Connie Sellecca plays a PhD.-holding psychiatrist who divorces her philandering husband and moves with her daughter to her family homestead in South Carolina, which has been sitting abandoned, presumably for years. Naturally, she encounters the boy next door (Randy Travis, from the next farm over), whom she left standing at the altar nearly two decades before.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the script or the acting. The faults of this film are in the casting and execution. I like both Travis and Sellecca, but have trouble seeing them as a couple. Indeed, Ms. Sellecca's appearance in this film was a prime reason for watching, but what we have here constitutes a serious flaw in the pairing of romantic leads.
Given that the rest of the cast seems fine for a film that is set in the rural south, one is sad to report that Ms. Sellecca seems to be the one miscast, as throughout the film, she appears from both nature and design to have just stepped off the pages of Vogue. Can you picture a high-tone model or a society chic, dressed in fashions and jewels, functioning comfortably in a dilapidated house in farmland?
And then there are the little things. Once a major flaw appears, one goes on alert looking for others. Start with the farmhouse.
When Sellecca's character and her daughter arrive, the first thing we see on a clear day is water dripping from a leaky roof into a half-full washtub. So who's been in there recently to manage the tub?
Next we have a working wall phone. Who bothers to pay monthly phone bills for an abandoned house? Or maybe she called ahead to have it hooked up
we don't know.
But wait, there's hope. Mr. Travis, whose character is now the local sheriff, mayor, and all-around Mr. Fixit, has been dating a local social worker who wants to marry him. They appear to be well-matched. In the end, will he do the right thing and make her an honest woman, or will he jump the shark to hook back up with his long-lost love? The 90 minutes of suspense killed my rating of this supposed-to-be feel-good film. To me, this was a holiday movie to forget.
