2017's The Christmas Train is Nuclear-Grade Yuletide Schmaltz
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The Christmas Tree is no mere television movie. No, it has the distinction of being a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, one of those mesmerizingly banal, hypnotically corny celebrations of Christmas in all of its sappy splendor that have blown up over the last couple of years.
Hallmark Christmas movies have become a fascinating universe onto themselves, a weirdly normal subculture complete with its own traditions, stars, themes and super-fans for who whom loving Christmas and Christmas movies defines them the same way digging Insane Clown Posse makes someone a Juggalo or adoring Phish with your whole soul makes someone a Phan.
The cult of the Hallmark Christmas movie is the Cult of Normality. It’s about the weird, distinctly seasonal allure of pumpkin spice-scented basic Yuletide pleasures.
2017’s The Christmas Train offers an appropriately overflowing cornucopia of pumpkin spice-scented basic-ass Yuletide pleasures. It’s an adaptation of a bestselling novel by David Baldacci, who you might know from his Sean King and Michelle Maxwell series of thrillers. Or his A. Shaw and Katie James books. Or of course his John Puller novels. Alternately, you might be familiar with the books Baldacci has written about Will Robie, Amos Decker, Atlee Pine or Aloysius Archer. He’s written a lot of books, is what I’m saying.
Dermot Mulroney stars as Tom Langdon, a folksy distant relative of Mark Twain who decides to honor his late father’s wishes by traveling on a Christmas train from Washington D.C to Los Angeles for literary inspiration and, to a much lesser extent, to visit his on-again, off-again actress girlfriend Leila (Holly Elissa).
On the Christmas train, Tom reconnects with Eleanor Carter (Kimberly Williams-Paisley), the love of his life. Tom and Eleanor spent six mostly ecstatic years together crisscrossing the globe as war correspondents before breaking up for no damned reason at all.
Eleanor got tired of worrying about whether or not her partner in love and war would be kidnapped by the Taliban so she left mysteriously without warning or explanation and later hooked up with eccentric filmmaker Max Powers (Danny Glover) as a script-doctor.
Eleanor is also the daughter Max never had. We know this because, in a particularly artful bit of dialogue, he tells the mildly neurotic scribe, “Eleanor, you KNOW you’re the daughter I never had!”
In pretty much any other movie, the name of Glover’s character would be a sly reference to The Simpsons episode where Homer immediately commands respect and attention when he changes his name to Max Power but The Christmas Train exists in a world without irony or self-awareness, which is consequently a universe in which The Simpsons does not exist.
No, I’m pretty sure that they gave the big-shot filmmaker the name Max Powers to indicate that he has the maximum amount of power within the narrative. He has so much power that he’s a regular Dude ex machina, a Magical Negro who will move heaven and earth in order to make some hokey white people smile.
It’s a mildly offensive stock character Glover plays with a twinkle in his eye, laughter in his voice and a spring in his step. Glover is way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way too good for a movie and a role like this but he commits with his whole body and soul in a way that is enormously endearing and entertaining.
Mulroney, in sharp contrast, delivers such a TV-sized performance that he stops just short of throwing to a commercial at the end of each scene. His veteran writer has traded in a life of adventure, danger and intrigue as a globe-trotting journalist thrill-seeker for a life of boring domesticity writing about furniture for magazines.
But when Max Powers asks Tom if he’d help write the script for his next movie about one of his favorite subjects—the magic of trains, beautiful trains—the struggling freelancer writer confidently says no. Working on a screenplay for big money for a hotshot filmmaker might be appealing to some, but that article on end tables he’s working on for Lady’s Home Journal isn’t going to write itself.
Eleanor is similarly inexplicably reluctant to actually write a movie rather than tweak someone else’s work. Max Powers (whose entire name I will always write out in its entirety, on account of it being Max Powers) wants Eleanor to write a script about trains and Christmas but she doesn’t want the attention and acclaim and credit that comes with being the primary screenwriter of a movie when she can have the non-attention, non-acclaim and non-credit that comes with being an uncredited script-doctor working behind the scenes.
The Christmas Train is deliciously, perversely light on conflict. When a conflict does arise, it is resolved almost immediately. For example, Tom and Eleanor’s re-kindled love affair is threatened briefly by Leila popping up at one of the train’s stops and surprising Tom, and not in a good way.
Leila makes Tom even more uncomfortable by proposing to him despite the lukewarm state of their relationship, but when Tom rejects her proposal and breaks up with her she seems not only 100 percent fine with being dumped; she actually seems relieved, even happy.
Leila is ambitious and intensely invested in her career as a voice actress/actress. This initially causes her to seem suspect but The Christmas Train is so stupidly big-hearted that it goes out of its way to make Leila sympathetic as penance for suggesting that there might be even a single unlikable character in the film.
On a similar note, seemingly the only reason soulmates Tom and Eleanor broke up was because Eleanor wanted to leave the world of globe-trotting journalism behind for something more domestic and didn’t know if that’s what Tom wanted. Consequently, now that Tom is writing about the most boring, domestic subjects imaginable there’s nothing keeping them from pursuing long-overdue marital bliss and everything pushing them together.
This includes a star-crossed young couple, a young man of means from a prominent family and a small-town girl from the South, who seem suspiciously less like an actual couple than a pair of actors with a very bad handle on the characters they’re playing and a mysterious train enthusiast played by Joan Cusack who loves Christmas and trains and love.
I’m not going to tell you how the movie ends but it is a TOTAL SHOCKER! Nah, it’s exactly what you’d expect.
Like Glover, Cusack is way too good for this treacly nonsense but she commits in a way that never quite obscures the mercenary nature of the gig.
The big twist in The Christmas Train is that Max Powers has been orchestrating the events on the train the same way he would in one of his movies for the sole purpose of reconnecting a script-doctor who is like a daughter to him with the impossibly perfect man of her dreams.
It’s an intriguingly meta twist: it’s as if Max Powers, a cornball entertainer not unlike the Hallmark Hall of Fame folks, is staging a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie on the train for the benefit of the kinds of people who write Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. It’d be an incredibly knowing, self-aware move if The Christmas Train did not seem wholly devoid of self-awareness.
The Christmas Train is stupid. It’s hokey. It’s unrelentingly saccharine. It’s peppermint-flavored hot garbage. I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. Watching this particularly hokey Christmas TV movie I began to understand how an unapologetic exercise in holly jolly pandering could be enormously satisfying on both an ironic and non-ironic level.
I enjoyed many a laugh at The Christmas Train’s expense but on a fundamental level it just plain works not despite its shamelessness but rather because of it.
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