A worthwhile Christmas movie

For as much as I love Christmas, I do not enjoy recent Christmas movies. The made-for-TV variety have mostly become romances which often have little to do with the holiday (except that some network exec thought that snow and Santas would make a good backdrop for an otherwise routine and forgettable love story), and the theatrical holiday movies, often about Santa Claus, are all about action and overkill. The new Disney/Jim Carrey Christmas Carol looks just dreadful.

I have found one little indie Christmas movie (from 2007, available on DVD) worth watching. It's called Noelle, and some online critics have issues with it because they believe it has a pro-life agenda. Honestly, a Christmas movie without some kind of moral or spiritual agenda isn't much of a Christmas movie, so that wouldn't automatically be a strike against it in my book. Though the movie does involve the issue of abortion, it is handled with restraint, and the pro-life lesson is not the only moral situation covered in the film.

Father Keene arrives in a Massachusettes seaside village a week before Christmas to make a decision about closing down the local parish. The congregation is small and aging, and the priest, Father Simeon, is a drunkard who says during a sermon that his church has become a mausoleum. Keene suggests that Simeon make one last stab at respectability, namely, a living creche to be held on Christmas Eve, which unfortunately will conflict with a traditional party thrown by a local town hotshot, Mrs. Worthington.

This gets Keene involved with Marjorie, a Worthington daughter, who is involved in an affair with Seth, a rich snob who, unbeknownst to anyone, is actually engaged to someone else. Marjorie seems unhappy and Keene wants her to be Mary in the nativity, but eventually it comes out that she is pregnant with Seth's baby and has been considering an abortion. This triggers a crisis of conscience within Keene (for reasons unknown to us until the end, though you'll figure out why early on) and he tries to get her to set her life in order.

Father Simeon's plotline is also important. He's not an old man; in fact, he and Keene were in seminary at the same time. Keene thinks Simeon has lost his calling, but Simeon throws that accusation back in Keene's face when the rather cold Keene admits he's not a "people person." For all of Simeon's faults, he does care about his parishoners; he's been secretly using church money to pay for an old fisherman's medical bills. All the story threads climax on Christmas Eve, and though the writer fudges some plot details, specifically how far along Marjorie's pregnancy is, the outcome is satisfying.

Keene is played by David Wall, a Robert Redford look-alike, who is also the director and writer, and I'm thinking he should have left one of those jobs to someone else. Kerry Wall (his real-life wife) is nicely understated as Marjorie; Sean Patrick Brennan as Simeon (pictured at left) is handsome and gets the worn-down feeling of his character right, but the less said about his acting, the better. Still, I like this movie if only because it's not a froufy romance or Santa Claus fantasy. It looks good--somewhat surprisingly, it was filmed on location in snowy Cape Cod, not Canada, which seems to be the go-to location for TV and movie locations these days. The title refers, I think, to a little girl whom Keene keeps seeing in misty visions all over town, and she's the main clue to the final outcome. The movie's serious tone (with some unobtrusive humor mostly involving the aging parishioners) is just right. As I said before, the moralizing, though central to the movie's action, is never heavy-handed (except for the one line of dialogue that Noelle has at the end of the film). I'd much rather watch this 4 or 5 more times than have to watch even 10 minutes of the new Jim Carrey Christmas monstrosity. [DVD]