An Evergreen Christmas (2014)

An Evergreen Christmas arrived in 2014 as a direct-to-DVD release from first-time narrative director Jeremy Culver, and it carries all the marks of a debut: earnest, a little rough around the edges, and built on one genuinely good idea surrounded by several middling ones. It sits at 5.8 on IMDb, which is about right. This is not a disaster. It is not a revelation. It is a decent small film that happens to have a better cast than most of its budget class, and that counts for something.

The setup is straightforward enough that it could be a country song. Evie Lee, played by Charleene Closshey, has left her small Tennessee hometown of Balsam Falls to chase a music career in Hollywood. Her father dies suddenly, she comes home for the funeral, and discovers she has inherited a Christmas tree farm buried under a mountain of back taxes. Her younger brother wants to sell. She is not sure what she wants. Robert Loggia plays Pops, the grandfather figure anchoring the family, and Naomi Judd appears as Honey. Booboo Stewart, fresh off the Twilight franchise, plays Angel. Greer Grammer, daughter of Kelsey Grammer, plays Annabelle. Tyler Ritter rounds out the principal cast.

Why Charleene Closshey Makes This Worth Watching

Closshey is not primarily an actress. She is a classically trained violinist who started playing piano at age 2, graduated as valedictorian from a performing arts high school in Lakeland, Florida, then went on to study at the Juilliard School, NYU, and Berklee College of Music. She has played violin for Josh Groban, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and Frank Sinatra Jr., and has traded fiddle licks with Charlie Daniels. She also scored the film's music herself.

This background shows on screen in ways that are genuinely useful. When Evie picks up an instrument or performs, there is no pretending. The musical sequences feel earned rather than decorated. Closshey also wrote and performed original songs for the soundtrack, which is the kind of creative investment that gives a low-budget production texture it could not otherwise afford. She made her Broadway debut in 2014 in the Tony Award-winning musical Once, the same year this film came out. That parallel says something: 2014 was a genuinely busy year for her, and the commitment to this project reflects that rather than contradicts it.

The performance itself is uneven in stretches where the script asks for more emotional complexity than the dialogue can support, but Closshey holds the film's center with enough warmth to keep things watchable.

The Cast Around Her

Robert Loggia was in his early eighties when this film was shot in early 2013. He died in December 2015 from complications of Alzheimer's disease, making his appearances here among his final film work. Loggia had a career spanning six decades, with an Oscar nomination for Jagged Edge (1985) and memorable turns in Scarface, Big, and Independence Day. Seeing him in a small holiday film at the end of his career is bittersweet, but he gives the role genuine gravity. Pops is not a showy part, and Loggia does not try to make it one.

Naomi Judd as Honey brings her own weight to the film. The Judds, the duo she formed with daughter Wynonna in 1983, produced 14 number-one singles and won five Grammy Awards before Naomi's hepatitis C diagnosis forced the group to stop touring in 1991. By the time she appeared in this film she had already appeared in several television movies and Hallmark productions. She fits naturally into the world of a Tennessee family drama, and the casting feels less like a stunt and more like a sensible choice. Judd died in April 2022, the day before she and Wynonna were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Booboo Stewart, known internationally as Seth Clearwater across three Twilight films, plays Angel with a quieter register than his franchise work required. Greer Grammer's Annabelle is the film's most underdeveloped role, a problem that traces back to the script rather than the performance.

The Christmas Tree Farm as Setting

The film was shot over 28 days between February 4 and March 4, 2013, primarily in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, specifically near Lincolnton and Gastonia. The Christmas tree farm scenes were filmed on actual working farms in North Carolina. The film is set in fictional Balsam Falls, Tennessee, which borrows its name from Balsam fir, one of the most popular Christmas tree species in the American Southeast.

The farm works better as a setting than the script fully earns. Christmas tree farming is a real agricultural industry with its own rhythms, economics, and regional culture. The film gestures toward this without drilling into it. A more confident screenplay might have used the mechanics of the business, the cycle of growing, harvesting, and selling trees, as a structural element rather than pure backdrop. What's here is mostly "the farm is in trouble," which is a thin hook for 98 minutes.

What Does Not Work

The pacing sags in the second act. The inheritance tax conflict, which should create genuine pressure, gets resolved with less difficulty than it threatened to cause. Character relationships are established through stated emotion rather than shown behavior. The romance subplot is present but not persuasive. These are not unusual problems for a low-budget independent holiday film, but they prevent An Evergreen Christmas from rising above its category into something more durable.

The screenplay, credited to Jeremy and Morgen Culver, has moments of real warmth but struggles with specificity. The best holiday films tend to be built on very particular details, specific places, specific rituals, specific family arguments. This one reaches for universality a little too readily, which has the effect of flattening what could have been more distinctive material.

It earned a PG rating, which is accurate. There is nothing objectionable here, and nothing particularly challenging either.

The Case for Watching It Anyway

A 5.8 IMDb film with Naomi Judd, Robert Loggia, and a Juilliard-trained violinist scoring her own movie is more interesting as an object than a 5.8 might suggest. The musical performances are the strongest sequences in the film, and if you turn it on in mid-December with the tree lit and something warm in a mug, its limitations recede considerably. It is the right film for the right mood, and that is not a small thing. Closshey's original songs for the soundtrack are genuinely good, particularly as background listening in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

The film premiered theatrically at the Franklin Theatre in Franklin, Tennessee before its DVD release on November 4, 2014. It later became available on Netflix, which expanded its audience considerably beyond what a DVD release alone would have reached. For a first narrative feature shot in under a month on a limited budget, with a cast this recognizable, getting onto Netflix represents a real result.

Loggia's face in a quiet scene near the end of the film, watching a younger generation find their footing, is the best image the movie produces. It does not say anything. It does not need to.