boringmuse | Movie Review: Christmas at Pemberley Manor (2018)

Before I get into the meat of this post, I would like to wish anyone who’s reading a (late) Merry Christmas and happy holidays! Hopefully you all had fun and spent some time with your friends and family unlike I, who was laying in bed working on a fanfiction while my parents were in Vegas partying it up.

I’m going to be doing a brief film review of Hallmark’s Christmas at Pemberley Manor because, if you haven’t noticed yet, I’m obsessed with Pride and Prejudice and love watching any adaptations of the novel. As a disclaimer, this is my first time watching a Hallmark Christmas movie, so the popular critiques I’ve heard about the “genre” (for instance that they’re all formulaic, slightly altered versions of each other), will be disregarded in my review.

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Christmas at Pemberley Manor essentially revolves around Elizabeth Bennet (played by Jessica Lowndes), an event planner from New York, planning for Lambton Town’s Annual Christmas Festival, where her friend from college George is the mayor. Caroline, Elizabeth’s snarky boss, is reluctant to let her take charge of the event, seeing as it’s going to be held under the company’s prestigious title, but she manages to stay upbeat.

When Elizabeth arrives at Lambton, she has an unpleasant first meeting with billionaire Mr. Darcy– played by the very charming and attractive Michael Rady– whose beautiful estate she eventually convinces him to provide as a venue for the festival when things don’t work out with the original location. As they start working together to make the event a success, they begin falling for each other.

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As many holiday-themed films go, this one is lighthearted and feel-good; definitely something to nestle up with on a cold day. Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship was alright, and I thought the modern vocations they were given suited them well. The cast members for the most part do a fine job with their roles, especially Elaine Hendrix, who plays an aggravating modern Caroline Bingley. I will say, however, that I despised the casting for Elizabeth; Lowndes has this annoying valley girl accent that I can never take seriously on a person, especially in this case where it’s Elizabeth Bennet being portrayed. She sounds utterly disingenuous and I cannot stand her inflections, much less her singing. At least she tries! (Shrug)

I was let down by this movie. The winter holidays are my favorite time of year, and hearing that a Pride and Prejudice inspired film based around the holiday season would be released got me thrilled. But despite all its festive feel, this adaptation turned out to be very loosely connected to the original novel. I mean extremely loosely. Many characters are completely extirpated, and I was confused by some of the nods made; was George supposed to be George Wickham? If so, why are there no hard feelings between his character and Darcy’s? And then there’s Jane Lucas, whose name I’m assuming is a mash-up of Jane Bennet and Charlotte Lucas (???). Even Bingley isn’t in the movie! Instead, Darcy has a skittish assistant named Travis. Why couldn’t they have just named him Charles? It would have been so easy to bring Pride’s original cast to life here, but I guess I was doomed to be disappointed.

Apart from my issues with how the film incorporated the original plot, I wanted to bring up that I didn’t feel much chemistry between the two leads. Lowndes and Rady did have some sweet moments, but for the most part it felt awkward and disjointed. The entirety of the movie was predictable, and the dialogue was so contrived. And what was up with the festival itself? The characters were all gushing about how the crowd was bigger than ever before, but I swear under thirty people actually showed up to the “great event.” I cringed, big time.

The few aspects I did like were Jane and Travis’s relationship and, of course, Michael Rady. He’s so sweet and charming and handsome and UGH he deserves a better Elizabeth! There was so much more that could have been done with this idea, but in the end it’s just an insult to Austen’s novel and, as an avid fangirl, I did not get what I was expecting, or hoping for.

If you’re not as big a fan of Pride and Prejudice as I am, you might like Christmas at Pemberley Manor more than I did, but for me it absolutely failed my expectations.