2023 Movie
Dir. Alex Ranarivelo · United States of America · English
Another generally uneventful Christmas movie with attractive, charismatic lead actors
Even if it knows to keep its ambitions modest, Holiday in the Vineyards still doesn’t find much to do for its small cast. The actors do what they can and certainly seem like they’re having fun play-acting a warm Christmas romcom, but when all is said and done there simply isn’t anything particularly striking about the collection of romcom-isms assembled for this movie. Even the film’s premise—which seems to promise a unique clashing of values between a small town and big capitalist business—resolves things with little more than a pat on the back. It’s certainly sweet on the surface, but these people we’re asked to to spend 107 minutes with still feel like strangers to us by the end.
A widow struggling to keep the local vineyard and raising her two young boys may be in store for a Christmas miracle when she falls for a big city playboy sent to get intel on a prospective vineyard for sale.
Sent by his business tycoon mother to scout a small town's budding wine industry for acquisition, a careless playboy falls in love with the community and a young widow he befriends.
Leading man Josh Swickard has the base traits that this admittedly shallow role requires (read: he is a very attractive person), but there's also a sheepish, everyman quality about him that helps keep the film afloat. So much so that, in fact, he isn't nearly as convincing as the playboy he's supposed to be at the beginning of the movie. Still, it never becomes frustrating to watch his character learn to soften up through the experience of basic human decency. And you can tell there's a comedic side to him that this movie unfortunately never really gives him the chance to tap into.
If there's one thing a disposable, cheerful holiday movie is going to touch on, it's—you guessed it—the grief of losing a loved one.
Emil Hofileña is a curator at A Good Movie to Watch. He also writes as a theater critic, with work published in Rogue and Out of Print, among others. He’s probably crying over a movie or an episode as we speak.
I’m watching the movie as I type . The business Mom in the movie just said, “let them get drunk with cheap wine “, as A “response” to, her business decision. That is so cruel! Sad and realistic and I would not expect a sentence like that on a “holiday“ movie.