There are those who will watch A Family Thanksgiving (2010) for the reassuring comforts of its adherence to Hallmark formula: nothing says the holidays quite like an ambitious, career-driven woman realizing the error of her ways in a festive family setting. A second, smaller group of us merely want to hear Faye Dunaway cry “Tina, bring me the carving knife!”, an opportunity that screenwriter Emily Baer senselessly squandered.
Minor consolation can be found in Dunaway’s Stevie Nicks meets Mother Goose wardrobe and ill-fitting wig, which might’ve been salvaged from a drag bar’s dumpster after a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? revue. A Family Thanksgiving is also saucier than the average Hallmark offering, featuring both scatological humor and — heavens to Betsy! — sex. It’s not often you see the heroine tear off her love interest’s clothes in one of these movies, but don’t get too excited: it’s made less unseemly by a time-travel loophole that places the action within the bonds of holy matrimony.
Claudia (Daphne Zuniga) is our obligatory workaholic city slicker, an attorney too focused on making partner to date or spend time with her family. She denigrates sister Jen (Gina Holden) for becoming a stay-at-home mother and is prone to inarticulate pronouncements like “I did not go to Harvard Law and graduate top of my class to become married and living in the suburbs. What, some soccer mom with a minivan?” (Here I was going to argue that Ivy Leaguers aren’t as insufferable about it in real-life as they are in TV movies, but the old “How do you know…” jokes about Harvard alumni exist for a reason.)
After canceling her Thanksgiving plans for the third year in a row to prepare for a case, Claudia is visited by Gina (Dunaway), who first represents herself as “a transpersonal psychologist” and then as “the ghost of Thanksgiving future.” You can fill in the blanks from there. Though Claudia insists that she doesn’t need a spouse or motherhood to feel complete, Gina refers to her life as “thoroughly unexamined” and deposits her into a suburban existence she doesn’t recognize as her own, replete with casual clothing (egad!), car seat confusion, diaper changes and enough spare time to reconnect with her sister.
In the faintest of nods toward having it all, a lazy legal subplot simmers in the background. But A Family Thanksgiving, directed by Neill Fearnley (of Billy Ray Cyrus’s Christmas in Canaan series), is mostly about Claudia’s culture shock as she learns there are more paths to contentment than overachieving and perfectionism. It’s as trite as you’d expect but more spirited than most Hallmark films, celebrating the messiness of domesticity and, yes, even acknowledging sex. Both of those tasks are made easier by the boundless patience, and considerable hunkiness, of Claudia’s alternate-universe husband Bill (Dan Payne, the ‘straight’ family man who slept with his son’s male friend in Mulligans), who attributes her chaotic behavior to PMS.
Zuniga, who never looked more like Lynda Carter, gamely tackles her one-dimensional role with easy charm. Her age (she was almost 50) also lends some poignancy to all the wish fulfillment. A Family Thanksgiving never addresses it, but you don’t look at Claudia and see a woman with adequate time to find love and bear a couple of children — you see someone whose decisions have permanently narrowed her options. Which brings us to Faye Dunaway, whose storied history of terrible behavior took her from the top of her profession to its lowest rungs. Serving the same function as Jean Smart in A Shoe Addict’s Christmas while exuding minimal warmth and exerting a fraction of the effort, she can’t seem to believe she’s fallen this far. Neither can we.
Streaming and DVD availability
A Family Thanksgiving is available on DVD and streams free on both Plex and YouTube.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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