For anyone wondering what Linda Hamilton got up to between Terminator films, here you go - in 2006 she starred in middling, made-for-TV Lifetime original Home By Christmas. And what a gruelling little tale it is, depicting what happens when Hamilton’s jobless housewife Julie leaves her cheating husband and tries to go it alone. A catalogue of ill-timed personal disasters quickly see her homeless and living in her car. At Christmastime.
Being a Lifetime movie, though, Julie’s brutal fall from grace is swiftly followed by a series of completely jammy coincidences that find her back on her feet in no time, with a hunky new love interest to boot.
Hamilton gives an affecting, earnest performance as the lady-of-leisure so used to attending fancy brunches, suddenly forced to fend for herself after having depended on her man for years to do most things for her. However, the way her life dramatically falls to pieces so abruptly and the way she just readily accepts this fate rings so completely false. Shortly after striking out on her own, Julie is mugged and hospitalised and, while she’s recovering, the mugger clears out her bank account. This means she misses just one (!) week’s rent and so she’s evicted? What that all about? Then the bank say they can’t help get her money back? And then she can’t find one friend to help her out? And then her ungrateful daughter decides she actually quite likes being rich after all, tells her she hates her and goes back to live with dad? And what the hell happened to the job she got? Did I miss that bit? So yes, it’s all really unlikely.
I was really looking forward to this being a story of this rich lady suddenly having to sleep rough, scrounge for change and eat out of bins but really, the toughest it gets for Julie is having to pinch a few sandwiches at an open house (which are technically free anyway) and then later lie to her hot date about where she sleeps at night. I find the film presents homelessness as some fantastic opportunity to take stock and turn your life around and it all comes too easily for Julie, with free food, nice clothes and haircuts just seemingly falling into her lap. She waltzes into a job selling real estate without any experience or references, helping her get her own house back.
It’s nice to see her get a happy ending but the film is absolute codswallop. Hamilton does her best but this one is just daft and gets progressively more brainless as it goes along. Worst of all, it’s not even all that Christmassy. It’s set in the months leading up to yuletide, so the title feels like a cheat. Still, it scrapes back a few Christmas points for the lovely part where love interest Mike (Rob Stewart) decorates her house for the holidays as a surprise. However, if what you’re looking for is Sarah Connor eating her Christmas dinner out of the trash, this won’t be the film for you.
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