With Cheesy Christmas Movies, I have a tendency to play “Name that Derivation.” because they are derivative; nobody expects originality. “Journey Back to Christmas” isn’t an exception to that. Where it is exceptional is that it takes tropes from “Forever Young,” “Remember the Night” (a tragically underappreciated film) and “It’s a Wonderful Life” without being obvious about it.
Hanna (Candace Cameron Bure), a nurse in a small-town hospital at the end of World War II, takes shelter from a snowstorm in a shed and emerges to find herself in the same town, 71 years later. Not unnaturally, she’s terrified and confused. Concerned passersby summon the police in the handsome-aw-shucks person of Officer Jake (Oliver Hudson). Faced with the prospect of having her forcibly committed, Jake instead convinces his superiors to let him take Hanna to the family farm until she can get her bearings. There she tries to make sense of a world in which iPads and eBay have replaced caroling and lights on the town gazebo. Her house is a health food store and the hospital where she worked is a library. From there, I expected the usual two-dimensional romance plot to play out between her and the inexplicably single Jake, and I expected wrong. Because even that many years later, Nurse Hanna is not completely forgotten.
I have to say here that I love, love, love a good time-travel or alternate history story, on the page or screen. The other side of that coin is that every little anachronism or historical howler gets under my skin like an allergy test. I wanted, for example, to enjoy “Outlander,” but the appalling lack of understanding of 18th-century Scottish history outweighed the excellent costuming, magnificent visuals and better-than-average plotting and acting. I endured the first season and figured I’d done my duty.
There were a couple of such nits to pick in “Journey Back to Christmas,” but not as many as there would be if the film were more self-conscious about accuracy, oddly enough. The only one that bothered me at all was that both the doctor and the police chief Hanna encounters in 2016 were black. That would have been extraordinary if not impossible in 1945, yet she never even blinks. (I also thought “Central Falls” was a hokey, unrealistic town name, until I looked it up. My apologies to any Central Fallsians who happen on this blog.)
Bure gives an adorable if slightly over-perky performance here, coming across genuinely kind and generous. Hudson is competent as the sort of lovable but slightly clueless semi-beefcake that acts as woman-bait in so many innocent romance stories. But the real show-stealer is Tom Skerritt as the mysterious Tobias Cook. By the time he’s revealed, we’ve long ago figured him out, yet he still packs a punch when it’s confirmed. I actually did choke up at the final George Bailey moment.
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