Sincere and serious Christmas Hope, festive, whimsical Dreams

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/12/2009 (6135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Now, go ahead and call me an old-fashioned, candy-cane-striped stick in the frozen Prairie mud if you like, but I am absolutely unmovable in my belief that all great festive-TV programs must have a basic, essential ingredient:

Whimsy.

For a seasonal TV show to become a Christmas classic, it must include, and inspire, a wide-eyed sense of whimsy.

Messages and sentiments are all very nice; lessons about life and family and giving and the reason for the season are definitely recommended; festive songs are welcome; scenes that evoke tears and/or laughter are preferred; happy endings are strongly advised.

But there has to be whimsy. And it’s the presence and absence of this quality that separates the two new Canadian-made Christmas specials in tonight’s prime-time lineup.

The Christmas Hope, which airs at 8 p.m. on Vision TV, was shot in Winnipeg earlier this year and arrives with precisely the sorts of earnest good intentions that all movies produced for U.S. cable’s Lifetime network seem to have.

It’s a tale of tragic loss and festive-season redemption that stars Madeleine Stowe as Patricia Addison, a committed and caring social worker who pours endless energy into her job as a means of shielding herself from her own grief over the death of her teenage son two years earlier.

She’s deeply in denial about her own emotions, and her inability to deal with the loss has pushed her marriage to the brink of collapse. Husband Mark (James Remar) has just about given up on trying to reach her, and it seems the couple is destined for a Christmas spent apart.

Then, suddenly, tragedy presents opportunity. Patricia and her partner are dispatched to pick up a five-year-old girl named Emily (Tori Barban) whose mother (Falcon Beach‘s Devon Weigel) has just been killed in a traffic mishap. When placing the youngster in a foster home proves problematic, Patricia is forced to ponder the possibility of having Emily stay with her over the holidays.

What follows, of course, is a journey of emotional reconnection that is equal parts heartwarming and heartwrenching. While the ending is entirely predictable, the performances that carry us there are solid and believable.

But The Christmas Hope takes itself so overwhelmingly seriously that there’s no sense of the festive to it. It’s watchable and probably even worthwhile, but it just isn’t very much fun.

At the other end of the whimsical-TV continuum is the new CBC special Christmas Dreams, which also airs at 8 p.m. and stars Cynthia Dale, Tom Cavanagh, Ed Asner, Henry Czerny and Maranda Thomas. It’s an hour-long musical adventure that runs headlong into the realm of festive fantasy and fairly dares you not to follow.

Dale, a fixture on the Stratford theatre scene since her long-ago days on Street Legal, stars as an eccentric shopkeeper named Rose, who’s just about to close up her emporium on Christmas Eve when a young girl named Samantha (Thomas) bursts in, looking for a last-minute gift for her sister.

Rather than just offering a suggestion or recommending a suitable trinket, Rose takes Samantha on a bizarre but somehow beautiful journey that affords both of them a chance to rediscover the magic of an old-fashioned family Christmas.

Along the way, they encounter a slick hipster named Slim (Cavanagh), Santa Claus’s less-famous brother, Jerry (Asner), and a frantically efficient banker-turned-baker named Norman (Czerny), each of whom offers a unique bit of musical advice to the winter-weary time travellers.

As Rose, Dale is just plain loopy, but her antics allow new friend Samantha — and, at the same time, anybody else who’s watching — to surrender to the tuneful silliness and fully embrace the fantastical nature of their trip.

The musical numbers range from cool to weird to simply, seasonally beautiful (Dale’s rendition of Counting My Blessings is the best since Bing crooned it to Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas), and even when they aren’t quite note-perfect, they’re awfully fun to watch.

Simply put, Christmas Dreams is a wonderful, whimsical treat. It’s what festive TV fare should feel like, and the betting here is that it’ll become a fixture in the People’s Network’s seasonal schedule.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca