Will You Merry Me? (2008)

Will You Merry Me? aired on Lifetime on December 13, 2008, and it occupies a specific niche that very few holiday films dare to occupy: it treats Christmas and Hanukkah as genuinely coexisting holidays, not competing ones. That alone makes it worth discussing. The film isn't a great movie, but it's a more interesting movie than it appears to be from the outside.

What Will You Merry Me Is Actually About

Rebecca Fine, played by Vikki Krinsky, is a sophisticated young woman from a Jewish family in Los Angeles. Henry Kringle, played by Tommy Lioutas, is from a choir-singing, carol-loving, very Christian family in the American Midwest. His last name is Kringle. The film knows exactly what it's doing with that detail, and it leans into it fully.

Henry proposes just before the holidays. Rebecca says yes. Then the two families descend on Madison, Wisconsin, at the exact moment when Hanukkah and Christmas overlap, and the next ninety minutes are devoted to watching two groups of people with very different relationships to December try to coexist in close quarters. Both families have good intentions. Neither family quite knows what to do with the other. That gap, between intention and execution, is where all the comedy lives.

The Cast and Why It Works

The film belongs to its two lead mothers. Wendie Malick plays Suzie Fine, Rebecca's stylish, faintly neurotic LA mother, and Cynthia Stevenson plays Marilyn Kringle, Henry's warm but relentlessly chipper Midwestern counterpart. Both actresses are sharper than the material strictly requires, which is the best thing that can happen to a Lifetime holiday movie.

Malick has a long history of stealing scenes in television comedy. She won a Golden Globe for Just Shoot Me! in the late 1990s and spent years on Hot in Cleveland. Here she plays bafflement and discomfort with the kind of precise comic timing that only comes from decades of sitcom work. She makes Suzie's awkwardness feel genuine rather than cartoonish.

Stevenson, who grew up in Vancouver and trained at the University of Victoria, is equally good at playing warmth that inadvertently smothers. The two of them together generate more heat than the younger leads, who are likable but relatively thinly written. The movie is really about the mothers.

The Interfaith Angle

Holiday movies about interfaith couples exist, but they mostly treat religious difference as a quirky obstacle to be quickly resolved. Will You Merry Me? spends more time with the actual content of the two traditions: the latkes, the menorah, the midnight church service, the carol-singing in the living room. The families are shown attempting, however clumsily, to participate in each other's traditions rather than simply tolerating them.

This is not a film that delivers profound theological insight. But it does acknowledge that Hanukkah and Christmas are not the same holiday wearing different costumes, and that marrying across that line involves more than just agreeing to have both a tree and a menorah. That acknowledgment, modest as it is, was not standard issue for Lifetime movies in 2008.

The film was directed by Nisha Ganatra, who would go on to direct Late Night for Amazon and The High Note for Focus Features, movies made on considerably larger budgets with considerably more attention paid to them.

Ganatra's direction here is workmanlike rather than inventive. The film looks exactly like a Lifetime movie from 2008, which is to say it is brightly lit, cleanly shot, and not particularly interested in doing anything unexpected with the camera. But Ganatra keeps the pacing tight and the performances grounded, which is the job.

What the Movie Gets Right and What It Doesn't

The screenplay by Karen McClellan is better at setup than resolution. The conflicts feel real enough in the first two acts: the dietary misunderstandings, the competing holiday music, the attempts by each family to appear more culturally flexible than they actually are. The resolution, by contrast, is achieved quickly and without much friction, which is how holiday movies tend to work but which still feels like a missed opportunity here.

The film also doesn't quite decide whether the comedy should be warm or sharp. Some scenes reach for genuine satire of both family types, and those scenes are the best ones. Others retreat into the safer territory of benevolent slapstick. The tonal inconsistency doesn't ruin the movie, but it keeps it from being as good as its premise deserves.

Patrick McKenna as Hank Kringle, Henry's father, gets some of the film's funnier lines, and he delivers them with the practiced ease of a Canadian character actor who has spent years doing exactly this kind of work. His scenes with David Eisner, playing Rebecca's father Marvin, have a loose, improv-adjacent quality that suggests both actors were having fun and were occasionally given room to find the scene rather than just execute it.

Is It a Christmas Movie?

Technically it's a December movie, which is not quite the same thing. The plot runs on the collision between Christmas and Hanukkah, which means it can't belong entirely to either holiday. The Kringle family decorates a tree and sings carols. The Fine family lights a menorah. Christmas Eve is the climactic setting. For the purposes of a Christmas movie list, it counts, but count it as the one entry that requires a small asterisk.

If you watch a lot of Lifetime holiday films, Will You Merry Me? will register as better than average. The premise is sharper, the lead performances from Malick and Stevenson are more committed, and the film at least gestures toward something real. It premiered the same year Nisha Ganatra was directing episodes of Ugly Betty and Weeds for network and cable, and that experience with dialogue-driven ensemble comedy shows in how she handles the family-gathering scenes.