Inspirational only on the basis of its sprawling incoherence, Holiday Baggage is a film so invested in the idea of reconciliation that it doesn’t bother to evaluate why, or even if, its family should stay together. Trading jingle bells for warning bells as early as its opening credits—when director Stephen Polk’s name appears at least five times within 90 seconds—this is a festive tale that makes you wish divorce decrees could be stuffed in Christmas stockings alongside candy canes and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.
Irrepressible scoundrel Pete Murphy (Barry Bostwick), a pilot, charted a course away from his family a decade ago, preferring flings with flight attendants in tropical locales to life with pediatrician Sarah (Cheryl Ladd) and their children in Chicago. Newly retired and eager to remarry, he is finally ready to formalize his divorce from Sarah, who agrees on the condition he reconcile with their daughters. That is easier said than done, partly because Pete has gone to such great lengths to insulate himself from the consequences of his actions that his body rejects the very concept of personal accountability.
After meeting with Sarah and realizing that life continued for their children in his absence—that there were graduations he missed, a wedding he wasn’t invited to, a pregnancy announcement call he never answered—he physically collapses and is rushed to the hospital, where his patrician ex laughably ministers to him. Rather than diagnose him with terminal self-involvement, she chides him about his blood sugar, cholesterol and hypertension, adding, “And, off the record, you look like crap.”
Train wrecks like Pete aren’t created in a vacuum, they require the tender, persistent nurturing of enablers like Sarah. And so, when he flees the hospital without undergoing a full cardiovascular workup, she invites him to stay at her home, where she can supervise him. It has been so long that he drives right past his own house. You would think his most inattentive moment as a father comes when he’s surprised to find that daughter Holly (Leah Wagner) is pregnant, even after Sarah already told him so. But you would be remarkably wrong. There’s still one enormous event in the lives of his both his daughters that he must participate in, only so he can abandon them halfway through to reconnect with a fiancée who is roughly their age.
Pete isn’t the only problem Holiday Baggage creates for itself, but he’s by far its most unsolvable, cowardly in his interactions with his children and resentful of Sarah’s opportunity to move on with a caring and responsible neighbor (Dan Flannery). Bostwick’s comic charms are so hopelessly dwarfed by his character’s selfishness that you begin to question what’s really going on. Was the screenplay, credited to Polk and Catherine E. Rubey, really that inchoate or was footage possibly lost that couldn’t be reshot? The endings, plural, suggest the former. (Here we should note that Polk also plays Lisa’s considerably older husband, a Freudian development that is sadly ignored.)
Ladd, celebrated for her beauty but often overlooked as an actress, possesses an intriguing onscreen stillness that naturally lends itself to mystery. Those abilities are sometimes squandered, as in Dancing with Danger, but can also be used to unsettling effect, as in Satan’s School for Girls and Poison Ivy. During the first half of the film, you patiently wait for Sarah to reveal hidden depths or show some signs of life… and you keep on waiting. I took a chance on Baggage after finding it online because there are few holiday films starring Charlie’s Angels alumnae. (The most notable is Jaclyn Smith’s The Night They Saved Christmas.) It should’ve been left on the luggage carousel.
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Streaming and DVD availability
Holiday Baggage is available on DVD and can also be streamed at Tubi.
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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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