A Nanny for Christmas

I love all the silly, "you can see the happy ending after the first 3 minutes" Christmas movies. I love them. I watch a ton every year. But this one just doesn't know what it wants to be and fails miserably trying. This movie has at least 4 (maybe 5) typical Christmas movie plots going at once, and doesn't have enough time to develop motivation of characters or resolutions for any them. Even for a Christmas movie people act in extremely contrived ways. You can't figure out why they would do that. And you don't really like them enough to care. Back stories are hinted at but not developed. It seemed the author had no idea how to set up the situation so just randomly got people to move to starting places for the story. Then there is too much plot to resolve, so abracadabra a small event or two suddenly makes everyone make decisions to tie up a happy ending for all the plots elements. Motivations for change are completely inadequate. If they had picked one or two of the several problems in the characters lives and focused on motivations and resolutions for that, it could have been a good movie. But it wasn't.

A movie where the protagonist creates an unnecessary problem for herself.

It was an all-round Christmas cheese-fest. It was very much your typical romantic comedy in a nut-shell; girl meets boy, lies about who she is, he finds out, happy ending. Whilst it did have some good moments it was often cringe-worthy to watch. Very little plot substance and some very flat acting meant that a lot of the film feels wasted. For example to make more of a story they had Ally befriend the children but this just fell flat on its face with bad acting and scenes that lacked reality. The children's relationship with their mother, the high powered advertising exec, was very odd as well and this too added to the disbelief that the children were in any way a part of the film. Whilst some scenes were shot beautifully, with stunning views of the house, the rest of it felt very home-movie-esque. The ending I could have quoted word for word as it was so predictable. However all was not lost, as there were still some nice moments and if you want a simple, cheap rom-com to warm up your Christmas, it does the job, although I doubt many of the actors will include it on their CV's.

Emmanuelle Vaugier plays a suma cum laud college graduate trying to break into the world of advertising. She interviews with one of the hottest agencies in the field, where she thinks she's interviewing for an account executive position but is instead hired as the nanny for the CEO's two children. Along the way she begins to fall in love with one of the agency's male executives who is struggling to come up with a pitch for a major client. Thinking that the executive will think less of her for being a nanny, she lies and tells him that she's a "special consultant" to the agency, hoping to impress him. As the nanny, she teaches the children that Shakespeare can be fun... if you set up your own play. Regimented in their behavior by their over-bearing mother and absentee father, the children embrace their new nanny's ideas of how to do things (hence the references to the "Sound of Music").

Already we know how the movie will end, but what makes you want to stick around and watch is (a) Ms. Vaugier, who does a great job of being the playful nanny as well as the business-first executive, and (b) a simple, straight-forward plot that you can watch over hot cocoa and spongecake.

You probably won't cry at the end, but at least you'll laugh at the more humorous moments.

Suffice it to say that I had, of course, never heard about the 2010 movie "A Nanny for Christmas" prior to sitting down to watch it here in 2024. I stumbled upon the movie as I was gathering Christmas movies for my December Christmas movie marathon.

Writers Michael Ciminera, Richard Gnolfo, Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan put together a rather generic script. I just didn't get that particular warm and sappy Christmassy feel as I sat through the 87 minutes that the movie ran for. Sure, it was a watchable movie, but it just didn't really stand out in the vast selection of sappy Christmas movies that are out there.

The movie does have a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Emmanuelle Vaugier, Dean Cain, Richard Ruccolo, Cynthia Gibb and Clyde Kusatsu. The acting performances in the movie were certainly fair.

While I did manage to sit through the entire movie, I was not particularly entertained. And since the movie failed to capture that sappy Christmas spirit, then the movie just didn't cut it for me.

This is definitely not a movie that I will be returning to watch a second time. Nor is it bound to become a Christmas classic. But I am sure that there is a fan base out there for a movie such as this.

My rating of director Michael Feifer's 2010 movie "A Nanny for Christmas" lands on a four out of ten stars.