I wanted to watch this movie because it looked like a potential train wreck from the previews and guess what?! It was! But in a kind of surprisingly delightful way. Despite being both an extended ad for Daisy brand dairy products and an extreme version of the problematic heterosexual dynamics of most Christmas movies, I have to say I kind of enjoyed it. So, let’s talk turkey.
Official Description: After leaving London, Abby connects with an anonymous caller while working at a cooking hotline. The caller is single dad "John" who Abby unknowingly has become smitten with in real life.
The movie starts with Abby (Emily Tennant), a soux chef at a restaurant in London, breaking up with her head chef boyfriend who, as she puts it, has '“betrayed [her] in work and betrayed [her] in love.” Oh, the drama!
Abby decides to take a break from cooking, and her parents give her the gift of plane tickets to Chicago where her great aunt or somebody has an apartment that they’re not currently using that Abby can stay in over the holidays. I don’t know if being sent away by your loved ones during the holidays following a break up is actually a gift, but we have to get our girl to the US somehow.
When she arrives in Chicago, she is immediately greeted by Margaret (Marina Stephenson Kerr), a busybody older neighbor type. During the holidays, Margaret normally works part-time at the Holiday Hotline, a fictional company modeled on the Butterball Turkey Hotline where cheery customer support personnel help callers solve their holiday turkey dilemmas during the holiday season. This year, Margaret wants to spend more time with her grandchildren over the holidays, so she strong arms Abby into taking her place as a Holiday Hotline operator, a coveted position which many other women in the apartment building want but which only Abby, with her chef background and extensive knowledge of turkey thanks to her American-born mother, is qualified for.
The standard greeting at the Holiday Hotline? “Let’s talk turkey”, preferably said in a breathy, low voice. Is it turkey or is it phone sex? Why not both. We also get some fantastically weird euphemistic lines like “Well, you see it's, um, [the turkey is] stuck on the end of my… hockey stick” because who doesn’t love turkey euphemisms! or American Pie callbacks? Unclear. The movie is also chock full of bad turkey puns and “dad jokes” which spoke to my corny heart. “It’s a no-briner!”
Anyway, on Abby’s first day at the hotline, she feels like clients are rejecting her turkey expertise due to her British accent, so with the help of her boss Roger (Erik Athavale), she adopts an American accent and names her new American alter ego Peggy. Thus begins our tale of mistaken identity and misunderstanding.
Our male love interest, John aka Jack (Niall Matter), is a single dad whose wife died three years ago. When his daughter, Jessica (Myla Volk) says she missing having Christmas at their house, Jack becomes determined to host a Christmas dinner the way his wife used to. The linchpin of the dinner, of course, was a turkey, so the movie quickly becomes entirely about Jack learning how to cook a turkey. Coincidence? I think not.
Over the course of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Jack does successfully learn to cook a turkey with an exorbitant amount of help from Peggy. I mean, for someone who cooks 3 turkeys over 4 weeks, he seems to call the hotline every day, not inspiring much confidence in his general ability to function at all, let alone raise a child, run a business, or any of the other things he supposedly does. Of course, because it’s a rom com, Peggy also helps John open up, get in touch with his emotions, put himself out there after the death of his wife, and several other items from the manic-pixie-dream-girl/woman-in-a-romance-movie to-do-list. There is some enemies-to-friends stuff with Jack and Abby outside of the phone hotline as well, but I think we’ve done enough plot synopsis here for you to get the gist of the thing.
Towards the end of the movie, Abby realizes that Jack is the caller from the hotline when they go on a date and he begins to tell her about his dead wife and how he’s been getting help from a woman on the turkey hotline. Jack, on the other hand, doesn’t figure it out until Christmas Eve, when he shows up at the office of the turkey hotline (LIKE A TOTAL STALKER) with a thank-you gift for Peggy - a turkey Hallmark ornament, of course - and sees Abby there.
Once Jack figures it out, he runs out of the room, and when Abby follows to try to explain, he gets pissed off that she “lied” to him and starts yelling at her. You see, he has a sad backstory about how his wife didn’t tell him right away when she got sick, which I guess entitles him to flip out like a giant manbaby. The next day at Christmas dinner, Jack gets told by his family that he was in love with Abby and should stop being a dick, avoiding having to do any actual introspection and, for whatever reason, still getting the girl.
Okay, despite the crappy gender politics, AS ALWAYS, this movie was still really fun to me. I love that they leaned hard into the absurdity of the whole thing with the jokes, the euphemisms, the overblown side characters like Margaret and Roger, and the silliness of the hotline callers’ turkey problems. It wasn’t the most Christmassy movie, but there was a holiday market - fast becoming an essential tradition in any holiday film - and a holiday Christmas party at Abby’s apartment building, where each of the residents are supposed to buy an ornament to hang on the tree that represents themselves. I have never heard of any apartment building in any big city where this would actually happen without any of the neighbors fighting, but then, that’s just part of the joy of Hallmark-land.
tl;dr: A case of mistaken identity revolving around a Holiday Turkey Hotline results in far too many euphemisms and bad puns… or maybe just the right amount.
LGBTQIA+ Rep: When telling Abby about the local holiday market, Jack’s brother’s girlfriend, Erica (Cora Matheson), who also lives in Abby’s building, asks Abby if she has a “boyfriend? Or girlfriend? Or miscellaneous significant other?” Ah yes, the three genders. But in reality, I both really enjoyed this moment and also decided that Erica is probably bi and is feeling out Abby to see if there’s anything there. The two women have better chemistry than either of them has with their heterosexual partner, and I could swear I detected a wistful note in Erica’s expression when she saw Abby and Jack finally get together at the end. Okay, so this does not count as actual representation, but I quite like my version of the story.
ALSO, I think Abby’s boss, Roger, is the actual queer-coded character in the movie. Certainly his level of investment in Abby/Peggy & John/Jack’s relationship and his high level of enthusiasm for the turkey hotline seem less than straight to me. YMMV.
Most ridiculous moment: At several moments in the movie we see holiday hotline operators answering calls from a variety of people with comical turkey dilemmas. In one of these clips, the caller is a mobster type who, after asking his turkey question, says, “Something tells me that you know too much…. about how to make a delicious
cheese cake for dessert.” Abby suggests that the secret is cottage cheese, and we get our second Daisy product placement within the movie. While I only counted two total, they were so grossly obvious that it makes the whole thing feel a bit like a 90 minute commercial for cottage cheese.
Watch again: Yes, I actually would.
Rating: 3 jolly elves for the better-than-average acting and leaning strongly into the camp in a way that speaks to me.
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