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Premieres Saturday, Dec. 6, at 9 PM (8 Central) on THE HALLMARK CHANNEL |
 Rhea Perlman, Jason Gedrick (top) loom over the choir of homeless men |
Here's a Xmas movie
you'll really enjoy
of TheColumnists.com
It isn't very unusual for a network Christmas movie to have a central character who just never seems to get with the holiday spirit...until his or her life is changed completely, often by an angel.
Let's face it: That concept has been raking the yokels in for more than a century since Charles Dickens first gave us Ebeneezer Scrooge and let us see him transformed by his conscience and a few errant holiday ghosts.
But I love the way they work it in The Hallmark Channel's new holiday movie "The Christmas Choir," which is all about an accountant who's too busy to even celebrate Christmas and such a workaholic that his beautiful girl friend breaks off their marriage plans and leaves him feeling really blue just a few weeks before Christmas.
While sitting in a bar, trying to soak his blues away, Peter (Jason Gedrick) hears a broken down old black piano player cadge a few bucks doing Christmas songs in between the gigs of the regular piano bar entertainers. The old guy sits down at the bar next to Peter, notices the well-dressed young man seems deeply depressed and decides to do something about it.
What he does is take Peter with him to the church-run mission where Sister Agatha (Rhea Perlman) and her helpers dish out free meals to the homeless. At first, Peter's offended that his new friend brought him to such a place, but before he leaves he's started to feel better and writes out a $500 check for Sister Agatha.
This leads Peter to use his almost forgotten musical skills to organize a choir made up of homeless men at the shelter. It seems Peter once wanted to be a musical entertainer himself, but his gin-soaked dad (Michael Sarrazin) pushed him into training as an accountant just so he'd have a more practical career. Now quite successful and financially secure, Peter's missing something from his life besides his pretty girl friend.
So, the movie is all about the rough road Peter has to travel in order to inspire a bunch of self-proclaimed urban "losers" into becoming a choir, then cutting through all the bureaucratic nonsense to let the public know what people can do if they set their minds to it. Yes, it's a "feel good" movie and I think it can't fail to fulfill its mission for anyone who tunes in.
For me, the kick also includes a chance to see some old familiar TV faces doing something quite out of their usual milieu. For instance, Jason Gedrick will always be, for me, the exciting young actor who played the rock star accused of murder in the first season of Steven Bochco's "Murder One" series on ABC. Or he'll be the young scion of a Mafia crime family in those two CBS miniseries of the 1990s derived from Mario Puzo stories. Or the ex-con back on the mean streets in CBS' short-lived, but astonishingly good "EZ Streets" series.
So when did Gedrick become a piano-playing, Christmas carol-singing choir leader? As weird as it looks at first, the guy is really good in this role and he's such an engaging person that you'll be rooting for him after no more than 10 minutes go by.
Then there's Rhea Perlman, best remembered to most of us as that sassy-mouthed cocktail waitress in "Cheers" or as Louie's smart-mouthed girl friend in "Taxi." If you think, how could that sawed-off, acid-tongued dame play a Catholic nun? Well, just check her out. She's a smart-mouthed, acid-tongued nun.
When she first sees the almost repulsed look on Peter's face when he reluctantly walks into her mission, she tells him, "What's your problem, your highness?"
"You're nothing like the nuns I knew when I was growing up," Peter tells her after she lays another couple of jaw-dropping insults on him.
"I'll take that as a compliment," she replies.
Another time, he lets her know he's aware she occasionally sneaks off for a smoke.
"You breathe a word about that," she tells him, "and you'll regret it the rest of your life."
Watching Peter retrieve his soul from the dark places it has gone is very entertaining and the woebegone homeless dudes he organizes into a choir are great. Finally, it's nice to see a much older Michael Sarrazin back doing a strong character part that's a long way from any of the leading man roles he played in the 1960s. He's overdue for a major revival. Somebody should check him out in this and find another strong role for him soon.
There's even a nice little romance woven into the storyline as Peter discovers Marilyn (Marianne Farley), a ticket seller at the subway, who turns out to be the girl he never would have found if his life hadn't gone into the toilet earlier in the holiday season, costing him the less supportive lady he originally hoped to marry.
The story, by the way, is based on the true story of the Montreal Homeless Choir.
I really liked this movie and I hope you give it a chance to entertain you and put you in the Christmas spirit, too.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The illustration is courtesy of The Hallmark Channel. This column first posted Dec. 1, 2008.
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