Where the heart is, although I could never find it
Diversity. It makes us great. It makes us strong. Quality representation of our many diverse cultures in our many diverse films is so important. And that’s why it’s so wonderful that, thanks to Netflix and a plucky creative team, the broader Latin American community finally has Christmas with You, a sickly-sweet, forgettably mediocre Christmas movie to call its very own. It even stars - speaking of forgettably mediocre - Freddie Prinze Jr.! That’s right! The poor man’s Rob Lowe!
If it’s possible to overwhelm a viewer with forgettable mediocrity, Christmas with You might just have accomplished that remarkable feat. Rarely has a movie been so committed to merely existing as a functional object. No robotic step is out of rhythm, no AutoTuned note out of key. Everything plays out exactly as it’s supposed to, exactly as it was written in the Lord’s Book of Netflix, exactly as we all figured out it would eight minutes into watching the movie, even if it takes the characters fifteen thousand times longer. It’s the movie version of a brand-new toaster, wrapped up in Santa-printed wrapping paper and tucked under the plastic tree.
Now, a toaster might be exactly what you want this Christmas season, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. And Christmas with You might be exactly the sort of sentimental holiday-season twaddle you want. But I’m glad I didn’t pay additional money to see it.
Christmas with You opens on a series of sweeps across the standard landmarks of New York City, decked out in the traditional Christmas glitz that denotes a Christmas special, because otherwise we might forget what we’re watching. We are introduced to Latina pop queen Angelina Costa (Aimee Garcia) performing her hit song “Sweet and Spicy.” Angelina walks through life in eight-inch designer heels waving to her fans, ushered from TV special to photo shoot by her best friend and manager Monique (Zenzi Williams). But - if you can believe this horror - Angelina is Getting Older. She doesn’t really understand how to use TikTok, and an insufferable Zoomer trends reporter (Grace Dumdaw) questions whether she is still “relevant.” She has recently split with her power-couple soap star boyfriend Ricardo (Gabriel Sloyer), though they haven’t announced their breakup yet. She’s being upstaged by her TikTok-savvy younger rival Cheri Bibi (Nicolette Stephanie Templier), and her producer “Billion Dollar” Barry (Lawrence J. Hughes) thinks she should reignite her career by writing a Christmas song and performing it an an upcoming star-studded charity gala. “It worked for Mariah!” he cheerily tells Monique.
I want to strangle myself with Christmas lights during this section of the movie. I get that it thinks it’s cleverly commenting on celebrity culture and the way it treats women in particular as disposable past their expiry dates, but watching Angelina - who looks and is shaped like Aimee Garcia - snivel about how miserable and burned out and finished she is while she tearfully nibbles celery sticks from a gaudy ceramic vase is not putting me in a charitable mood. Satire and comedy are difficult. If you aren’t talented enough to pull them off properly, you will become the thing you claim to hate.
So that’s the first thirty minutes of the film, after which I was ready to cancel my Netflix subscription. But then we head out to the ‘burbs to meet the B-plot, and we meet widowed music teacher Miguel Torres (Prinze) and his daughter Cristina (Deja Monique Cruz), who is preparing for her Christmastime quinceañera. Cristina is a huge fan of Angelina’s, and she uploads a video to Instagram of herself singing one of Angelina’s songs that she used to enjoy with her mother. Angelina sees the video, is deeply moved, and decides that granting her young admirer’s wish for a selfie with her would be just the pop of Christmas cheer she needs. And as it turns out, the elder Torres is an occasional hobbyist songwriter who is working on a Christmas song of his own. You can fill in the rest of the plot from there.
It’s at this point that Christmas with You stops being an unwatchable horrorshow and actually becomes kind of charming, so much that we might have driven north from Manhattan into a different movie. The Torres home is warm, inviting, and genuine, bathed in the golden glow of Christmas lights and the sounds of the telenovela that Cristina’s Abuela Frida (Socorro Santiago) watches every day. The laughter and hugs and smells of home-wrapped tamales that fill their cozy kitchen feel sincere and unforced, and the movie starts to feel like it might understand the concept of the Christmas spirit. Garcia and Prinze’s chemistry is nothing to write home about, but Cruz is a delightful spark of life whose infectious joy and happiness light up every scene she’s in like the Times Square tree.
Don’t get too excited, though. It’s still a Netflix original Christmas special. Everything outside of the Torres house is still covered with that plasticky overlit Netflix sheen that gives the whole project a supreme sense of artifice. Every plot beat you expect - the gradual falling in love, the eleventh-hour shoehorned-in conflict, the protagonist learning the True Meaning of Family and the Holidays and All That Good Crap - happens exactly when you expect it to, just about to the second. It even has the obligatory three endings of all 2022 movies, including one with a dance party. If you need one example moment to hit home the movie’s complete lack of personality, take the moment when Angelina finds Miguel’s barely begun song on the piano. She’s so touched by the “message” of the song, she claims, that she simply has to collaborate with him on this song, the first songwriting collaboration of her career. The lyrics that inspire her so? “They say home is where the heart is.” If that’s all she needed to rejuvenate her soul, she could have simply gone for a walk in a Hallmark store and spared us all.
Those scenes inside the family home, though - they’re enough to convince me that someone here, a writer or director or set dresser, really did care, and really did understand what a Christmas special needs to work, even if the demands of the Netflix Gods kept them from realizing that vision. If you’re craving a brainless, predictable romance to give you some easy warm fuzzies, you could do way worse than Christmas with You. Merry Christmas. Enjoy your toaster.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies - mostly bad, occasionally good - in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There's a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.
If it’s possible to overwhelm a viewer with forgettable mediocrity, Christmas with You might just have accomplished that remarkable feat. Rarely has a movie been so committed to merely existing as a functional object. No robotic step is out of rhythm, no AutoTuned note out of key. Everything plays out exactly as it’s supposed to, exactly as it was written in the Lord’s Book of Netflix, exactly as we all figured out it would eight minutes into watching the movie, even if it takes the characters fifteen thousand times longer. It’s the movie version of a brand-new toaster, wrapped up in Santa-printed wrapping paper and tucked under the plastic tree.
Now, a toaster might be exactly what you want this Christmas season, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. And Christmas with You might be exactly the sort of sentimental holiday-season twaddle you want. But I’m glad I didn’t pay additional money to see it.
Christmas with You opens on a series of sweeps across the standard landmarks of New York City, decked out in the traditional Christmas glitz that denotes a Christmas special, because otherwise we might forget what we’re watching. We are introduced to Latina pop queen Angelina Costa (Aimee Garcia) performing her hit song “Sweet and Spicy.” Angelina walks through life in eight-inch designer heels waving to her fans, ushered from TV special to photo shoot by her best friend and manager Monique (Zenzi Williams). But - if you can believe this horror - Angelina is Getting Older. She doesn’t really understand how to use TikTok, and an insufferable Zoomer trends reporter (Grace Dumdaw) questions whether she is still “relevant.” She has recently split with her power-couple soap star boyfriend Ricardo (Gabriel Sloyer), though they haven’t announced their breakup yet. She’s being upstaged by her TikTok-savvy younger rival Cheri Bibi (Nicolette Stephanie Templier), and her producer “Billion Dollar” Barry (Lawrence J. Hughes) thinks she should reignite her career by writing a Christmas song and performing it an an upcoming star-studded charity gala. “It worked for Mariah!” he cheerily tells Monique.
I want to strangle myself with Christmas lights during this section of the movie. I get that it thinks it’s cleverly commenting on celebrity culture and the way it treats women in particular as disposable past their expiry dates, but watching Angelina - who looks and is shaped like Aimee Garcia - snivel about how miserable and burned out and finished she is while she tearfully nibbles celery sticks from a gaudy ceramic vase is not putting me in a charitable mood. Satire and comedy are difficult. If you aren’t talented enough to pull them off properly, you will become the thing you claim to hate.
So that’s the first thirty minutes of the film, after which I was ready to cancel my Netflix subscription. But then we head out to the ‘burbs to meet the B-plot, and we meet widowed music teacher Miguel Torres (Prinze) and his daughter Cristina (Deja Monique Cruz), who is preparing for her Christmastime quinceañera. Cristina is a huge fan of Angelina’s, and she uploads a video to Instagram of herself singing one of Angelina’s songs that she used to enjoy with her mother. Angelina sees the video, is deeply moved, and decides that granting her young admirer’s wish for a selfie with her would be just the pop of Christmas cheer she needs. And as it turns out, the elder Torres is an occasional hobbyist songwriter who is working on a Christmas song of his own. You can fill in the rest of the plot from there.
It’s at this point that Christmas with You stops being an unwatchable horrorshow and actually becomes kind of charming, so much that we might have driven north from Manhattan into a different movie. The Torres home is warm, inviting, and genuine, bathed in the golden glow of Christmas lights and the sounds of the telenovela that Cristina’s Abuela Frida (Socorro Santiago) watches every day. The laughter and hugs and smells of home-wrapped tamales that fill their cozy kitchen feel sincere and unforced, and the movie starts to feel like it might understand the concept of the Christmas spirit. Garcia and Prinze’s chemistry is nothing to write home about, but Cruz is a delightful spark of life whose infectious joy and happiness light up every scene she’s in like the Times Square tree.
Don’t get too excited, though. It’s still a Netflix original Christmas special. Everything outside of the Torres house is still covered with that plasticky overlit Netflix sheen that gives the whole project a supreme sense of artifice. Every plot beat you expect - the gradual falling in love, the eleventh-hour shoehorned-in conflict, the protagonist learning the True Meaning of Family and the Holidays and All That Good Crap - happens exactly when you expect it to, just about to the second. It even has the obligatory three endings of all 2022 movies, including one with a dance party. If you need one example moment to hit home the movie’s complete lack of personality, take the moment when Angelina finds Miguel’s barely begun song on the piano. She’s so touched by the “message” of the song, she claims, that she simply has to collaborate with him on this song, the first songwriting collaboration of her career. The lyrics that inspire her so? “They say home is where the heart is.” If that’s all she needed to rejuvenate her soul, she could have simply gone for a walk in a Hallmark store and spared us all.
Those scenes inside the family home, though - they’re enough to convince me that someone here, a writer or director or set dresser, really did care, and really did understand what a Christmas special needs to work, even if the demands of the Netflix Gods kept them from realizing that vision. If you’re craving a brainless, predictable romance to give you some easy warm fuzzies, you could do way worse than Christmas with You. Merry Christmas. Enjoy your toaster.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies - mostly bad, occasionally good - in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There's a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.
