The Christmas Setup (Lifetime Pictures, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020, 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime premiered a new holiday movie called The Christmas Setup. Ordinarily I avoid Lifetime’s holiday fare -- which this year they started at the end of October and are continuing to the new year -- because it gets way too sappy for my taste, but I’d seen previews for their Christmas slate and noticed one clip in which two men were kissing each other. Through some online searching I was able to find that amongst the usual clutch of Lifetime Christmas movies there was at least one whose protagonists were two Gay men, and I checked the Lifetime schedules regularly to see when it would be on. I found out the title was The Christmas Setup and it was so-called because the central character was actually played by former The Nanny star Fran Drescher as Kate Spencer, who lives on Connor Avenue in Milwaukee and is trying to set up her Gay son Hugo (Ben Lewis), a New York attorney, with his old high-school crush object Patrick (Blake Lee). Patrick returned to Milwaukee after starting a sensational Internet start-up called Cassandra, which supposedly can predict its users’ futures based on algorithms representing everything they’ve done in the past (like a lot of fictional apps in recent Lifetime movies, this frankly sounds scary and Big Brother-ish) and then selling it for so much money he never has to work again, though he’s helping out his father’s Christmas tree lot and donating the money to charity. The two “meet cute” when Patrick delivers a particularly enormous tree to the Spencer home -- my husband Charles wondered why such an obviously Jewish actress as Drescher, whom he called “the last living exemplar of Yiddish Art Theatre acting,” was cast as a woman who’s the head of her neighborhood’s Christmas celebration committee (and I was wondering how all these people were going outside in a Wisconsin winter with only light sweaters and jackets on and without their breaths steaming) -- and Patrick gets roped into Kate’s elaborate plans for celebrating Christmas, including the annual “Santa Express” letter-writing party to Santa Claus at the train’s virtually unused 1920’s-era station thrown every Christmas Eve. There’s also a move afoot by the local government to have the station torn down and a new, ugly “train kiosk” put up in its place, which Kate is fighting and so far is losing.

Before he left New York to see his family -- and took his fag-hag quasi-girlfriend and co-worker Madelyn (Ellen Wong) with him, leading his mom to wonder if he’d turned straight and got married to a woman -- Hugo had got into an argument with the managing partner of his law firm (cast with an African-American actor just to show how ecumenical and integrated everything in this idealized Lifetime vision of America is) in which he pleaded to be made a partner in the firm and got a noncommittal response. A number of things happen that more or less bring Hugo and Patrick together as well as setting up mini-roadblocks to their burgeoning relationship; in one scene they’re stringing Christmas lights on Kate’s roof when one of them accidentally kicks away the ladder they used to get up there, and while there Patrick talks about how much he hates lawyers since he was accused of plagiarizing the concept of Cassandra and he resented the big law firms whose attorneys tried to kill his sale of it. Where I thought this was going was it would turn out that Hugo was one of the lawyers who had worked the case against Patrick’s company and that would be the complication writer Michael J. Murray would use to derail, at least temporarily, Hugo’s and Patrick’s potential affair. Instead Madelyn, at a pre-Christmas trivia game Kate has organized in which the final question was in what city did Charles Dickens write A Christmas Carol, blurts out, “London -- and that’s where Hugo is going!” We’ve already found out that Hugo has been offered the partnership after all, but it comes with a commitment to relocate to London and open a branch of the law firm there (though I wondered how much good that would do given the dramatic differences between the British and American legal systems).

Then Patrick invites Hugo to a “pop-up cabaret” on Christmas eve where the entertainer is a drag queen (though she sings jazz and she sings it with her/his own voice) and he’s brought up to the stage to sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” (Well, the song was written for Judy Garland, after all, and therefore it has Gay “cred.”) All the emotion of his family reunion -- including his success at figuring out a way to save the beloved train station (it had a destination sign reading “Forthton” and I, of course, joked that on the other side there’d be one called “Backton”) from demolition and, along the way, discovering that Eugene Connor, the 1920’s philanthropist who built the neighborhood, was Gay and left his entire fortune to a long-time partner named Ashby -- causes Hugo to turn down the big promotion to London, quit the law firm and settle in Milwaukee with his new light o’love. And the one between Hugo and Patrick isn’t the only match Kate sets up for one of her kids: Hugo’s straight older brother Aiden (Chad Connell, who actually did more for me physically than either Ben Lewis or Blake Lee!) and Hugo’s platonic girlfriend Madelyn (ya remember Madelyn?) also get the hots for each other even though he’s in the military and is stationed in Indianapolis. In other words, The Christmas Setup is your typical Lifetime holiday romance -- two people who casually met years earlier are brought together by the holidays and end up paired off as a couple despite the differences that set them apart originally -- whose only difference from the norm is that the two who meet up and pair off are both men.

Apparently Ben Lewis and Blake Lee are a Gay couple off-screen as well -- so at least they could kiss each other on-screen (though that’s as far as they go -- a couple of relatively chaste on-the-lips kisses -- Lifetime has offered us some quite lubricious soft-core straight porn but they’re obviously still not ready to go there with two guys or two girls yet) without raising the issues straight Taron Egerton had to face when he said his biggest challenge in playing the Gay Elton John in Rocketman was having to kiss men on screen. The film was decently directed by Pat Mills (a man, and presumably straight judging from the picture of him with his arm around a woman on his imdb.com page), who did the best he could with a pretty preposterous script -- and the cast was O.K., though Drescher always treads a fine line between funny and intolerable (though I could identify because I too am a Gay man who had a crazy Jewish mother!) and Ben Lewis has too much of the overgrown twink about him to do much for me either as a body or a personality. In fact, one of the weirder miscalculations in the script is that when director Mills finally gives us a shot of him dressed in tight blue jeans that make him look at least a little bit sexy (he doesn’t seem to have much of a basket, but I’ll let his real-life partner Blake Lee worry about that!), Madelyn immediately makes him change from the supposedly out-of-style jeans to a pair of brown pants of a velvet-like material that seemed to me more like pajamas than anything else. (Then again, I’ve seen men going out with pants that look an awful lot like pajamas and sometimes get mistaken for them.) The idea of two people, whatever their genders or orientations, starting a casual friendship, losing touch with each other, then re-meeting and becoming lovers isn’t unknown to me -- Charles and I had a brief friendship in the early 1980’s (he met me and my then-girlfriend at a political party his mom was throwing, and a few months later I came out as Gay) before he left town, and we re-met and became a couple shortly after he returned to San Diego -- but as presented here it’s the stuff of a million movies and the only real novelty of this is that they’re both Gay men.