I'm sorry to sound like a Scrouge, but this TNT film was a holiday stinker!
The film's premise had good potential: From overseas, an American GI in World War II sends his high school sweetheart a marriage proposal and an engagement ring, which unfortunately are lost in the mail. When the letter and the ring are miraculously discovered forty years later, one would expect that the revelation would clear up the mystery and end the long-standing feud between two Italian families.
But when Alicia (Lainie Kazan) learns about the letter and the ring sent by her former beau Nick (Tony Lo Bianco), her inexplicable response is to continue to be angry at him! This made no sense because it wasn't Nick's fault that the letter and the ring were lost. The subplot of the couple in the next generation (Patricia Heaton and Vincent Spano) also seemed forced and not believable. There were moments in this film that resembled French farce, then turned immediately into Greek tragedy!
The dialogue was terrible, and the cast seemed to be reading their lines, as opposed to performing the action and connecting with each other in their relationships. I almost wished that the actors could have improvised the scenes around the basic romantic premise, instead of forcing the emotional life and giving us the impression that they were reading the insipid lines from cue cards.
Before the film began, TNT offered this tagline as a teaser: "The holidays are for bringing people together." As it turned out, that line was better than any of the scripted dialogue in the film, and the best character was the grandma mainly because she was mute!
The film's premise had good potential: From overseas, an American GI in World War II sends his high school sweetheart a marriage proposal and an engagement ring, which unfortunately are lost in the mail. When the letter and the ring are miraculously discovered forty years later, one would expect that the revelation would clear up the mystery and end the long-standing feud between two Italian families.
But when Alicia (Lainie Kazan) learns about the letter and the ring sent by her former beau Nick (Tony Lo Bianco), her inexplicable response is to continue to be angry at him! This made no sense because it wasn't Nick's fault that the letter and the ring were lost. The subplot of the couple in the next generation (Patricia Heaton and Vincent Spano) also seemed forced and not believable. There were moments in this film that resembled French farce, then turned immediately into Greek tragedy!
The dialogue was terrible, and the cast seemed to be reading their lines, as opposed to performing the action and connecting with each other in their relationships. I almost wished that the actors could have improvised the scenes around the basic romantic premise, instead of forcing the emotional life and giving us the impression that they were reading the insipid lines from cue cards.
Before the film began, TNT offered this tagline as a teaser: "The holidays are for bringing people together." As it turned out, that line was better than any of the scripted dialogue in the film, and the best character was the grandma mainly because she was mute!