Christmas movie review: Under the Mistletoe

Rating: A-

Overall, I enjoyed this movie. And, I really didn't think I would. The downgrade from an A to an A- is simply because it's only incidentally a Christmas movie. Under the Mistletoe tells the story of a mother and son living in sort of perpetual sadness because they lost their husband/father in a car accident at Christmas the year before. And it's now Christmas time again and both are still clinging to the deceased man too much. The son, in particular, is having trouble moving on because he sees and talks to his dad's ghost nearly every day! Needless to say, the mother is worried about her son's "visions" and also kind of jealous that she can't see her husband like her son can. For reasons I still don't get, the son & father decide to enter the mother (played by Jaime Ray Newman, who played the memorable Kristina Cassidine on General Hospital) in a dating contest sponsored by the local radio station. I guess the idea is that she needs to move on. Of course, as soon as she starts dating someone, the son and father don't like it. I guess it's just because the guy is a jerk, which he is, but they can't have everything, you know? Meanwhile, the son bonds with his counselor at his school and it doesn't take a psychic to realize which man Jaime's character will end up with. Anyway, it's a pretty good movie: sometimes funny, sometimes cute, sometimes sad, sometimes mystical. Pretty much, it's a little bit of everything. A small gripe is that I found it somewhat hard-to-believe that Jaime Ray Newman could have an 11-year-old. In real life, she's 28 and sure, it's possible, but she just looks too young, I guess. I also had a slightly difficult time differentiating between the actor who played the dead husband and the actor who played the school counselor. They look enough alike that every time one of them was on screen, I had to stop and think "Is this the ghost dad? Okay, no, it's the counselor." It didn't help that both actors had a lot of scenes with the son. Overall, though, really enjoyable!