Married by Christmas

Nobody involved in the making of this movie EVER talked to a lawyer about how to deal with the insane clause in Granny's ridiculous and mean spirited will (Phyllis Schlafly would have loved Granny). I'm a lawyer. The will supposedly states that the business is to be given to the then unidentifiable future husband of the first of her unmarried granddaughters to get married (which would leave her own daughter and both granddaughters completely disinherited). This could have and should have been challenged in court after Granny died (which apparently occurred long before the events in the movie) as setting forth a condition precedent that might never occur (given that it was possible when the will was submitted to probate that neither granddaughter would ever marry) and given the absence of an identifiable beneficiary at the time of Granny's death.

And even if such a legal challenge failed (unlikely if the relatives all agreed to challenge the will), a lawyer could easily have drafted a contract and a prenup when the first engagement came along that transferred half of the business to each sister (and perhaps giving the first husband half of his wife's share). An inadequate post marriage version of this approach was briefly and vaguely alluded to early on but the new fiancé said everyone should "sleep on it", at which point Katie (well played by April Bowlby) should have reconsidered the character of the person she was marrying. Instead, she and her fiancé started making plans to change the company.

It's very frustrating to watch a movie driven by an infuriating premise and even more so when the conflict is an antiquated vestige of a time when women were regarded as subservient second class citizens (although there's still a lot of that in the world).

Jes Macallan was really great as Carrie and, if you can ignore the premise (which I couldn't), there's some decent dialogue and well played relationship scenes. But Carrie's "plan" to get married before her sister was desperate and annoying, as was the failure to work out a fair win-win deal BEFORE the wedding. I hate watched the rest of the movie to see how they resolved the conflict (ugh) but I felt like there was a big black cloud hanging over everything. That's not the feeling I want when I'm watching a Christmas movie.