Watched: Finished the third one on 01/29/2025
Format: Amazon
Viewing: First for all three
Director: Peter DeLuise, Terry Ingram x2
Job: BnB owner
Location of story: Pennsylvania?
new skill: running a BnB/ starting a bakery business
Man: Brennan Elliot
Job of Man: Wall Street Deal Maker/ Goat Herd/ Handy Man
Goes to/ Returns to: Goes To
Event: None/ None/ Wedding
Food: Baked goods. My God, so many baked goods
Well, this was roughly 4.5 hours spent on a very long walk.
The All of My Heart trilogy maybe doesn't need to exist, and, yet, it does. Why? I do not know. Was the original so successful The People demanded more? Internet sleuthing tells me that, yes, people loved the first one so much, Hallmark had to cook up sequels.
The series fulfills the fantasy (by someone, absolutely not me) of owning and operating a Bed and Breakfast in the country, where everyone tells you that you are good at baking. This is clearly a dream of many.
It is also a Hallmark movie series that never says it out loud, but absolutely implies, our leads are living in sin for the equivalent of 2.25 movies.
As a bonus, it features TV luminary Ed Asner for absolutely no reason, but he's in all three movies as The Wise Old Man.
After finishing some other Chabert movie (I think the Hawaii movie), I was rolled into All of My Heart (2015). In this one, Chabert plays a caterer who inherits *half* of a house, and sees the possibility to make her dream of opening a BnB in leaf-peeper country a reality. Frequent Chabert collab Brennan Elliot shows up as the other inheritee, and plays a hard-nosed Wall Street guy who just wants to get half the proceeds of the house's sale. If she can buy him out, great.
However, two weeks in, he loses his job and money in a magic-wand "poof! you're poor!" movie scenario, and he decides to crash at the house to which he has a legal stake.
So, yes, the movie is one part The Money Pit as the two work to fix the place up to make it suitable as a BnB (and Chabert can buy him out eventually), one part every-movie-about-cityfolk-moving-to-the-country as they deal with an old house and wacky animals (goats). And, of course, fall in love. We even see the wedding at the end of the first movie.
Chabert's character's main trait is to project a distorted reality field around herself where crushing financial stress and her fraught and/ or collapsing relationships do not effect her good cheer, desire to help, and love of baking. Is it a stretch for Chabert? It is not.
Elliot is the chipper, good-humored fellow who is actually aware of the absolute financial hole they're in but gamely soldiers on, buoyed by Chabert's constant stream of sugar-laced baked goods paired with her myopic attitude.
The movie establishes a kindly neighbor, wacky townsfolk, and that Lacey inspires people by existing.
But no sooner had I finished the first movie to start this post than I went to look up the movie on IMDB and realized - there are THREE of these movies.
And what better way to keep this Chabert-a-Thon going than to knock three movies out that are basically the equal runtime of Kill Bills I and II?
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| goats are weirdly central to everything happening |
All of My Heart: Inn Love (2017) takes us back to before the wedding as Elliot and Chabert navigate the rocky waters of opening a BnB and their negative cashflow. Elliot has a chance to reclaim his role on Wall Street which should help pay the bills.
Without needing to establish who the two characters are, like a Marvel movie's second installment, they can get into more plot. And side-characters get more screentime. And this is where we establish - the inn is magic! Sort of! As everyone who is there reignites and/ or finds romance.
Fortuitously, this includes a travel blogger who is there to nuke the BnB with a mean post, until she hooks up with the seemingly gigantic handy-man (just a regular tall guy, but our leads are like 5'2') who apparently smooches her until she decides the inn is great. Speaking of Marvel, the handy-man played Colossus in X2.
All of my Heart: Inn Love is a weird Hallmark movie, but, divorced from its Hallmark pedigree and the fact it very much is book-ended by Hallmark movies, a fairly normal movie . It's the dark middle-chapter, the Empire Strikes Back of Chabert films!
Stealing precious Chabert screentime, the movie follows Elliot's decision to keep chasing the Wall Street career or stick around the BnB he never meant to own. He commutes, which is brutal, and then just stays in town, which causes a wedge. He is BOTH city man and country man! Unheard of! THEY CANNOT CO-EXIST IN A SINGLE HUMAN.
Chabert starts a business selling her baked goods and teams up with a regional distributor. But mostly she stands around trying to be perky while wondering "wait - did my dude just ditch me again for Manhattan while I'm folding sheets, cooking and cleaning for a house full of people?"
The resulting argument is also the *only* Hallmark movie I can remember ever seeing wherein people have a fairly real-sounding fight over very real-sounding topics, and both consider whether this is what they should be doing. It's not Marriage Story, but my eyes about fell out of my head.
The final decision by Elliot's character to just say "we're going to just have to live on less money to make this work, because I want to make this work" is the most mature and oddly grounded romantic decision I can remember seeing in a Hallmark movie.
The final installment is All of My Heart: The Wedding, and I will give you up to three guesses what happens in this installment.
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| Mr. Ed Asner, ladies and gentlemen |
Well, the deal Chabert cut with the distributor for her coffee-shop-friendly baked goods goes to shit in a New York minute, and she's left with no additional income. There's a storyline there, sort of, but aside from filling time, I don't know why it exists. Surprise - she lands on her feet.
The two main storylines are that Chabert's distant cousin shows up with a claim to the house and wants a 1/3rd of the cost, and there's no money for that, so she decides the thing to do is ruin them? The other plot features Elliot's dad who is off-brand Kurtwood Smith. He has to accept his son's goat-herding ways, and does. Mostly because he's entered Chabert's reality distortion field where all of this seems like a good idea and not back-breaking labor.
Everything works out when the town comes together to pay off the cousin, just stealing wholesale from It's a Wonderful Life, but if Potter were a cute pilates instructor/ accountant.
Then, still $75K in the hole and with no real financial solution in sight, the movie just ends as the leads get married and that's that. Chabert looks smashing in her gown, though.
The plot of the third one kind of doesn't make sense and exists in the realm of "because the movies said so", but I'm pretty sure that if a third inheritor of the property existed out there somewhere, a discussion would be had with the attorney or in probate - and if not, I'm pretty sure people would be sued.
It's fine. It also is one of the times where you think "I get why they did these two movies after the first one, but given the timeline of the three movies, with all this bad luck... these people are @#$%ing cursed". The only way out for them by the film's end is to basically have a massive gift of cash, and Chabert is super nice to the person destroying their lives, hopes and dreams. NO, LACEY. SHE IS BANKRUPTING YOU.
So... why do these movies exist? What's it all about?
As I said at the top, I know people want to start BnB's. They exist. A cute old house with character where the baked goods are fresh out of the oven, and where you're going to get laid just by showing up? It's a nice sell, if a little noisy in an old farm house.
If the children yearn for the mines, Hallmark viewers yearn for farmhouses with gigantic kitchens, friends who are attractive, but not more than themselves. They want community, if that means everyone loves them for their spirit and baked goods and will give them money. Is it pleasurable to watch these people struggle financially? No. It really isn't. So doing that for three movies is a rough ride, especially because it really doesn't feel resolved at the end.
The oddest bit that the movies really commit to isn't the "singing pipes", it's that Chabert somehow has time to run a baked goods empire she does entirely on her own while also tending to her very new BnB 24/7. And it makes me worried about what happens if Chabert's character is sick for a day.
But these movies are simple, relaxing pleasures where thinking about them too much is a problem, and we're coasting on the charm of the actors. Weirdly, the third film reads like fan-fiction of the first movie. Or at least has the same "where is this going? That's not how any of this works..." vibe I ascribe to a lot of fanfic.
Is Chabert a good fit here? Sure. She manages to bring her A-game and maybe more than what they were bargaining for in the second film. She has some chemistry with Brennan, who seems like he's having a good time and is enjoying goofing with the goats.
Is it a stretch for Chabert? No. But this is her Hallmark sweet spot. It seems like damning with faint praise to say she's not off-putting, but, friendos, I watch Hallmark Christmas offerings and not all Hallmark stars are created equal. Some are annoying af. On her worst day, Chabert coasts through these movies behind a tray of croissants.
But if I'm going to get film school on us and ponder what does Chabert mean in the context of this film - what does she bring along with her that sparks something within the minds of viewers - we need to keep unpacking. Why is she not annoying? Why is she, in fact, pleasant? She can act just fine, and when given opportunity to do so, flexes. Does a portion of the audience relate to her? Is she a fiction suit they can put on? Can the audience put themselves in Lacey Chabert's 6" heels for 84 minutes while she bakes and makes friends?
In the nichey, nichey world of Hallmark that is *not* the uber-popular Christmas movies, what makes someone the star attraction? I dunno. I just watched three of these things and I'm still unpacking.
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