in a competition for her job, each trying to outdo the other with a series of Christmas-themed store windows.  Cute premise, right?  Of course their rivalry slowly morphs into love, as is legally mandated in every romantic comedy ever, and Girl eventually dumps her snobby boyfriend after overcoming her shame about her working-class family (poor Naomi Judd).  

Now here is where my half-watching causes me to get a bit fuzzy on the plot, because at some point it’s revealed that Boy sleeps in the department store at night so I guess he’s also poor and homeless?  He also wants to be a real artist and likes to paint.  After  both Girl and  Boy mess up their window displays they get fired and then set off an alarm and then do another window display featuring themselves just standing around and it turns out the kindly old window cleaner they’ve been nice to throughout the movie is really the store owner in disguise and he’s also in love with Naomi Judd.  Whew!  

Just look at the chemistry between these two!  And by two I mean Boy and his sweater.

Sadly none of the above was executed very well or with any real excitement, even of the kitschy kind.  Chyler Leigh’s character of Girl was really boring and, as I established earlier, Boy was distractingly gay.  At one point Nick wanted the movie to be a love story between Boy and his (also gay) snarky supervisor but then quickly lost interest when he realized it was meant to be a love story of the heterosexual variety.  The window displays themselves would have been the big draw here except both characters had a thing for minimalism, meaning the movie was running over budget.  So the few window displays we see are very bland and stark, a major disappointment, like the movie overall.

Movies of this type are a crap shoot; they all have alluringly cheesy titles and promise to deliver Christmas cheer in a major way but a lot of the time they’re pretty bad.  Only sometimes you get a diamond in the rough like Snowglobe or Holiday in Handcuffs.  This wasn’t even particularly very Christmasy, save the sparse Christmas windows and the not-gay gay Boy's sweaters. The characters also kept talking about having a “turdunkin,” a turkey covered in Dunkin Donuts batter, which sounded pretty amazing.  But then they never even bothered showing the turdunkin, in blatant violation of Chekov's golden rule: You do not tease a turdunkin in the first act and then fail to show it in the third.