On the 2nd Day of Christmas (1997)

There is a certain kind of Christmas TV movie that does not try to reinvent anything. It has a simple moral problem, a predictable resolution, and a cast that is just talented enough to make you forget you can see every plot turn coming from twenty minutes out. On the 2nd Day of Christmas, the 1997 Lifetime film directed by James Frawley, is exactly that kind of movie. It is also, against modest expectations, a genuinely pleasant way to spend ninety minutes on a December evening.

The setup is economical. Trish (Mary Stuart Masterson) and her six-year-old niece Patsy (Lauren Pratt) are small-time pickpockets working the Christmas Eve crowds at a department store. They are caught by Bert (Mark Ruffalo), a security guard whose boss wants them prosecuted. Bert, unwilling to see a child spend Christmas with social services, strikes a deal: he will personally keep watch over both of them through the holiday. What follows is exactly what you expect, and the film is confident enough in its own warmth not to pretend otherwise.

Mark Ruffalo Before Anyone Knew His Name

In 1997, Mark Ruffalo was broke and unknown. He had been bartending for years while scraping together minor roles in films like the horror sequel Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994) and The Dentist (1996). His stage work in Kenneth Lonergan's off-Broadway play This Is Our Youth had started building a reputation in theater circles, but film casting directors were not exactly fighting over him.

Watching him in On the 2nd Day of Christmas, you can see why. He is notably at ease. Bert is an open, guileless character, a man who makes a kind decision and then has to live with the inconvenience of it, and Ruffalo plays that without irony or self-pity. The performance is not a revelation, but it is competent and human in ways that matter for this kind of material. Three years later, You Can Count on Me would make him a name. This is the film he made while waiting for that to happen.

Masterson is the more interesting piece of the equation. By 1997 she had already been in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Benny and Joon (1993), films that had earned her real critical regard. Choosing a Lifetime movie at that point in a career is a choice, and her Trish is the better for it. She is not playing a villain or a saint, just a young woman who got into a bad habit and has a child depending on her. Masterson keeps her from becoming a cliche, which is the whole job here.

The Director's Unlikely Resume

James Frawley died in January 2019, but in 1997 he was a working television director with a peculiar claim to distinction: he had directed The Muppet Movie in 1979, hired by Jim Henson partly because of Frawley's background in improvisational theater and his rapport with controlled chaos. He had also directed roughly half the episodes of The Monkees in the 1960s, work that earned him the Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series in 1967.

By the mid-1990s, Frawley was moving between network drama pilots and television movies. He directed the Emmy-nominated pilot for Ally McBeal, an episode of Columbo, and work on Cagney and Lacey. Directing a Lifetime Christmas movie was not a step down so much as a lateral move in a career that had always been more workmanlike than auteurist.

His direction here is competent and invisible, which is what the material requires. The Christmas Eve shopping sequences have the right cramped energy. The quieter scenes hold long enough for the actors to do their work.

Howard Hesseman as an Elf (Sort Of)

The supporting cast includes Howard Hesseman, best known as DJ John "Dr. Johnny Fever" on WKRP in Cincinnati from 1978 to 1982, a role that earned him two Emmy nominations. In On the 2nd Day of Christmas he plays David, described in promotional materials as the head elf at "Santa's Castle" in the department store. The role is small and the script does not give him much to work with, but his presence lends the film a faint nostalgic glow for anyone who grew up watching network TV in the early 1980s.

David Hewlett, the Canadian actor who would go on to a long career in science fiction television, appears as Mel, Trish's problematic ex-boyfriend who shows up mid-film trailing financial trouble. He is the closest thing the movie has to an antagonist who is not a bureaucratic obstacle, and he handles it with the right amount of hapless menace.

What the Film Gets Right

The screenplay, by Brian Hohlfeld, earns its warmth honestly. Bert's decision to take responsibility for Trish and Patsy is not presented as heroic. It is presented as slightly inconvenient and entirely voluntary, which makes it feel real. The film does not over-explain why a security guard would do this; it simply shows a man making a decent choice and then sticking to it.

Patsy, played by Lauren Pratt, avoids the usual child-performance pitfalls. She is not precociously wise. She is six, she is confused about her circumstances, and she wants Christmas to not be ruined. That is enough, and the film keeps her in that register rather than turning her into a moral instruction device.

The movie debuted on December 8, 1997, on Lifetime, which had been building its reputation as a home for female-driven stories through the 1990s. It was a US-Canadian co-production, which explains why several cast members, including Hewlett, are Canadian. A DVD release through Echo Bridge Entertainment came in September 2012, long after the film had faded from regular holiday rotation.

The runtime is 89 minutes. The film wastes very few of them.