Northpole (2014)
Northpole, the magical city where Santa and his elves live and work is in trouble. Families around the globe have gotten too busy to enjoy the season together, and Northpole depends on their holiday happiness to keep running. In the hopes of turning things around, a determined young elf befriends a little boy with a lot of spirit. His skeptical journalist mom doesn’t have room in her heart for anything but the facts, so it’s going to take a little nudge from his charming teacher to create an unbeatable Christmas team to turn around this town and share the importance of the season with the whole world.
rating 6/10 User rating 77 votes 60% ❄ Christmas Connection
Northpole is Christmas mythology made literal: Santa's workshop reimagined as a thriving city, elves as a full civilization, and holiday spirit as an actual energy source the world depends on. The entire plot turns on restoring Christmas belief as a civic duty. There is no version of this story that works without December 25th at the center of it.
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Our Review
Northpole opens with a premise that sounds like it was invented by a committee: Santa's workshop has become a sprawling magical city that runs on the collective happiness of the world, and that happiness is running out because modern people are too busy and too distracted to feel the Christmas spirit. It's a conceit that could easily collapse into something preachy and dull. What saves it, almost entirely, is Bailee Madison.
Madison was 15 years old when this Hallmark Channel film premiered on November 15, 2014. She plays Clementine, an elf dispatched from Northpole to the human world to help a lonely boy named Kevin (Max Charles) rekindle enough Christmas magic to keep the city running. Madison plays the character at full throttle: relentlessly optimistic, mildly chaotic, and genuinely funny. In a genre built on warm competence, she stands out because she's actually performing.
What Northpole Gets Right
The movie's smartest move is treating Northpole itself as a real place with stakes. The city's infrastructure is powered by a kind of emotional energy grid, and when the needle drops, buildings go dark and elves lose their jobs. It's a children's movie concept, but it gives the fantasy dimension weight that most Hallmark holiday films avoid entirely. The world-building is thin, but at least there is some.
The boy-and-elf friendship at the center of the story works better than the adult romance the film also tries to run. Kevin is a recently transplanted kid struggling in a new school, and his connection with Clementine is the only relationship in the movie that earns its sentiment. Max Charles holds his own opposite Madison, which is not a small feat.
The casting of Robert Wagner and Jill St. John as Santa and Mrs. Claus is a quietly clever move. Wagner and St. John are a real-life married couple, which gives their on-screen partnership an ease that casting agents usually spend weeks trying to manufacture. Wagner's Santa is warm without being saccharine, and St. John brings a dry wit to Mrs. Claus that the role rarely gets. The Hallmark Channel announced the casting in May 2014 with something approaching fanfare, billing it as two Hollywood icons playing the most famous couple in holiday mythology.
The Tiffani Thiessen Problem (and Non-Problem)
Tiffani Thiessen plays Chelsea, a single mother and aspiring journalist who is skeptical of her son's elf stories and busy trying to get ahead at her new job. Thiessen was wrapping up five seasons on USA Network's White Collar when she took this role, and she brings a professionalism that elevates the material. She's not given much to work with. Chelsea's arc is predictable from the first ten minutes: career-focused woman learns to slow down, charming teacher (Josh Hopkins) exists mainly to give her someone to slow down with.
Hopkins as the teacher Ryan is fine. The romance is obligatory. Neither is the reason to watch.
The movie knows this, at least intuitively. The adult storyline gets its required screen time, but the camera keeps drifting back to Madison whenever possible. That instinct is correct.
Candice Glover and the Gospel Subplot
Candice Glover appears as Josephine, a gospel singer whose music becomes part of the community's Christmas reclamation. Glover won the twelfth season of American Idol in May 2013, making her casting here a deliberate attempt to pull in viewers who followed her competition run. Her scenes are brief but warm, and her voice is used well. The gospel angle is one of the film's more interesting choices, gesturing toward Christmas as a shared communal experience rather than a purely domestic one.
The Hallmark Machinery
Northpole was directed by Douglas Barr and written by Gregg Rossen and Brian Sawyer. It draws 4 million total viewers on its premiere night, making it Hallmark's most-watched original film of 2014 to that point. It did well enough to earn a sequel the following year, Northpole: Open for Christmas, which brought back Madison and added Lori Loughlin.
The film was shot in Montreal, Canada, which stands in for a generic American small town with reasonable efficiency. The Northpole set pieces have a scrappy charm to them, the kind of production design that clearly had a budget ceiling and worked within it imaginatively.
Brian Lowry at Variety called it "sweet and inoffensive" and wished it had more spice. Mary McNamara at the Los Angeles Times called it "cookie-cutter" but praised its ingredients. Both reviews are accurate, and neither is quite damning enough to matter if you're looking for exactly this kind of movie at this time of year.
What Northpole delivers is a fantasy-inflected Hallmark film that takes its mythology slightly more seriously than most. It doesn't reinvent anything. What it has is Madison, fully committed to an elf with the earnestness of an actor who hasn't yet learned to be embarrassed by conviction. That's worth something in December.
Fun Facts
Robert Wagner and Jill St. John, who play Santa and Mrs. Claus, have been married in real life since 1990, giving their Northpole partnership a chemistry that no amount of casting could have faked.
Bailee Madison was 15 years old when Northpole premiered on November 15, 2014, and had already appeared in major productions including Adam Sandler's Just Go with It (2011) and the ABC series Once Upon a Time.
Candice Glover, who plays the gospel singer Josephine, won American Idol Season 12 in May 2013, just 18 months before the film aired. Her casting was a direct attempt to bring her fanbase to the Hallmark Channel premiere.
The film drew approximately 4 million total viewers on its premiere night, making it the Hallmark Channel's highest-rated original film of 2014 up to that point among household ratings, women aged 25 to 54, and total viewers.
Northpole was successful enough to generate a direct sequel, Northpole: Open for Christmas, which aired in November 2015 with Madison returning as Clementine alongside Lori Loughlin and Dermot Mulroney.
The film was directed by Douglas Barr, who is best known to American audiences as Howie Munson from the 1980s action-comedy series The Fall Guy, and who transitioned into television directing after his acting career.
The screenplay was written by Gregg Rossen and Brian Sawyer, a writing team who became regular contributors to Hallmark's holiday film slate throughout the 2010s.
Tiffani Thiessen, who plays the skeptical single mother Chelsea, is best known for playing Kelly Kapowski on Saved by the Bell from 1989 to 1993. Northpole was one of her first prominent Hallmark productions.
Cast
