A Christmas Kiss (2011)
Wendy Walton is the best designer in Boston... but no one knows it yet. Hoping to kick-start her career, Wendy has left work with the local theatre to take a job as an assistant to Priscilla Hall, the most prestigious designer in the city. Ms. Hall works Wendy around the clock, which is how Wendy finds herself trapped in an elevator late one night with an incredibly handsome stranger. Wendy and the mystery man share an impulsive, romantic, life changing kiss before the doors open and Wendy runs out, leaving him behind. The next day at work, Wendy answers the door to find the handsome gentleman standing in front of her.
rating 5/10 User rating 199 votes 61% ❄ Christmas Connection
The entire film takes place in the weeks before Christmas, with holiday decorating as a central plot mechanic. The heroine is hired to Christmas-ify a mansion for a charity fundraiser, and the seasonal setting is woven into every scene rather than bolted on as backdrop. You could not transplant this story to Valentine's Day.
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Our Review
The elevator doors close. A woman and a stranger are trapped inside. They share a kiss. The doors open, she bolts, and the whole plot of A Christmas Kiss is set in motion. You already know where this is going, and the film knows you know, and it does it anyway with a certain unashamed confidence that is harder to achieve than it looks.
This 2011 ION Television movie, directed by John Stimpson and written by Joany Kane, arrived without critical fanfare and without a theatrical release. It premiered on December 11, 2011, and went on to generate enough goodwill that a sequel, A Christmas Kiss II, followed in 2014. That is its own kind of verdict.
The Setup: Cinderella with a Floor Plan
Wendy Walton (Laura Breckenridge) is a talented aspiring interior designer grinding away as an assistant to Priscilla Hall (Elisabeth Rohm), the most imperious boss in the city. Priscilla works Wendy around the clock, including one fateful late night when Wendy gets stuck in a hotel elevator with a charming stranger named Adam (Brendan Fehr). They kiss. It's impulsive, it's romantic, it changes everything.
Then Adam turns out to be Priscilla's long-distance boyfriend.
The screenplay then assigns Wendy the task of decorating Adam's mansion for a Christmas charity fundraiser, which means extended scenes of growing intimacy, loaded glances across tinsel and garland, and Priscilla behaving badly enough to make the audience feel fine about whatever happens next. Joany Kane is not reinventing the wheel. She is making sure the wheel rolls smoothly.
The Cinderella structure is deliberate and unambiguous: overworked girl, wicked boss-as-stepmother, a man who needs to see past surface impressions. The film even has Wendy give up her Nutcracker theater job to take the position with Priscilla, so we lose the arts-world dream along with everything else before the third act hands it all back. It's a tidy machine.
The Cast: Who Actually Delivers
Breckenridge carries the film. She brings a warmth to Wendy that the script doesn't always earn on its own, and she sells the internal conflict without playing it at full melodrama volume. That restraint is what keeps the movie watchable.
Rohm, who spent four seasons as Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order, leans all the way into Priscilla's imperious awfulness. She's having fun with it. When she's on screen, the movie has friction.
Brendan Fehr, best known from the sci-fi series Roswell and later Bones, handles Adam with decent charm. His role is fundamentally passive, because Adam mostly needs to stand in nice rooms and look confused about which woman he wants, but Fehr doesn't make it painful.
Jerrika Hinton plays Tressa, Wendy's best friend and roommate, delivering sassy support in a role that exists mainly to let Wendy talk through her feelings aloud. Hinton would go on to join Grey's Anatomy in 2012, so this film catches her at the very start of a much bigger career arc.
What ION Television Was Actually Doing in 2011
By 2011, ION Television was staking out Christmas-movie territory with an approach slightly looser than Hallmark's. The friends in this film get to have some actual edge to their dialogue. Priscilla is allowed to be genuinely unpleasant rather than cartoonishly so. The production, handled by Moody Independent and shot on location in Richmond, Virginia, used the Richmond Ballet for its Nutcracker sequences, which gives the film a level of production texture that the budget shouldn't quite allow.
The 96-minute runtime is lean enough that the film doesn't overstay its welcome. Most made-for-TV holiday movies suffer from 20 minutes of padding that stalls out the second act. This one moves.
The Honest Assessment
A 55 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is about right. This is not a poorly made film. The cinematography is warm, the Christmas decorating sequences are genuinely lush, and the central performances are solid. What it lacks is any willingness to complicate the formula it's working with.
Adam's dilemma is resolved when Priscilla does something sufficiently terrible to make his choice obvious. There's no real cost to anything, no moment where Wendy has to make a genuinely hard call. The screenplay protects its heroine from having to want something badly enough that getting it might hurt someone else.
That's a choice, and it's the standard choice for this genre. If you're watching an ION Television Christmas rom-com, you are not there for moral ambiguity. You're there for tinsel, stolen glances, and a kiss that means something. On those terms, A Christmas Kiss delivers without apology.
Fun Facts
The film premiered on ION Television on December 11, 2011, and performed well enough to spawn a sequel, A Christmas Kiss II, in 2014, making it one of the network's few holiday properties to generate a follow-up.
Production took place in Richmond, Virginia, and the production team enlisted the Richmond Ballet to provide the professional dancers seen in the Nutcracker sequences early in the film.
Jerrika Hinton, who plays best friend Tressa, joined the cast of Grey's Anatomy the following year in 2012, playing Dr. Stephanie Edwards across six seasons before departing in 2018.
Elisabeth Rohm, who plays the villain Priscilla, previously played ADA Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order for four seasons (2001 to 2005), and later appeared in David O. Russell's American Hustle (2013) and Joy (2015).
Brendan Fehr, cast as the male lead Adam, is best known for playing alien hybrid Michael Guerin in the sci-fi series Roswell, which ran from 1999 to 2002 on The WB and UPN.
The film was written by Joany Kane, a Massachusetts-based screenwriter who specializes in made-for-television holiday romance films, and produced by Moody Independent, a Boston-area production company.
Wendy is initially established as a theater set designer working on a local Nutcracker production, a detail that allows the screenplay to connect the film's romantic arc to a piece of classical Christmas entertainment without paying for any substantial ballet footage.
Cast
