Welcome to Rick's Texan Reviews' annual Christmas movie review, where I review a Christmas-themed film. This year, I look at the first openly-gay Hallmark Television Christmas movie.
The Hallmark Channel is donning its gay apparel for Christmas with The Holiday Sitter. I figure The Holiday Sitter was something that everyone behind the project patted themselves on the back for. Sadly, The Holiday Sitter will not make anyone's Yuletide gay, as it is probably the worst Hallmark movie that I have seen, which is saying a lot.
Perpetual bachelor Sam Dalton (Jonathan Bennett) has no interest in much of anything outside his high finance career. He certainly is not interested in either having a family or his current family. Sam is looking forward to his Hawaiian holidays when his sister Kathleen Walker (Chelsea Hobbs) calls. She and her husband Nate (Matthew James Dowden) have to rush out of their New York suburb of Braydon to pick up the baby they have just ordered and hurriedly need a babysitter for their teen son Miles (Everett Andres) and tween daughter Dania (Mila Morgan).
Actually, they have to be there at the birth of their new child born via surrogate, and the birth mother went into early labor. The who, what and why of all this is irrelevant. The Holiday Sitter just needs an excuse to get the parents out and Sam in.
Sam, who is so removed from his family that he does not know what Nate & Kathleen's house looks like and is I think unaware of his niece and nephew's names, does not tell his sister and brother-in-law that his flight leaves that very day. He just goes, and there meets Jason DeVito (George Krissa). He is the Walker's contractor, comes from a big Italian family and, like Sam, is openly gay. While Sam is totally inept with children, Jason is working to adopt rather than wait for Mr. Right, especially if Mr. Right does not want to start a family.
In the ensuing three days before Christmas, Sam and Jason find that opposites attract, both of them mentor Miles as he pursues Jason's niece Arabella (Bella Leonardo) in a local theater production and cater to Dania's vegan whims and hissy fits. Sam finds the joys of parenting and is even rewarded with his new niece being named Angelica Samantha in his honor. Will Sam and Jason find themselves in each other's arms by the end?
A good way to judge the success of a same-sex romance such as The Holiday Sitter would be if it would work with a heterosexual couple. Judging by that standard, it is possible for it to work, but there are outside factors that make The Holiday Sitter a disaster from the word go. Sam is really a horrible person. He is a bit shallow, clumsy (a running gag involves when he accidentally set the kitchen on fire the last time he babysat) and so bad with kids that when Dania calls him, "Uncle Sam" he responds with "Niece Dania" in a puzzled manner. He appears to not understand why he would be called "Uncle" by a minor. It is as if Sam is not a person or even a character but some odd auto-animatronic figure that is attempting to pass itself as human.
As a side note, he is "Uncle Sam" and there is not one joke about that.
Had it been Samantha and Jason, The Holiday Sitter would still stink. At the top of the list is Morgan as Dania. I think she gave a bad performance, though to be fair every performance in The Holiday Sitter was hopelessly broad and cringey. What sets Morgan apart is how whiny and obnoxious Dania is. She is a vegan, which is already a sign that this tween girl is insufferable. Kathleen, who herself is also obnoxious when Sam finds a long list of dos and don'ts as well as a super-tight schedule for the kids, has given permission for Dania and Miles to have pancakes. Sam, whose cooking skills are already a source of mockery, tries to order out but has no luck. Dania, who wants her vegan pancakes, will not be denied and starts whining and making faces about it. If memory serves right, when Jason comes in to do his "uncle consulting" work, he finds Dania face down on the counter, making moaning noises.
I think that is meant to be funny. It only makes Dania into a little monster.
It takes a lot to make audiences actively hate children, but I hated Dania. Kathleen has promised her little girl that she and Nate will be there for Christmas. That means they have to ride through heavy snowstorms with a newborn to please this little brat. Sure, everyone has to go through hoops and ladders, even put a baby's life at risk, to please one little girl rather than tell her she can't get her way. Dania is perhaps the most awful character in The Holiday Sitter, which made the case that Sam is right in not wanting to be around any of his family.
Not that anyone else in The Holiday Sitter gave a good performance. It is just that Morgan stood out because her character was so insufferable that part of me wishes she had been left out in the cold. As a side note, given that it is New York in winter, the weather seemed almost tropical in Braydon, the suburban Fire Island with its many gay couples.
Bennett is thoroughly hamming it up as Sam, never bothering to make the character into a real person. In some ways, Sam is a walking gay stereotype, the type of man who knows another man is gay because that man recognizes what type of loafers he wears.
In The Holiday Sitter, Jason tells Sam that he got some baking powder on his Rossini loafers. At first, Sam barely seems to notice what Jason said. As soon as it dawns on him that Jason knows what a Rossini loafer is, he asks him how he knows. Jason only smiles and walks away. Jason silently mouths his delighted reaction. To be fair, at least The Holiday Sitter answers the question on why Kathleen never bothered to hook up Jason and Sam (she knows that Sam, unlike Jason, does not want a family). Credit should be given for probably the only logical point in The Holiday Sitter.
It is curious that Legally Blonde is now retroactively seen as homophobic because a gay character recognized Elle Woods' shoe brand, but The Holiday Sitter, which has a similar gag, is not. That Krissa and Bennett (the latter who also has a story credit with co-screenwriter Greg Baldwin, writing with Tracy Andreen) are both openly gay makes this bit more curious. They are diving into a gay stereotype which falls horrendously flat.
As yet another side note, I know a few gay men who have no idea about shoe or clothes brands. That makes me think that The Holiday Sitter was not about moving past the "novelty" of a same-sex romantic comedy but about checking off boxes. Jason is a contractor, and here it would have been a nice change of pace to see someone who moves away from such stereotypes into more "manly" pursuits. That, however, would have required some thinking, which The Holiday Sitter was not about to do.
Jason's subplot about wanting a family is there to show the contrast to Sam, but being an acceptable uncle to his large group of Italian-American nieces and nephews does not show anything about his future parenting skills. I would have suggested making him Arabella's foster father, or even biological one. He could have been a divorced father, accepting his homosexuality after having married a woman and having a child with her. It is, I suppose, easier to keep him childless and giving him this vague goal of adoption, but his desire for a family never rings true and just comes and goes whenever the plot needs it.
I have digressed from the performances, which are all universally awful. Krissa is so blank as Jason, and even when playing against others, Krissa seems so robotic in his delivery. There is no chemistry between him and Bennett. Bennett did nothing but show Sam to be a near-moron, his performance being so broad as to almost transcend camp. When he is told that his new niece will be named after him, I think he is meant to be seen as genuinely moved. As performed by Jonathan Bennett, I genuinely could not tell if he was pretending to cry in an alleged humorous manner or not. That is bad: when what is meant to be moving ends up doubtful about its sincerity.
Even in their small roles both Hobbs and Dowden were embarrassing as Kathleen and Nate. They were just dull and flat when separate from the central story. Andres probably was the best of the lot, but only when he performed in the Christmas play The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. We'll leave aside the question as to why there was a Christmas pageant on Christmas Eve itself.
The Miles/Arabella subplot went nowhere, was resolved quickly and was surprisingly the only heterosexual romance in the film.
The Holiday Sitter was terrible, with director Ali Liebert being the most to blame. Not only were the performances pretty much awful, but The Holiday Sitter drowned in cutesy sitcom music that is annoying and shows the low level of production it flourishes in.
Bros, with its claims of being the first gay romantic comedy released by a major studio, had a lot of fun mocking the Hallmark Channel romcoms, particularly its Christmas movies. Not to be outdone, Hallmark decided the same year Bros came out (no pun intended) that it was time for its first gay Christmas romantic comedy. While there have been gay and lesbian romances in one or two Hallmark movies, The Holiday Sitter is the first to have a same-sex romance as its central plot. It will probably not the last, but one can only hope that future gay Hallmark movies are better than The Holiday Sitter.
0/10
2023 Christmas Film: Journey to Bethlehem
2022 Christmas Film: Santa Claus (1959)
2021 Christmas Film: It Happened on Fifth Avenue
2020 Christmas Film: Roots: The Gift
2019 Christmas Film: Last Christmas
2018 Christmas Film: Christmas with the Kranks
2017 Christmas Film: The Man Who Invented Christmas
2016 Christmas Film: Batman Returns
2015 Christmas Film: A Madea Christmas
2014 Christmas Film: Prancer
2013 Christmas Film: A Christmas Carol (1951)
2012 Christmas Film: Arthur Christmas
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