Family is such an important part of life. Too often the movies paint an ideal home life where Mom and Dad get up in the morning and exchange pleasantries over a peck on the cheek. And as often as we call movies fake, the natural tendency is to want to see something that reflects reality or something that has the feeling of something real. Yet for whatever reason, family films don't often show how life is for many. Mom and Dad often sleep in separate homes today, yet Hollywood seems slow to reflect it. And when they are apart, the children seem to be scheming on ways of getting them back together. All I Want for Christmas is one such film. Generic at its core, the idea behind the movie is valiant enough but happy themes aren't enough to carry an otherwise boring film.

Ethan (Ethan Embry) and Hallie (Thora Birch) are products of divorced parents. With Christmas fast approaching, Hallie is having wishes of bringing her family together again. So she approaches Santa Claus (Leslie Neilson in a surprisingly subdued role). But because Ethan is the wiser and slightly older brother, he knows that Hallie shouldn't count on Santa for making things right. He's got a more realistic outlook on life so he takes matters into his own hands. Taking a page out of The Parent Trap, Ethan and Hallie set out to devise a plan that would bring their parents back together.

While the intentions might be noble, the execution is overly sentimental. I wanted to like Ethan and Hallie as the thought of kids trying to get their parents back together is a very relevant one that is largely ignored considering the amount of children who come from split homes nowadays. Birch is a spitfire as the young daughter. She shows a charming combination of attitude and faith that are hard not to like. However, the story makes her out to be a little too cute, a toy to be looked at and laughed at but not to be taken seriously as a little person. Ethan, on the other hand, feels far too generic. He shows little personality that would set him apart from any other boy, this despite the fact that he comes from an overlooked situation - at least in the movies.

I don't know if it's fair to condemn a film such as this for placing itself in a very upper-class setting but it made me have a hard time relating with many of the situations. Sure, some of the world is rich but more people aren't. Between the obscenely large homes, ballroom dances and lavish wedding plans, I was greatly distanced because the setting made itself more important than it needed to be. Because wealth plays such a prominent role in the lives and attitudes of many of the supporting characters, it undermines the significance of Ethan and Hallie's plight.

Because All I Want for Christmas is geared towards a family audience, the outcome is largely ever in doubt. But even in taking it outside of the genre, the construction of relationships between the adults makes it far too obvious. The film begins with the children's parents already apart. We don't see any of their fights or differences that drove them away from each other in the first place and when they're shown together they really don't seem all that different. Their mother Catherine (Harley Jane Kozak) is engaged to be remarried, but her fiancé (Kevin Nealon) is set up as a child-hating villain. He's clearly not cut out to be Hallie and Ethan's stepfather. Therefore, getting their parents back together cannot be a far stretch because we're not given much of a reason as to why they should have been separated in the first place.

All I Want for Christmas has the look and feel of a generic family sitcom. At a half-hour, I could have handled it and its generic characters. But stretched out to more than 90 minutes, it's a lot harder to handle, no matter how interested in the subject matter I might have been.

©Movie Views; December 10, 2003

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