Review Essay
I know it might bother this film’s fans to hear me say it, but the premise of 2019’s Let it Snow is essentially a time-compressed, teenage Love Actually. Several different plot lines are all arcing and criss-crossing through spaces very close to each other, and in some cases there are connections between characters we didn’t expect. The movie’s not really a comedy in a “ha ha” sense, but there’s certainly some funny moments. In the end we realize that, again, much like Love Actually, the film-makers think that the right closing narration over the right piece of music will make it feel profound. And maybe it does? I want to be clear, too: I’m one of those people the Internet loves to hate…I actually enjoy the 2003 holiday romantic comedy anthology film, Love Actually. So I’m not trying to criticize Let It Snow by saying that it’s got a familiar and almost comically overstuffed lineup of relationship scenarios—the couple that doesn’t know they belong together but they do. The couple where he’s worshipped her from a-near and she’s oblivious. The couple who would be great together if one of the girls was willing to step out of the closet and admit she likes girls. The couple that are almost certainly about to break up and it’s a question of who gets there first. We get expressions of family love, of the love between friends. And we have one truly unhinged character who’s seemingly mostly in the movie to be comic relief and/or a plot device to keep things on the rails. If you’re watching this movie, get ready for narrative whiplash (and be ready to take some notes to keep things straight).
The premise of the film—to the extent that I can call it a “premise”—is that there’s something magical about snow falling, and this particular snowy Christmas Eve in a small Illinois town is going to be chock full of magic. It’s a stretch, to be sure: it’s not like snow is rare in this town, or like this is an unusually monumental amount of snowfall, etc. (it’s enough to temporarily halt a train, but everything else about the snowfall felt like a pretty standard Great Plains storm to me). Nobody wished upon a snowflake, as far as I can tell, or cast a spell. It feels mostly like an excuse to make the title make sense, and maybe to explain why so many unlikely events coincide in this film to knock over the correct dominos to make everything turn out okay. I know it may feel like a spoiler to tell you things are going to work out, but I have to say, it’s baked deeply into this movie’s DNA that things are going to work out. Unlike Love Actually (and I promise, this is my last comparison to that film), the screenplay here doesn’t really have the courage for genuinely broken hearts: the only main character left unpartnered at the end of this story is a person whose story clearly is happier ending up solo, despite the fact that basically every single relationship in the movie’s a long shot to succeed. I can imagine that feeling triumphant, reassuring, or sweet, but to me it had more the feeling of being predestined. I was glad for all these kids but the unreality of it left me feeling a little disconnected from the world of the film.
The film has some things going for it: several of its young stars show up with real skill to deliver on screen (in particular, Kiernan Shipka’s an old pro at her young age, between years on Mad Men and starring in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch reboot), and the movie’s soundtrack is absolutely loaded with well-curated tracks that fit into yet another of my Yuletide interests, songs that are technically holiday music without being “holiday music”. While I found the character of “Tinfoil Woman” a little TOO obviously the invention of a Hollywood screenplay—I don’t care how quirky your small town is, there’s no way it is constantly being circled by a community-minded conspiracy theory freak whose truck can navigate even the snowiest of streets for the sake of rescuing helpless teenagers—any film that can have Joan Cusack in it is better off for the inclusion, and I was glad she was here. I was also glad that the film didn’t try to diagnose or “fix” Tinfoil Woman—she’s on her own journey, and that’s not what this movie is about. Another pleasant surprise was the fact that JP, the jock Angie’s got a crush on (who, therefore, stands in the way of Tobin, Angie’s best friend, dating Angie), is not a jerk or a heel, but instead is an attractive, sweet, funny, self-assured guy who treats Tobin almost as well as he treats Angie.
The headwind all of those strengths are trying to walk into, though, is a motion picture that, at the level of screenplay, editing, and direction, is just trying to do too much too fast at too many levels of emotion. Rom-coms usually have the problem that everything in the script could be fixed rapidly if they just said one obvious true thing to each other that the screenplay works hard to keep them from saying. Let It Snow, alas, has way too many plotlines and every single one of them hinges on something the characters obviously should say and almost certainly would say in real life, but don’t until the third act for dramatic reasons. And the need to race through things can force weird exchanges, where characters who JUST had a magical moment together need to suddenly forget all about it so there can be a new conflict, or where characters say really awful, almost unforgivable things to each other because we need to communicate “someone just tried to burn a bridge in this relationship” with great efficiency. Again, all of this haste just pushes me into checking out of emotional engagement with the film, despite the fact that there’s a lot of potential for genuine emotion in these teenagers and their tensions with family/friends. Like, I know by now I ought to have run through the various major named characters and their deals, but there’s such a surplus of major characters, all of whom have deals, that I’m not sure how to do it well.
The movie is also weighed down with quirks, from a restaurant called Waffle Town that’s missing its W, leading multiple people to refer to it as “affle town,” to a character whose attempt to shave his chest leaves him with a comically bleeding nipple that’s a talking point for the entire running time of the film, to, uh, did I mention this small town has a resident they all call “Tinfoil Woman” who just drives circles around town in the snow looking to be a good Samaritan and who is also somehow a rambling lunatic? We get an ecumenical, interfaith holiday pageant (between this and Single All the Way, what is with modern movies and the aversion to just staging a straightforward Christmas nativity play? Hey Hollywood, everybody knows it’s Jesus’s birthday, I promise, it’s not going to offend your viewers if a small town on Christmas Eve includes a handful of people briefly engaged in sincere religious observance) that a character refers to as “one of the best, most insane things I have ever seen”. A waitress tries to win over the girl of her dreams by serving up something called a “Quaffle Waffle”. The quirk is off the charts.
What it comes down to for this movie (and for, I’m sure, dozens of other movies in this particular streaming-friendly subgenre of “small town holiday rom-coms with a lot of quirk and some cute young talent”) is the question of what you’ve come to the movie in search of. If you want cute people in cute places whose problems, however serious on paper, end up being almost adorable themselves given how easily/fully they’re resolved by the time the end credits roll, this movie has you covered. If you were hoping for something that covered fewer relationships with more depth, or that had found a way to make this premise into something deeper than a “be the real you, and people will love you for it” afterschool special, Let It Snow is going to let you down to some extent. I had a very pleasant time when I was just admiring Kiernan Shipka’s elfin smile or appreciating the endless charisma of Shameik Moore as a stranded pop musician. I had a more confounding time trying to keep up with what the movie wanted me to feel (and asking myself if I felt it), or trying to understand why a character was doing any of the things they were doing (other than “because the script said so”). Not every movie needs to be an Oscar winner to be worthwhile, at this or any other time of year, so I certainly understand the value of a work like Let It Snow. I just also can’t pretend that it soars to heights it didn’t take me to. Three cheers for the diversity of the casting/storytelling here, though, and I hope that the talents who put this film together aim someday at getting something more substantial made, since I think we had a lot of the ingredients we needed for a modern classic.
I Know That Face: Isabela Merced, who’s here in one of the many leading roles as Julia, a bright girl with an edge and a chance to go to college but there’s this family thing, see, etc., appeared as a fictionalized version of herself in the 2015 television movie, the Nickelodeon Ho Ho Holiday Special. Kiernan Shipka, who in this film plays the totally chill girl Angie (or “the Duke”) who would be in danger of Manic Pixie Dream status if she had more screen time, appears as Gryla in the 2024 Santa Claus heist movie, Red One. And of course Joan Cusack, whose performance as “Tinfoil Woman” basically rescues a character the screenplay had set up for failure, is a well seasoned vet on the silver screen: she voices Mrs. Krum in the charming animated Santa movie, Klaus, and earlier in her career she’s the voice of the Lead Elf in Arthur Christmas. She plays Agnes in The Christmas Train, a TV movie about…oh, come on, it’s all there in the title. She’s the villainous Miss Rachel Bitterman in 2002’s It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie. I’m probably missing other qualifying credits, too: she’s Joan Cusack, she’s in dozens of movies, almost always in supporting parts, and in my experience she is absolutely always great. I’m glad she was here.
That Takes Me Back: This 2019 movie about teenagers didn’t make me nostalgic for anything in particular, but at the speed that teenage subcultures change, I assume that a more plugged-in young person would find a lot here that feels positively ancient.
I Understood That Reference: Jesus makes a brief appearance at the all-inclusive world pageant—again, briefer than you might expect on his own holiday but that’s not what this movie wanted to show—and the wise men keep making occasional appearances due to Tobin’s costuming decisions which, like much of the film, remain at least somewhat confusing to me.
Holiday Vibes (8.5/10): Though it’s a movie that’s more about young love than it is the particular hurdles of holiday living, we still get a ton of Yuletide hijinks, from the kooky pageant to Julie bringing Stuart home for her family’s Christmas Eve observance. Add in a magical snowfall and it’s checking a lot of the necessary boxes here: you’ll feel that seasonal glow, I’m certain.
Actual Quality (7.5/10): To some extent, Let It Snow is a movie where the parts are greater than the whole. If I think just about an individual character moment or line of dialogue, I can start to convince myself that this was a really solid rom-com. It’s only by stepping back slightly and asking myself if I was really invested in the film and if it holds together as a coherent story that I realize I was a lot more checked out from it than I have been from the better films I’ve seen for FFTH blog posts. I think this is a fair rating (from my own perspective), but I think the holiday fluffiness of this movie means that the mileage will vary a lot (and, as seen below, it depends a little on what you want out of a movie watching experience).
Party Mood-Setter? This is 1,000% what this movie is for. Checking in and out of the movie while not necessarily caring that much who’s who or what’s allegedly happening means you can coast on the attractive and bubbly cast, the solid soundtrack, and the moments of genuine humor. If you’re baking some cookies or just want to throw something on in the background of a gathering to entertain people who have sat down at the edge of it for a moment, this is absolutely going to do the trick.
Plucked Heart Strings? There are moments, especially the ones involving Julie and her mom, that have genuine emotion: they don’t pack as much of a punch due to the pacing (and just the challenge of being invested in storylines that are mostly pre-engineered for resolution) but I can imagine feeling a catch in your throat as you watch, even if I didn’t experience it.
Recommended Frequency: This is another split the difference movie for me: I am sure I could go my whole life without watching it again as a dramatic work, but I am also sure I will not go my whole life without seeing it again, because it’s too perfect at filling that “let’s put on a holiday movie while we address Christmas cards or trim the tree” niche that folks want. If you’re someone who does a lot of that, this may be an every year movie for you: for me, my guess is it’ll pop up now and then, in years where I’m a little more invested in those at-home holiday vibes.
Let It Snow is another of these streamer-exclusive films: Netflix made it, and if you want to watch it, you’ve got to go to Netflix. If you go looking for DVD copies, either at a store or at your library, you are only going to find copies of the 2013 Hallmark movie Let It Snow starring TV holiday perennial Candace Cameron Bure (seriously, the woman’s been in a minimum of 17 Christmas movies, none of which are currently in the queue here at FFTH, for the record). Whichever snow-themed holiday rom-com you’re seeking out, have fun with it!
