(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you’ve watched a Christmas film or two, and this reviewer has seen a considerable share of them, then you’ll quite familiar with the idea that when things go wrong in your life, your automatic first thought is to hightail it back to your hometown.
Nothing unusual there; when life heads south with calamitously bruising intent, the first thing we want to do is to go somewhere – if of course we have somewhere to go and not everyone does, sadly – where the love is unconditional, where we don’t have to adult quite so actively and where we can lick our wounds, find our bearings and get ready for whatever the next stage of life may be.
But as The Merry Gentlemen makes abundantly clear, in this genre a temporary trip home often becomes a permanent one, as the lead character reacquaints themselves with a town and people, friends and family both, they have long neglected, discovering in the process that what they need most in life has been waiting for them in their hometown all along.
Cue the arrival back in the storied town of Sycamore Creek, all decked in The Merry Gentlemen in its festive best, of dancer Ashley Davis (Britt Robertson) who has just lost her job as a part of a Rockettes-like troop in New York City, thanks to the arrival of a newer, hungrier dancer, and decides that what she needs to do is spend Christmas with the people she’s been neglecting for a solid twelve years.
Surprisingly, no one in her family seems all that resentful.
Apparently going to the big city and getting stuck in an artistic rut is your passport to endless, unjustified forgiveness, and so it is that Ashley’s mum and dad, Lily and Stan (Beth Broderick and Michael Gross respectively), and elder sister Marie (Marla Sokoloff) and all-but-obligatory hunky husband Rodger (Marc Anthony Samuel) embrace her return as if it she has done no wrong.
It’s the ultimate prodigal daughter dynamic, and while Ashley hasn’t led a dissolute life nor squandered a fortune, she’s not exactly been close family of the year; but then The Merry Gentlemen is happy to exist in a world where suspending belief is almost reflexive and there’s a whole ton of stuff you just take as a given.
For instance, that when Ashley finds out her parents’s music club, The Rhythm Room, is facing closure at the hands of a greedy landlord, Denise (Maria Canals-Barrera) who wants to out a juice bar or something in there instead, she has almost no trouble at all getting the business’s occasional handyman, and incredibly obvious love interest – the meet cute is clunky and involves some of the worst physical comedy you’re likely to see anywhere, with Mentos ad-level emoting accompanying it – Luke (Chad Michael Murray), the bartender Troy (Cold Prattes) and brother-in-law Rodger to put on a Christmas-themed male revue.
So, not only is Ashley unequivocally accepted back into the family despite her casual emotional neglect of them, but she is then hailed as the saviour of the family business, and the town, and quite possibly the world though that never becomes clear in the film.
Thankfully Luke, Rodger and Troy (who it must be said has the pecs of a god and can do no wrong) are brilliantly talented dancers – well, that’s lucky! Would’ve sucked it they all had left feet and Ashley’s messiah complex cold not be burnished still further – and the revue is a roaring success with the 30 or so people the audience spending the GNP of a small country in the bar each night.
Is The Rhythm Room saved? Yes! Does Ashley fall in love with Luke with next-to-no chemistry burbling between them? Why, yes, of course, she does. And is the family saved and Ashley convinced she should never leave again and that true love has been there all along in the small town she left all those years ago, no doubt for some very sound reasons? Also yes.
Hardly spoilers any of them; charming though The Merry Gentlemen is in its own low-key, almost inert way, it telegraphs its plot twists and turns, which honestly are more like lazy, languid turns in a tourist drive road, with all the subtlety of a Christmas carol-yodelling extrovert wrapped in neon latex and a galaxy’s worth of twinkling festive lights.
Stick the narrative on a cliff somewhere and you could guide ships home.
For all that, though, and its willing captivity to every festive romcom trope and cliche known to man, woman and child, and scarf-wearing snowperson, The Merry Gentlemen doesn’t completely suck as a diversionary watch at Chfistmas.
Granted, you forget about it the moment it ends, and it’s highly likely you will need a Wikipedia entry to recall the plot mere seconds later, but there’s enough life in it, though barely, to keep you interested and to somehow, it’s a Christmas miracle indeed, not hit the 10-second forward icon so many times you get RSI.
Much of that can be sheeted home to Robertson who is the only one in the film who doesn’t appear to be phoning it in; perhaps it’s all those years far away in NYC where she did nothing but phone it home, but somehow Robertson manages to invest her limp and raggedy dialogue with something approaching human authenticity.
She is bright and sparkly and fun, and you can at least understand on some level why her family endlessly forgive her many a neglectful sin, and why Luke, who seems to be only barely a step or two up from ambivalently comatose, falls rather suddenly in love with her.
She’s got the goods where almost no one else does, and while you could blame a hackneyed plot or cardboard cutout characters or dialogue with all the inventive creativity of festive paint drying in a prop background for a Christmas all-male revue, it seems that no one but Robertson seems to know what to do with a movie that barely has a pulse beating.
The Merry Gentlemen is not entirely unwatchable and the fact that this reviewer watched to the end speaks at least slightly, sort of highly of it, but honestly, this is one film that doesn’t seem to try to want to reach high and which succeeds admirably, offering some safe, unadventurous festive fun which, like the fake snow scattered halfheartedly along the streets of Sycamore Creek, dissipates in its effect on viewers almost as soon as they skip, possibly relieved its all over, to the end of the credits.