HBO Max jumps into this year’s Christmas-movie fray with Holiday Harmony, a rom-dram showcase for newcomer Annelise Cepero, with support from a dependable veteran in Brooke Shields. This story of a wandering singer with big music-biz hopes holds some promise for a little more musical oomph than we usually get from formulaic holiday TV movies. Perhaps it’ll set itself apart from the competition thanks to the prestige HBO/Warner Bros. brand – well, relative prestige anyway, compared to the grind-’em-out cheapo aesthetic of the Hallmark and Lifetime stuff, which comprise the primary glut of streaming/cable holiday fodder expanding across the landscape like an oozing, unceasingly hungry, semi-sentient slime-mold creature, which consumes us as much as we consume it. Joy to the world!
HOLIDAY HARMONY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Gail (Cepero) lives in a van, not necessarily down by the river, but one assumes she at least occasionally parks it by a river, since she travels the country in it, singing in pubs and clubs and dreaming big of musical stardom. What kind of van is it, you may ask? An old rusty Volkswagen bus of course, because jamming Econoline just doesn’t fit the cutesy aesthetic of these types of movies, nor does it look nearly as adorbs on Insta. Anyway, we first meet Gail in Miami, where she strums a Pat Benatar cover by request for a small audience. She submits a performance video to a prominent nonfictional radio and podcast media corp that’s namedropped in the script at least a dozen times, hoping it’ll land her a gig as the opening act for said media goliath’s upcoming Christmas concert in Los Angeles. Perhaps you will feel compelled to listen to that corporation’s audio content after the movie? The corporation would really appreciate that!
Just when you start to wonder if the anticipation of winning the contest will comprise the plot, said expectation is upended when Gail actually wins the thing, therefore setting in motion a completely different cliche: The Traveling Across the Country Under Deadline Road Comedy. She hops into her van, which she named Jewel, possibly because the real-life singer Jewel was quite famously homeless and living out of her vehicle just like Gail. Pressure’s on: Not only does she have to drive to L.A., but she also has to pen an original song, a challenge for a career cover-song singer. She makes her way across the country, scraping together last-minute gigs that barely pay, living hand-to-mouth, broadcasting her journey to her many social media followers, and we half-expect her to meet Frances McDormand for expert lessons on how to defecate in a bucket. THAT would be one hell of an Instagram story!
The trip is going just fine until she nearly murders an alpaca that’s in the middle of the road – and crashes poor old Jewel. But, as these things go, destiny is afoot: The stupid-ass alpaca belongs to Van (Shields), who just so happens to own an auto-repair shop, and just so happens to be the mother of a hunky mechanic, Jeremy (Jeremy Sumpter), who just so happens to know where Gail can earn some quick karaoke cash, and also just so happens to know that the local middle school needs a music teacher, stuff that just so happens to be able to help Gail quite a bit, because Gail just so happens to not be able to afford the auto repairs. Now what, pray tell, is the name of the town Gail finds herself in, making eyes at a hunky mechanic who says shit like “Ain’t no use for fancy around here”? Harmony Springs, of course. Not Harmony Sleeps or Harmony Chills Out or Harmony Withers on the Vine and Dies a Slow and Anonymous Death, but Harmony SPRINGS. For some reason, this feels like a place where one might write a sweet new Xmas tune, and/or finally root down and stay a while.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Holiday Harmony bears some true Xmas movie pedigree in Lauren Swickard, who co-wrote the script, and also wrote and starred in the two California Christmas movies for Netflix. So this movie is like those movies – you know, blandly pleasant – crossed with School of Rock, since the lead character ends up teaching music to a class of adorable misfit children.
Performance Worth Watching: Cepero can sing quite well and act almost as well, and therefore shows promise in her first leading role. She surely deserves a better script to recite and song to sing than what she gets here, though.
Memorable Dialogue: Gail very subtly breaks the fourth wall with the following line, which reveals her sudden awareness that she’s in a cheesy Christmas movie: “A woman named Van is going to vix my van. Where the hell am I?”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Holiday Harmony differentiates itself from the Christmas-TV-movie industrial complex in one significant way: It surpasses the usual 85-minute run time of these things by a whopping 25 minutes. Entire worlds are created and destroyed in that amount of time in TV Xmas movies, but in this one, not a damn thing happens that’s dramatically compelling or funny – it’s just 25 more uninspired minutes contributing to the overall bland whole.
Swickard and Christopher James Harvill’s screenplay consists of a Just So Happens plot with contrivance levels that are off the charts (or should that be off the musical charts yuk yuk har har?). It doesn’t do much to inspire Cepero and Sumpter, whose struggle to kindle much in the way of chemistry renders this movie a rom-blah. Neither does it stir up much comedy; the wacky alpaca is quickly sidelined for the antics of schoolchildren in Gail’s class, an exchange of rather dubious merit. And musically – well, two rapping middle-schoolers go a long way towards torpedoing the goodwill generated by Cepero’s moving rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Wayfaring Stranger,” which lends the movie a strong lyrical metaphor it doesn’t deserve. This holiday sort-of-musicall just sings flat.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Holiday Harmony is dull, perfectly wholesome background fodder perfect for half-watching while scrolling through your phone trying to find a good deal on an air fryer for your mother-in-law. Other movies of its ilk aren’t so boring and earnest, and accomplish just as much in less time.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
