Hallmark Review: 'A Family Thanksgiving'

Life is all work and no play for lawyer Claudia Parks (Daphne Zuniga), who is on the verge of being made partner at her firm and has always allowed her career to be her number one priority. This leaves Claudia at odds with her stay-at-home mom sister Jen (Gina Holden), who becomes frustrated when her sister not only reveals that she's cancelling her Thanksgiving visit to work on a case, but that the case in question has her defending the company planning to tear down the local park.

As Claudia prepares to get to work on the case, however, a mysterious woman named Gina (Faye Dunaway) who claims to be the firm's psychologist confronts Claudia and asks her if she truly feels satisfied with her life. When Claudia declares that she is, however, she suddenly finds herself dropped off in an alternate reality. Here, she's Claudia Mills, is married to a man named Bill (Dan Payne), and has two young children in Jake and Amy (Nicolai Giustra and Kennedi Clements). After finding that she can't return to her real life until she "finds balance," Claudia works to find out what she must do to get back to her reality—and learns in the process that her perfect life may have been missing something after all.

Like my previously reviewed Hallmark flick, A Family Thanksgiving is a Hallmark Thanksgiving feature containing plot elements familiar to those who have seen enough of Hallmark's Christmas films. In addition to the oft-used "Alternate reality/Freaky Friday switch during the holidays" plot line, there's also a subplot revolving around a similar "Save the Beloved (insert locale)" beat from The Thanksgiving House. Familiarity aside, A Family Thanksgiving possesses the charm that all entertaining Hallmark films need—though the film's first act did have me worried about the quality of the film that would follow it.

This was largely due to two aspects, the first being my fear of the route it appeared the film was taking in regards to Claudia's character arc. With the opening minutes establishing Claudia as such a work-centered person that she neglects her family and makes no time for a personal life, it appeared A Family Thanksgiving would be playing into the "Career-Oriented Woman Needs a Man to Be Happy" fallacy that Hallmark has been accused of encouraging in the past. The second was the film's initial cringe comedy regarding Claudia's shock at being transported to a new reality where she is a wife and mother, which at times feels heavier on the cringe and light on the comedy. Both hindrances had the ability to tank the film, and while both are definitely present flaws, A Family Thanksgiving is mostly able to rise above them both.

The aforementioned toxic attitude is vaguely present in snippets throughout the film, but otherwise, A Family Thanksgiving takes the time to justify its stance against Claudia's current life as a big city attorney. By putting her work ahead of all else to the point of (by her own admission) replacing her friends and family with her career, Claudia is shown to have become hard-hearted and slightly neurotic, hardly allowing time for herself let alone for her family. In that sense, A Family Thanksgiving becomes less about a career-oriented woman who the film decides needs a husband and kids to have a complete life, but about a woman realizing the value and warmth there is in having a loving family and how her extreme focus on her career caused her to lose sight of that.

(It helps that the film gets a little tongue-in-cheek about such toxic and dated ideals by having Claudia exasperatedly proclaim to Gina that not every woman needs motherhood in order to complete her.)

As for the occasionally hit-and-miss comedy, Daphne Zuniga (who also acted as one of the film's executive producers) is largely responsible for allowing the humor to work. Even as Claudia's initial antics with her new children go from unfunny to cringey and borderline uncomfortable, Zuniga acts as an anchor for the humor, giving even the more unbearable scenes a sliver of comedy through her deliveries. Zuniga also brings emotional edge to Claudia as her experience changes her for the better, leading to a few genuinely touching scenes throughout the film. Of her fellow cast members, Zuniga shares her best chemistry with Gina Holden, with both women playing off of each other as Claudia's situation allows her to bond with her sister over the struggles of motherhood and finally realize she was wrong in assuming Jen's life as a stay-at-home mom was a cake walk compared to hers.

Zuniga and Dan Payne also do well together as they find themselves sudden husband and wife, with the film's message about true balance being aided by Claudia and Bill's character arc as two people learning to work alongside each other to get what they want. Unfortunately, though, since Claudia and Bill spend so much of the film apart from each other, we never get the chance to see them emerge as a romantic couple for us to root to see together—making SPOILER ALERT the film's ending where the two meet up again and hit it off (implied to be the start of their life in the alternate reality becoming true) simply fall flat at best and go against the film's strong message at worst Spoilers Over. Nicolai Giustra and Kennedi Clements are cute as Jake and Amy Mills and (for the most part) do so without getting annoying, and prolific actress Faye Dunaway is clearly having a blast as Claudia's supernatural guide Gina—though her flighty attitude regarding her mission to help Claudia made her come off more as a supernatural troll rather than a legitimate caring mentor.

Despite its handful of flaws on top of an occasionally uneven pace, A Family Thanksgiving accomplishes its baseline goal: being a heartwarming film about family to get people in the mood for the holiday season. With a solid lead performance from Daphne Zuniga and a plot that allows for some genuine moments of heart to emerge, this is a film that you might be interested in giving a look when you're snuggled up on your couch this Thanksgiving weekend.

Score: 6.5 out of 10 bran muffins.