‘Tis the season for paint-by-numbers romantic comedies covered in snow, twinkling with holiday lights, and accompanied by Christmas carols. Plots barely matter, and characters are as forgettable as last year’s stocking stuffers. You know the drill–make some popcorn, turn off your brain, and watch pretty people fall in love. Bonus points if there’s some sort of royalty involved.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I won’t watch every last terrible rom-com that comes across my screen. I will, and I will enjoy it. I will know what’s going to happen, and I can pretty much write the dialogue myself, and the sheer cheese of it all will sometimes make me squirm, by by god, I will watch it. Which is why I gritted my teeth and sat down to watch The Noel Diary on Netflix, prepared to be mortified and also to happily coo at the pretty people prettily falling in pretty holiday love.
But Reader, it was good!
Netflix has done something interesting here. They’ve made a rom-com that’s not particularly funny. It’s almost, dare I say it, an actual romance that’s just dressed up in a quirky holiday outfit. The Noel Diary is an adult movie about grown-ups dealing with the traumas of their past in a mature fashion. There are no embarrassing public meltdowns, no over-the-top Big Romantic Gestures, no silly misunderstandings that could be cleared up with a single conversation. There are simply characters who come together in rom-com-esque circumstances to go on a journey together and fall in love.
This is a very spare film, cast-wise. Refreshingly, our main character is a man, Jacob Turner–excellently portrayed by Justin Hartley from This is Us. Jacob is a famous novelist who lives alone in a gorgeous house with his dog. Normally I’m annoyed by the places fictional writers live in, since I’m a writer and most of my friends are writers and none of us can afford houses like that. (Or, you know, food. Or health insurance.) But in this case, Jacob is Nicholas Sparks-level famous and rich, so it actually makes sense. Jacob is a loner and he likes it that way. He has also just learned that his estranged mother recently died and left everything to him.
Jacob doesn’t have a wisecracking best friend or a happily married brother or a gay college roommate to bounce exposition off. He’s the rare rom-com hero who says he’s a loner and actually is a loner. He and the dog go to his childhood home to clean the place out, and we learn his mom was a hoarder. He hasn’t seen her in years. We meet the next door neighbor, played by the always-lovely Bonnie Bedelia, who fills in some missing information including that Jacob’s dad came to the funeral. He’s been gone since Jacob was a child. And finally, we see a woman watching from across the street. That’s pretty much the whole cast. It’s kind of nice for a change, to keep a holiday film small.
As Jacob goes through his boxed-up past–literally–the watching woman knocks on the door looking for hers as well. Turns out her birth mother once lived at this address, and that’s the only information she has. This leads the two of them on a quest for the secrets of his childhood and her birth, which are entwined to some degree.
Rachel, luminously portrayed by Barrett Doss, has trust issues largely because she was adopted. She’s grown up in a happy family but feels haunted by the idea that her birth mother didn’t want her. She’s engaged to a nice, very structured guy and says she’s happy but we–and Jacob, and Rachel herself–know she’s holding a part of herself back to stay safe. Meanwhile, Jacob lost his entire family in one way or another, to death or abandonment or mental illness. When he says he likes being alone, it’s because that’s the only way he knows for sure that he won’t get hurt. These are two wounded people, and yet they’re also regular, normal, functional adults who deal with their lives and their problems just fine. It’s…odd. In a silly holiday rom-com, it’s unusual to see such maturity on display.
Jacob and Rachel find themselves on a road trip in the snow, trapped in a series of picturesque villages where they must stay in gorgeous little B&Bs overnight. At one point Jacob even jokes to an innkeeper that he’s surprised they have two rooms available, because in a rom-com there would only be one room left. And that’s really the crux of this movie–it’s got all the trappings of a Christmas rom-com, even though at heart it’s a story about two adults finally trying to make peace with the mistakes of their parents.
Where The Noel Diary works best is in the characters, letting them talk and explore and live their realities. There is a terrible trauma at the heart of Jacob’s issues, one that destroyed his family and has played out for decades. This is a realistic treatment of trauma, and the film allows the sadness to linger. Not everything is wrapped up neatly, or at all. Where the movies stumbles is in the romance, not because the leads don’t sell it, but rather because the obligatory rom-com beats don’t always feel natural in a movie that wants to be taken seriously. These are mostly quibbles, however. Overall, it’s an unexpected pleasure of a romance about–and for–grown-ups.
So this time, maybe pay a little more attention to the silly Christmas rom-com. It’s worth it.
