Lindsay Lohan’s Christmas movie is average to great

Years after falling into a metaphorical precipice, Lindsay Lohan is back in great shape in the Christmas B-movie Falling for Christmas (on Netflix from November 10), better than average. The film, by the director Jane Campion (joke, it is directed by the skillful Janeen Damian), concerns a wealthy hotel heiress, Sierra, who takes a nasty fall while skiing, bangs her head against a tree (in real life she would already be dead) and wakes up with amnesia. When a kind owner of a troubled shelter, Jake (Daniel Day-Lewis – nojust kidding, it is Chord Overstreet), takes her with him, Sierra, now called Sarah, learns the true meaning of love, family, career and, of course, Christmas.

A story of reinvention for an actress looking for a personal reinvention. Operation that mostly works well. Lindsay Lohan’s interpretation is lively and pleasing, with an aura of charm of Mean Girls (you hate Parental trap) dancing around her for the first time in some time. I’d be happy to see her in other films after this one, even if maybe in something more substantial than a Hallmark imitation.

Self Falling for Christmas had he really committed himself to telling a funny story, Sierra before the amnesia would have been a real nightmare, mean, spoiled and violent towards the staff. In this version of things, however, it is only a little privileged and superficial. She dreams of becoming an influencer, instead of taking on a role in her father’s hotel group, which I believe represents her main conflict. Actually she is her social climber’s boyfriend, Tad- Ian McKellen – sorryI stop it, it is George Young -, to be stupid. But he’s not that bad either, and he has his own little story arc with an interesting trajectory.

One of the advantages of the film is that it reproduces only the funniest aspects of the mundane Christmas comedies. Jake is the archetype of the rude with a heart of gold, he has a precocious daughter (Olivia Perez), a devoted elderly mother-in-law (Alejandra Flores) and a sad story behind it involving a dead wife. All of this is acceptably standard. As well as the Christmas-obsessed town where these two resorts – Sierra’s family, a luxury resort, and Jake’s, cozy but dilapidated – are located. There’s the necessary cheer in the air and a potentially mystical old man who looks a lot like the guy upstairs. (That is Santa Claus, not God, but actually, what’s the difference?).

What Fall in love with Christmas not ape are the crudest and most classic trappings of its kind. Many of these films are about frail city career women who are taught a lesson in provincial family values ​​in order to shake off the selfishness of their ambitions. A bad cliché, which seems to be driven by a real political hatred. Falling for Christmas mostly reverses this concept: it is, in a certain sense, Sierra moving towards a career. Sure, she’s humiliated by housework, but all of her life changes are lighter than some of the anti-coastal crap that airs on cable TV during the holiday season.

In short, Lindsay Lohan could have done worse. Fall in love with Christmas it even seems to have a limited budget. You don’t get the feeling this is a Vancouver suburb that has been thrown fake snow, and the sight of Chord Overstreet driving a sled madly towards her beloved one just feels like a bad green screen. Damian makes extensive use of drones, which we now have to accept as part of the director’s job, and in doing so evokes the welcoming yet terrifying feeling of being in a mountain town in winter.

The defect principal of the film is about the plot. At the beginning of the film, Sierra and Jake meet up when he bumps into her in the hotel lobby and spills her hot chocolate with whipped cream on her signature jumpsuit. But when he finds her body crumpled in the snow and then talks to her in the hospital, he doesn’t remember her. Which doesn’t make much sense. He surely he would recognize the woman he smeared on a few hours earlier. Maybe he too has some sort of memory loss.

Oh, well … Aside from this big narrative hole, Falling for Christmas it’s a film as stupidly captivating as it wants to be. In a deeper sense, it’s heartening to see Lohan fit and perform well. His has been a bumpy road for the past two decades, and this little film gives us hope (perhaps naive, perhaps presumptuous, perhaps excessive) that he is well and fully on the path of improvement. Watching the film, I remembered that Lindsay Lohan worked with the likes of Robert Altman and Paul Schraderwith the potential for an interesting and varied career. Falling for Christmas he still finds it at the foot of a high career mountain, but the chairlift may be on its way.