It's always a hit or a flop when Hallmark takes a specific theme and turns it into their usual romance. Melt My Heart This Christmas is an unfortunate failure when they take the world of glassblowing and build a romance around the awful caricature of an evil boss. Ruining a movie with a single character is difficult, and the lack of concrete details doesn't help.
Holly (Laura Vandervoot) is an amateur glassblower who now works for a new company and is trying to showcase her glass ornaments at a Christmas glass festival. She doesn't get along with the festival organizer, Jack (Stephen Huszar). To appease Jack, Holly agrees to work as an assistant to the festival's big-name headliner, Bianca Bonhomme (Jennifer Wighorn), a supposedly world-renowned, semi-retired glass artist whose assistant has just quit, so she's threatening to withdraw from the festival because she's a horrible person.
Director: Amy Force
Writer: Ansley Gordon
Stars: Laura Vandervoort, Stephen Huszar, Jennifer Wigmore
The first third of the film is Bianca giving a poor performance as Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep) in The Devil Wears Prada. That's not a compliment. She's a boring, one-dimensional, and insufferable character.
The romance between Jack and Holly could have been good, but it's relegated to the background by Bianca's hostility toward Holly. They spend a lot of time together, but it's all rather bland. A generic romance for a generic movie.
I often say that the key to Hallmark's niche movies lies in getting the details right. In making sure the specific events or references are all real. In this case, they don't get the details wrong, but they also don't have any details at all. Everything in the film—the festival, the glassblowing, the location—is generic and offers no specificity that justifies or detracts from it, or makes it interesting.
Although we don't see much of the glassblowing, what little we do see is interesting and beautiful. The film also has excellent cinematography and production. Most of the scenes take place in the festival's Christmas market, which provides a charming backdrop (albeit with a slightly too Hallmark-esque and less realistic feel).
This Christmas movie was my most anticipated release of the season. Glassblowing, Christmas, and romance are perfectly complementary themes, and with this backdrop? Gorgeous. Instead, it's the most generic version of that film, with an insufferable character that makes it incredibly difficult to connect with the viewer. Jack has a line in this movie that says, "The key to art is authenticity." This movie doesn't feel very authentic.
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