Christmas 2020 Reviews: Day 12 - A Puppy for Christmas (2016)

"A dog is for life, not just for Christmas" goes the famous Dogs Trust slogan, and it's always been something on my mind around this time of year. I hate seeing news stories of puppies being bred and sold as Christmas presents, only to be handed over to dog shelters a few days or weeks later, when people realised that a cute puppy isn't just a sweet little teddy bear for them to cuddle, but is a real living creature that needs love, stability and care. When I found out about A Puppy For Christmas, I was curious to see if they would tackle this issue at all.

Of course they don't. This is a light-hearted chick-flick after all, people only want to watch puppies for the cuteness, not to be confronted with serious issues surrounding how they are commercialised around this time of year, and the repercussions of that.

A Puppy for Christmas follows Noelle (played by Cindy Busby) a journalist who has always wanted a puppy, but life has always held her back from getting one, for various reasons. The latest issue is that her boyfriend Todd is allergic to a lot of things, including dogs. However, she ends up buying a cockapoo puppy from a pet shop (you can do that in America apparently) after her friend tells her that the breed is hypoallergenic. Noelle is thrilled to own a puppy at last. However, she ends up calling him Buster, after he "busts up her life" by destroying Todd's home, resulting in him dumping her and making her move out. Noelle and Buster have nowhere to go, until a kind co-worker named Liam (Greyson Holt) invites her to stay with him at his family's farm for Christmas.

I really did not like this film for the first fifteen minutes. If you have followed this blog for a little while, you may recognise Noelle's actress Cindy Busby from another doggy romance, Unleashing Mr Darcy (which is one of my favourite reviews I've written for this blog, I'll link it here in case you'd like to read it). I was not a fan of Busby's character in that film, and it took me a while to warm to her here. The film opens with Noelle narrating over a series of Christmas images from her past, saying how life got in the way of getting the puppy she always wanted. She would write a letter to Father Christmas every year saying that all she wanted was a puppy, but each year she got a goldfish, then a turtle, and then a cockatoo instead. None of those poor living creatures were apparently good enough for our Noelle though, and she continues to vie for a puppy each year. Considering the lack of attention these other animals got as Noelle to too busy begging for a puppy, and that none of them are ever mentioned or referred to again, I can only assume that these creatures died cruel, neglectful deaths. Maybe not the most cheerful way to start analysing this film, but I'm sorry, I do hate how this film endorses the idea of pets as novelty gifts. To make matters worse, after the years she got the goldfish, turtle and cockatoo, her parents divorce and Noelle simply responds with "You would think the guilt alone would bring a puppy my way". Seriously? A child would have bigger things on her mind at that moment in time - why don't her parents love each other anymore, does that mean they don't love her, was it her fault they aren't divorcing, where is she going to live now, etc. But not Noelle.

Also, how bad are these parents that they don't listen to their kid when she says she wants a puppy and buy her every other animal under the sun without ever sitting down and giving her a reason why she can't have a puppy, but can somehow have these other animals.

Then as Noelle grows up to complain about how you're not allowed to have a puppy at university. I get leaving pets you already have behind is hard, but you're complaining that your middle class education -which by the way, is probably full-time and so she wouldn't be able to look after a puppy properly in her tiny dorm room anyway- stopping you from getting a dog? Just... what?

And then that brings us to the present day, where she has a boyfriend of five years who has a dog allergy.

I think this whole idea of Noelle constantly being setback in her dream of getting a puppy (and I think it is important to note that it is always a puppy that she says she wants, never a dog) has good comedic potential, but the way the film presents it is reckless. We never know why Noelle wants a puppy so much, and why it specifically has to be as a Christmas gift. As I said before, considering the real animals put up for adoption each year, it just feels a bit naïve and somewhat insensitive to not even address this issue. The fact that she then goes and buys her puppy from a shop, instead of adopting it (which is reportedly much easier to do in the U.S. than it is here in the UK) isn't a great message to send out either.

Otherwise, Noelle came across as very immature and completely lacked self-awareness in the beginning. She buys a puppy without consulting her boyfriend -who she lives with, and is allergic to dogs- first, which is selfish. An additionally selfish action is that she only buys the dog by itself: she doesn't buy it a bed, or food, or toys, or anything it will need, and gets upset when it pees on her in her car. The way this woman is written is how spoilt teenage girls are normally written, and that's an insult to teenage girls.

When her boyfriend Todd dumps her, he also makes her move out with the dog, and she ends up homeless. She sleeps under her desk at work at night, crying to the dog about how he is all she has left. I felt nothing for Noelle at this point, and instead laughed at how the puppy tried to escape while she was making this speech, so she had to cling him close to her chest to continue her lines.

Yet... somewhere along the way, pretty much as soon as Noelle arrived at Liam's farm with him and her puppy, Buster, this film actually became charming and somewhat fun. Liam's parents died, so his remaining family are his grandfather (played by Derek McGrath, who is a delight) and his sister Joyce (Allison Price) who has a massive crush on Noelle. I was a bit concerned at first at how overly keen Joyce was on Noelle, and was worried that it was be a stereotypical LGBTQ+ predator character going after the straight character for comedic relief. Thankfully, this doesn't happen, as they have Joyce admire Noelle for a while, but they soon become friends, and she's completely respectful when Noelle and Liam start to bond romantically.

I thought Liam was a fine character, not a particularly memorable male lead, but nice while you're watching him. The one problem I had with him is that we never see his fiancé, Jessica. He talks about her a lot, but she doesn't appear in the film, and we never even see a photo of her. It just feels very obvious that "Jessica" is an excuse for Liam and Noelle not to be together right away, to the point that when she's eliminated, it's clearly no loss on Liam's part because there was nothing for the character or audience to connect to anyway. There's a scene where Noelle asks him how he met Jessica, and his response is faded out with a Christmas song, which then fades into shots of Noelle and Liam laughing and talking with each other as they drive to his farm. That is how little they care about this supposed character, and instead attempt to manipulate the audience into wanting the two main characters to be together.

The middle bit of the film was the best part. There's no great plot, but you see Noelle bonding with Liam and his family, and developing a love for the Christmas tree farm they own. The dog plays a fair part in the plot, although I do find it a bit annoying and worrying in equal measure how it's Liam and his granddad who take the time to train him, while Noelle just carries him around everywhere (a habit Cindy Busby has carried over from her time on Unleashing Mr Darcy, where she did the same irritating thing - I suppose it's so the dog is on camera constantly for the "Aww" factor while she talks, but dogs want to walk, so I don't like it).

The ending had it's problems, but it wasn't as bad as the beginning. There's a subplot in this film of Noelle's ex-boyfriend Todd trying to get Noelle back after realising that dumping her was a mistake. Todd is played by Christopher Russell, and I have to say that this guy makes an excellent slimeball. There's just something almost delightfully despicable in how bad of a person Todd is. He's the right amount of snooty pretentiousness that keeps the character lacking self-awareness, rather than being a knowingly bad human.

However, Todd appears to play out the old cliché of "the ex who wants the protagonist back, just as she's met someone else" just after Liam and Noelle kiss for the first time, which feels like an annoying bit of drama for the sake of a third act climax. Todd makes a short speech to Noelle about what a fool he's been, and she takes him back, just like that, right in front of Liam, who is devastated.

I was left dumbfounded for a moment after this scene, so clueless as to why Noelle would be so willing to go back with Todd, to the point that I thought she was joking with him, but she wasn't, she actually goes back with him that quickly. It was at this point that I was reminded what an inept, immature person Noelle was, the last twenty minutes before then had managed to convince me that maybe she wasn't so bad, and had grown a little in the company of this stable family, something she had never had herself.

Somehow, Liam still wants Noelle, and even more surprisingly, his grandfather and sister want him to go after her too, even though she essentially just dumped him right after their kiss. There are some other silly things in the finale, especially something regarding a present Noelle gets for Christmas that made me groan when it appeared onscreen.

Noelle is not a good character, but I did find Cindy Busby more enjoyable to watch here than I did in the terrible "Darcy" films. Overall, this film definitely has it's problems, but that middle part is such sweet, cosy viewing that I just can't hate it, or even dislike it too intensely. I can see people getting too frustrated with Noelle and switch this off before then, and I understand that. However, the sweet parts are really sweet, and some of the ineptitude of our leading lady is actually disarmingly amusing. This film will make you feel something, I just can't guarantee what that will be for everyone.

THE SCOREBOARD

Would I recommend this film? Yes

Christmas quote of the film: "You know, I haven't decorated a Christmas tree in years... Todd is allergic to pine trees and polyvinyl chloride. It's what they make fake trees out of. Instead, we usually put a big Christmas bulb on his interior bamboo garden." - Noelle

Film rating: 5/10