Make the Yuletide Gay Could Almost Pass for a Hallmark Movie

My marathon of rather obscure Christmas movies suggested by Netflix continued yesterday with this year’s Make the Yuletide Gay, written and directed by Rob Williams and featuring a cast of mostly unknowns, at least to me. The major exception to that was Gates McFadden, who, as any good Trekkie knows, played Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Her presence intrigued me, but she only appears for a few minutes, and in a role that is less sympathetic than most.

Olaf Gunnunderson (Keith Jordan) is a popular, self-assured college senior in a committed relationship with Nathan Standford (Adamo Ruggiero), the sensitive son of a pair of distant socialites (McFadden and Ian Buchanan). Olaf, or “Gunn” as he’s more generally known by his peers, is looking forward to returning home to his doting midwestern parents, even though they don’t know he’s gay and he has no intention of telling them. Nathan’s relationship with his parents is more strained, and when they casually announce at the last minute that they’ve won a Christmas cruise for two and he’ll have an empty house to look forward to, he decides to pay the Gunnundersons a surprise visit, initially unaware of just how much Gunn’s parents don’t know.

In many ways this plays like a Hallmark movie, with its emphasis on the joys of a tight-knit family and one young man’s struggle to come to terms with differing aspects of his identity. Nathan, who feels completely alienated from parents who never seemed to care about him much to begin with, longs for what Gunn has, while Gunn is afraid his parents will stop loving him if he bares his soul to them. The movie is Not Rated, but there’s very little profanity and nothing much more overt than a lip-lock, though more double entendres than Austin Powers could shake a stick at give the movie an inconsistent tone.

Additionally, while Kelly Keaton and Derek Long make the Gunnundersons, Anya and Sven, endearing and give us a good sense of the family dynamic, their performances are often a bit uncomfortable. Keaton speaks with an exaggerated Wisconsin accent that often grates, while Long spends most of his time looking spaced out. Tighter editing probably would have helped a bit in making some of their dialogue a little less awkward.

Nonetheless, Sven, for all his eccentricities, is enjoyably laid-back, and he’s not quite as out-to-lunch as it often appears, as demonstrated particularly well in a quiet conversation with the lonely Nathan. Anya is the most colorful character in the movie, and she can scarcely speak without giggling, but her maternal warmth is expansive and extends to the boy Olaf hastily introduces as his roommate. Thrown into the mix are Abbey Mancuso (Hallee Hirsh), a neighbor Olaf once dated, and her spiteful mother Heather (Alison Arngrim), who has an odd ongoing feud with Anya that really doesn’t add anything to the movie except an opportunity to make a sly reference to Nellie, Arngrim's mean-spirited character in Little House on the Prairie.

While I think some of the acting could have been better and I could have done without the innuendo, on the whole I found this movie to be a pretty appealing look at two very different families and the young men at their centers.