Well, we’ve made it! It’s the halfway point! It’s been six months since last Christmas and it’s six months to this Christmas! And right now, I’m cautiously optimistic that we may actually be able to celebrate Christmas like we did before the pandemic.
(“Cautiously optimistic” because I really want to see what happens when the fall comes and cold and flu season bear down on us again. It’s easy to say we’re almost done with the pandemic now in summer when the weather is nice, ventilation is better in most places and most people are spending more times outdoors).
But for now, we’re going to mark the halfway point with a movie from last Christmas that features a carnival, a magical carousel and a chance to change your life.
They’re singing “Deck the Halls”/But it’s not like Christmas at all/’Cause I remember when you were here/And all the fun we had last SPOILERS!
We meet Cheryl Jenkins (Tamera Mowry-Housley), who works in some fancy government science agency and is in charge of giving out grants to fund different projects. She’s swamped with paperwork and is eager to go home for the first time in a while. Cheryl wishes she just had more time and it’s clear she’s very stressed. She leaves DC and heads home for Christmas.
She gets home and reunites with her parents, Jeanette (P. Lynn Johnson) and Robert (Bobby L. Stewart), as well as her sister Trish (Zarrin Darnell-Martin). Her parents have sold the home Cheryl and Trish grew up in and downsized to a smaller condo. It’s a tight squeeze but they manage, though it’s clear Cheryl misses her family home.
Cheryl and Trish go to their town’s Christmas fair. There, she runs into Terrence Fletcher (Brendon Zub), who she was supposed to go on a date with several years ago but ended up canceling due to her job. He is now the town’s mayor and she wonders if he is the one that got away. She also runs into Michael Xavier (George Campbell), her rival from high school. She has not missed him one bit and marvels that he’s still stuck in their small town as a teacher.
Trish reveals that she’s going to open her own restaurant but Cheryl isn’t supportive. She points out most places fail within the first year and thinks her sister should find something more certain. Trish is understandably upset and excuses herself. Cheryl finds her way to a carousel and boards it, going on a crazy trip as it spins around and around.
When she gets off, she’s a little dizzy. She then heads back into the carnival and gets the feeling something is wrong. Especially when she sees that a special platform Terrence had gotten set up is no longer there. She also notices that flyers have the wrong year on it – they’re off by five years but everyone insists the year is right. Cheryl is even more confused.
Cheryl decides to head home and is surprised when she finds her family at their own house. She’s even more surprised when she notices the angel on top of the tree is intact, meaning she hasn’t accidentally broken it yet. Her parents are concerned but Cheryl is over the moon – she’s been sent back in time and she decides this is a gift. She can now make different choices and maybe her life in the future will be different.
Let’s break down the decisions she makes that changes who she is:
Terrence
Cheryl finally goes on that date with Terrence and finds out that he is only focused on himself and his political career. He talks only about that and interacts with almost everyone else but Cheryl. She considers it a bust and realizes he definitely wasn’t the one who got away.
Bullet dodged.
Trisha
Cheryl tries to convince Trisha to give up her dreams of running a restaurant and to go into another career. Her sister finally lets her have it, saying that Cheryl may think she’s just looking out for Trisha but that it’s demoralizing to not even have her sister’s support. Cheryl checks herself and discovers that Trisha is really passionate about her career so she starts to support her.
Cheryl spent a good chunk of the movie trying to ignore her future boss, Dr. Phillips (Benjamin Wilkinson), but they keep running into each other. She finally agrees to have a meeting with him and is prepared to turn him down. After all, she no longer likes her job and is feeling burnt out. She also regrets that it took her from her dream of doing research and actively working in astronomy, especially as before she got sent back in time, she learned a team made a discovery she had been pursuing in grad school. Cheryl wants to pursue her work and not get bogged down in paperwork.
But Dr. Phillips manages to convince her to take her job anyway as she remembers all the projects she approved and worried that they wouldn’t have gotten done if she wasn’t there. So she decides to take the job anyway in the end.
I really didn’t like this plot and I’ll go more into at the end.
Miss Nelson/Science Club/Michael
Yes, I’m lumping them all together because I feel you really can’t separate them from each other – they are really the same storyline.
After realizing she’s in the past, Cheryl goes to visit her old science teach and mentor, Miss Nelson (Sheryl Lee Ralph), who is still alive. Cheryl and Miss Nelson talk for a bit and Cheryl says she wants to get her teacher’s perspective on something. Miss Nelson invites her to visit her in her classroom the next day and Cheryl agrees.
Cheryl goes to visit Miss Nelson the next day and asks her about time travel. Her question intrigues her teacher, which I know it intrigued my physics teacher in high school. We even had a whole field trip about it – ultimately, I determined that while time travel is not a scientific impossibility, it’s a scientific improbability. Miss Nelson doesn’t really come up with an answer before talking about how she has a lot of work ahead of the holiday season. Cheryl asks if she can help and Miss Nelson asks her to help with the science club, saying it may inspire the students to see someone who is pursuing a career in science. Cheryl agrees.
She then realizes that Michael also helps in the science club and their rivalry resumes. Except it’s clear that Michael has more of a knack for engaging the teens than Cheryl, who first goes very theoretical and over their heads. She reluctantly lets him give her some tips and next takes the students on a field trip to the carnival and essentially does Physics Day with them like I did at Six Flags Great Adventure in high school.
As they work together, Michael and Cheryl get to know each other better. Cheryl learns that Michael wasn’t trying to always one-up her in high school – she inspired him to work harder, to be better. He admired her, something she never considered before. She now admires how good he is as a teacher and how he connects with the students. It wasn’t the career he planned for himself – life derailed his plans for medical school – but he believes it is the career he was meant to have.
Cheryl tells Michael about the time traveling and he doesn’t believe her at first. She then starts to recall things about that week, including a freak snow storm. When it hits, Michael does start to believe her and they bond even more, slowly falling in love.
Cheryl thanks Miss Nelson for all her help and for helping her find some passion in her life again. She tries to warn Miss Nelson about her fatal heart attack by Miss Nelson doesn’t want to know her fate. She and Cheryl say goodbye, especially as Cheryl has decided to take the job in DC.
Michael is disappointed but they spend one last night at the carnival. Cheryl finds the carousel and hops on again, spinning back to the future. She races back to her old house, realizes it definitely is the present time again and gets to talk with the family who bought it. They seem pretty sweet and she makes peace with the decision. She then heads back home.
Everything wraps up – Cheryl works it out so that she can move back to her home town and work remotely while also doing some part time teaching at a local university. And she reunites with Michael, who has been waiting for her for five years. All’s well that ends well, apparently.
So how was it?
Pretty good, except for that part about the job, so I’ll just get the rant over with now.
So the movie made it very clear that Cheryl was not happy with her job. While it starts with her at some gala to celebrate a grant, it quickly moves to her complaining about all the grant requests she needs to read and how late she already is. We also are told that her work has kept her from visiting home for several months, maybe a year or two. She doesn’t mention any friends in DC nor does she have a love life. It seems all she does is work and she is clearly not happy. She even spends the entire movie avoiding her boss and getting that job. But then she changes her mind over all the grants she had approved, worried that all the projects she had approved would not have been and amazing discoveries would not have been made.
But it felt out of left field. They could’ve had Cheryl sprinkle in mentions of the projects she had approved. Or run into a situation where something she approved would’ve helped but because it hadn’t been discovered yet, there was no way to help. It felt more like the writers went “Oh, wait, paradox, so she has to take the job for reasons!” and didn’t do much else.
So yeah. That bothered me. I was looking forward to a final act where we see how different Cheryl’s life is because she made different decisions and I was a bit disappointed that they just sent her back.
Otherwise, it was a good movie. Mowry-Housley had great chemistry with Campbell. I really was rooting for Cheryl and Michael to make it in the end and I loved their heart-to-hearts. All of Cheryl’s preconceived notions were blown up and she finally saw things in a new light, especially when it came to him.
I did enjoy how going back in time gave Cheryl some perspective. She finally stopped trying to control her sister’s career and made peace with some of the changes that happened in her life. It really helped her find peace and happiness again and it was nice journey to watch.
If you get a chance to watch it, I hope you do – and I hope the job plotline doesn’t annoy you as much as it annoys me.
See you all in July!
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