Christmas in Maple Hills

This was my favorite Christmas movie of the 2023 season on the Great American Family network (and in my top 5 overall of the 2023 Christmas movies on both Great American Family and Hallmark). It was not your typical predictable GAF/Hallmark Chritsmas movie. It had much more to the plot and I really enjoyed the storyline solving the mystery of the lead character's grandmother's love story via flashbacks to the WWII era. There was good chemistry between the actors in both the modern day timeline as well as the historical timeline of the grandparents. Each year there are only a few movies I would rewatch the following Christmas season and this movie will be one of them.

The movie was rather slow , even with decent actors. Around half way through, the obligatory Hallmark mixed race couple shows up. It's always unexpected and they work on you like that. I don't like being manipulated, and that's what it feels like. Aside from that, the script is also a downer. I didn't feel very enthused after watching. The only redeeming quality was the scenery and the country feel. However, as someone else mentioned, the lead actress seems very city girl type. I think this movie would have worked better with a different leading lady such as Lindy Booth , or Danicka McKellar. The leading actor was generic as most of them are.

This could have been a nice sentimental story that was more than the usual Hallmark Saturday night. Like some of their Christmas stories that involve a quest to uncover something from the past, it is a romance with a mystery attached. The mystery would be especially compelling as it involves Grandma and a mysterious relationship during World War II.

My first problem that I'll call a hole is that an unusually committed love affair is launched on basically one dance at a USO-like function where grandma is a hostess who admits she isn't supposed to get personal with the soldiers. From that beginning, the soldier writes her countless letters and she pines to receive them but some mix-up leaves him without her address and so apparently she never got them while he was gone. He is deployed several years. I don't want to give a spoiler, but let me just say that how this is resolved is equally spontaneous and hard to understand.

Meanwhile, the granddaughter Val and her newfound "friend" are searching for answers to a title issue for the ranch. How they proceed on the search is confusing. How and where they find clues is confusing. And where they find the biggest clues leave an obvious question - why did they wait to look there? The way it played in the movie, it seemed that there was no reason they couldn't have looked there first. In fact, it would have made more sense than at least one of the places they did look. It really was a disappointment.

There is a character Douglas who isn't really explained. All I can figure is that he is a red herring for the viewer.

The movie explores home, immediate family, ancestral family, love, and wanderlust.

The movie kept my attention because of the mystery, but my frustration level was high throughout because there were so many scenes that were hard to figure out. I wasn't particularly surprised by anything including the ending.

The acting was decent despite the story holes. There was chemistry between Marcus Rosner and the beautiful and winsome Emily Alatalo. There were many flashbacks as I alluded to above.

Good actors. Poor script which makes the story line fall way short. The movie plods along in a mundane plot line with no side plots, distractors, MacGuffins or anything to add some character to the movie. Each scene is quite sterile with minimal characters, action and emotion. It seems as if the producers limited cost by avoiding extras and scenery. Without interesting dialogue, the writers easily whipped out some lines and left it at that.

The female lead supposedly grew up on a ranch but comes across as a city girl. I could not believe she was a country girl who loved the outdoors and farm life. A basic plot is the determination of who actually owns the land. However, from the beginning, I never had any emotional tie to idea of the lead losing her family land and being evicted. No suspense at all as to how the ending would play out.

Good story line that falls way short in entertaining. So much potential. So little result.

7.6 stars.

A wonderfully nostalgic and memorable story of two interwoven romances spanning 80 years in the town of Maple Hills. It's an account of a family on the verge of losing their maple farm because the bank discovers the deed is not in their name. The true owner is a mysterious person who signed it sometime soon after WWII.

In the present day, a doctor and a young woman whose family runs the farm are falling in love. The mystery of the farm is occupying their time more than anticipated and soon becomes an impediment to the romance. In the past, we see her grandmother longing for a man to return from the war. He is not much more than a stranger to her, but she is in love with him and he with her. There are other men involved both in the past and present, and we are left trying to solve the mysteries of unrequited loves and how they all began. Who owns the farm, who will discover the identity of the stranger and the mystery deed owner?

First of all, there are way too many commercials, so this film must have a runtime of 80 minutes. That's fine, but with a story so rich with so much potential, more is better. Nevertheless, it's very easy to get lost in both the back story and the present one, both so fascinating, it's difficult to pick which is better.

It's a very intriguing mystery that keeps us guessing who, when, and where. Enjoy it for the excitement, the romance, or both, but either way this is two stories unconventionally rolled into one short film.