In 2004, a movie was released about the joyous reclamation of youthful romance through time travel, and the rejection of hard-bitten corporate life in favour of downhome suburban bliss. Tragically, dear readers, I am not referring to the masterpiece 13 Going on 30 but to Eve’s Christmas. My first (and thus far only) Hallmark movie experience, I watched Eve’s Christmas during the early Christmas period while off school and faintly delirious from a stomach bug. It has clung to my amygdala all these years. Why? Allow me to divulge.
The movie follows Eve (Elisa Donovan, most recognisable as the snarky Amber in 1995’s Clueless), a smart, sassy Madison Avenue advertising exec with an alarmingly metallic purple makeup palette. After her boss-cum-situationship has the audacity to choose Christmas with his children over skiing with her, she gets drunk with her secretary Mandy (who is also her childhood best friend?) to ease the discomfort of being the Other Woman and to commiserate her living a loveless life. On the way home, a Christmas Angel masquerading as a homeless man (the definitive Manhattan experience) points out that she can always wish upon the Christmas Star if she needs to make a change in her life. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Back at her plum-toned penthouse she rediscovers fond memories in an old home video, including footage of her cuddling her ex-fiancé Scott (Sebastian Spence). It transpires that eight years ago she was supposed to get married on Christmas Day, but she broke off the engagement to become a high-flying Ad Woman in New York, leaving her old life behind completely. Suddenly feeling the sort of regret only a combination of wine and bourbon can concoct, she wishes on the star to go back in time and change her destiny. Sparkles dribble out of the star onto her sleeping form, and lo! She awakens in her Oregon childhood bedroom in 1996, several days before her wedding to the aforementioned hometown beau, with the chance to set things straight and find real happiness.
A hometown return from the metropolis in the pursuit of reconnecting with one’s roots, socially and/or romantically, is a well-worn trope of the Hallmark movie (albeit not always involving time travel). This is the dog whistle that just refuses to die: don’t let the cosmopolitan elite suck you in! Come back to the corn-fed homestead! It has form in traditional American storytelling, a callback to colonialism and isolationism. Considering that the Hallmark Channel has its roots in conservative Christian media, having originally been known as The Faith and Values Channel (yikes), there is certainly historical precedence for this, despite Hallmark toning down its overtly religious messaging since rebranding in 2001.
The classic American conundrum of corporate capitalism hindering romantic fulfilment or obscuring ‘the true meaning of Christmas’, is a media trope routinely fed to the US population. Eve’s Christmas leans into this in its opening scenes. With needlessly sinister underlighting, Eve successfully sells a pitch to a wine company based around the happy memories couples associate with their brand, a quintessentially 00s powerpoint taunting her with images of weddings and romantic picnics.
She shares a celebratory drink with the aforementioned boss, a sleazeball with Ken doll hair that, impressively, isn’t a wig. She drily observes that it was her CV headshot which got her hired by him, marking the perfect opportunity for him to attempt a makeout session. The whole scene is lit and blocked like a casting couch porno, making for a deeply uncomfortable viewing experience. This and the bland executive production design certainly does the trick of establishing an undesirable big-city life, imploring the viewer to reach for their Christian Girl Fall chunky cable knit and snuggle up by the fire.
The very brief time spent in the Manhattan corporate world also includes a strident attempt to give Eve a personality, where she repeatedly declares that she hates coffee. She’s so crazy! Love her! Luckily, and unusually for Hallmark, Donovan is a fairly decent actor, and manages to play off the dud script with more flair than one might expect from a typical Hallmark heroine—at least initially. The togetherness of her performance in the establishing scenes, however, completely falls away when she enters Back-In-Time-Land, and it is her unhinged characterisation choices throughout the second and third acts which have imprinted this film on my unfortunate brain.
In her attempts to convey the strain of time travel, Donovan is persistently in a state of breathless bafflement, exaggeratedly opening her mouth in speechlessness before each line, and delivering her dialogue with a peculiar overemphasis. It is distractingly awful to watch. For roughly an hour and fifteen minutes her hypnotically gaping maw engulfs the screen, an Artaudian relentlessness bent on punishing the viewer. There are brief moments of seeming safety, only for her jaw to unhinge and torment me once again. The climactic scene where she confronts Scott in her wedding dress to explain why she wants to stay with him, after all, demonstrates the mandible at its most heightened—though, thankfully, it also serves as a reminder that the film is nearly over.
Aside from Donovan’s lantern jaw levity, the world of ‘90s small town Oregon contains the usual puzzling features of a made-for-TV movie. The verdant scenery indicates that the film was shot some time in late spring. The vain attempts to Christmasify the set do little to rectify this, as fake snow falls like giant flakes of dead skin on a seemingly delighted congregation. Eve, a woman in her early 30s, has travelled back in time by eight years, yet her former (or, in this timeline, current) fiancé looks like a forty-year-old fishing tackle salesman. He drives a pick-up with a distractingly large canoe constantly strapped to the back of it. Perhaps his personality is bound deep within it, like a soul jar. The bridal shop in this small town is run by a toothy eccentric French woman, played by the closest approximation the casting director could find: a Canadian. The limp attempts to highlight the cultural norms of the ‘90s compared to Eve’s ‘00s outlook include jokes about not knowing what Pilates or tofu are, while the only vague visual indication of the era is her childhood best friend’s side ponytail. This all exemplifies the classic hallmarks (!) of a Hallmark movie—attempts at creating a tangible, recognisable world that are hamstrung by an absence of creative flair, resulting in an uncanny and often downright unsettling aura.
The film eschews the obvious ending one might expect from the company formerly known as The Faith and Values Channel, in which Eve rejects her life in a Manhattan penthouse for a cosy Oregonian one. This was 2004 after all, a post-Sex and the City world where the metropolis need not represent a fundamental evil. Throughout the film Eve tussles with the choice of career success versus domesticity, reviving the tensions that led to her leaving Scott in the first place and never seeing him again. Instead, she successfully overcomes the 11th hour hurdle in which Scott discovers the letter in her drawer indicating she will leave him, sealing her fate all over again. Eve confesses about the Christmas Wish and explains what the future holds for her; that despite her success she was miserable, and that she chooses to marry him knowing it is the right choice for her. Post-wedding ceremony she wishes on the Christmas Star once again, awakening in the riotously plum-coloured penthouse, worried that the Wish didn’t work. But all is not lost! Scott is there with her, and she is the CEO of a chain of bookstores branched off from Scott’s original Oregonian store. The happy ending that proves Women Can Have It All.
Despite all the initial groundwork laid for framing corporate life as essentially unfulfilling, it turns out the downsides are predicated on whether or not you have a pervy boss. What’s more, the very nature of time travel as a plot device means that instead of her life continuing in a linear mode from the point of altering her past and marrying Scott after all, she now is left with an eight year memory hole. The success of building a chain out of a small town store, the eight years of marital bliss to the man she truly loves, the happy incidents of daily life—she has none of it! But at least they get to have a very Happy Christmas together in the penthouse, with what looks suspiciously like the skyline from The Room (2003) looming beyond its windows. The true meaning of a Hallmark Christmas is, after all, about creating a void within your identity in the pursuit of just the right kind of man, and just the right kind of corporate career. Joy to the world, indeed.
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