Borrowed Hearts (1997)

Borrowed Hearts arrived on CBS in November 1997 with a cast that was, depending on your timing, either about to become very famous or already kind of famous. Roma Downey was in her fourth season on Touched by an Angel, pulling in over 20 million viewers a week. Eric McCormack was a working TV actor still a year away from Will & Grace changing everything for him. Hector Elizondo was Hector Elizondo, the man who has appeared in every single Garry Marshall film, which is either a charming bit of trivia or a Twilight Zone episode depending on how you look at it. The film was directed by Ted Kotcheff, the same man who made First Blood and Weekend at Bernie's, which tells you something about the range Hollywood expected from directors in those decades.

The premise is the kind that only works in a TV movie or a screwball comedy from 1938: Sam Goddard (McCormack), a driven Chicago businessman, is this close to landing a massive deal with a wealthy Mexican industrialist named Miguel de la Vega (Elizondo). The catch is that de la Vega only does business with family men, believing that a man's character is revealed by how he treats his family during the holidays. Sam has no family. Sam has an apartment and a secretary. So Sam does the logical thing: he hires Kathleen Merriweather (Downey), a single mother who works in his company, to pretend to be his wife, and her daughter to pretend to be his kid, and they all fly down to de la Vega's sprawling hacienda in New Mexico for Christmas.

The Fake Family Formula, Executed With Competence

There is a very short list of ways a fake-family-turns-real story can go wrong, and Borrowed Hearts avoids most of them. The script does not make Sam a villain who needs to be reformed so much as a man who has simply never stopped to look up from his work. McCormack plays him with enough self-awareness that you don't spend the movie waiting for him to apologize. He is charming and a bit oblivious, which is a harder combination to pull off than it sounds.

Downey does the heavier lifting. Kathleen is a character who could easily become a passive prize, but Downey gives her enough quiet stubbornness that you understand why she agrees to the scheme (she needs the money) and why she eventually starts caring about the outcome. The chemistry between the two is warm without being electric, which suits the TV movie format perfectly. This is comfort food, not haute cuisine.

Elizondo is the film's secret weapon. De la Vega is written as a potential antagonist, the man whose traditional values are being manipulated, but Elizondo plays him as genuinely wise. He is not fooled easily. He is watching. Whether de la Vega figures out the deception before the third act is the film's only real suspense, and the script handles it better than expected.

What the Christmas Setting Actually Does

Most TV Christmas movies use the holiday as wallpaper. Borrowed Hearts at least uses it structurally. De la Vega's belief that Christmas reveals a man's true character is the engine that makes the plot plausible. His hacienda is decorated with the kind of care that reads as genuinely meaningful rather than set-dressing. A Christmas Eve dinner scene gives the cast something to do besides walk around pretending to be a family, and it generates the film's best scene: Sam attempting to hold his own in a conversation about what Christmas means to him, and realizing he doesn't have a good answer.

The New Mexico setting is a smart choice. The Christmastime landscape of the Southwest, with its luminarias and adobe architecture and a very different visual vocabulary than the snowy Midwest, gives the film a look that distinguishes it from the generic "snow falls on a small town" aesthetic of most holiday TV movies from this era. It also roots de la Vega's traditions in something specific and real rather than generic "family values."

The Eric McCormack Problem

In 1998, Will & Grace premiered. Within a year, McCormack was one of the most recognizable faces on American television. Borrowed Hearts, which aired just before that transformation, is interesting to watch now because you can see the performance that got him the part. He is playing a very specific type: urban, slightly brittle, more comfortable with deals than feelings, but with a warmth underneath that keeps breaking through his own defenses. That is Will Truman. The DNA is right there.

It makes Borrowed Hearts function as an accidental audition tape, a proof of concept for a comedic-romantic leading man who had not yet been given a comedic-romantic lead. If the film has a lasting reason to exist beyond holiday programming, that is probably it.