Jake Helgren | Dashing in December / 2020

the city boy and country folk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jake Helgren (writer and director) Dashing in December / 2020

 

      True to its genre John Helgren’s Paramount’s Dashing in December features a lead character who returns home, in this case Wyatt Burwall’s (Peter Porte) first visit in five years to the paradisical ranch in Colorado on which he grew up. But Wyatt, now a rich investment fund manager living in New York arrives as the villain of the piece, determining to convince his mother Deb (Andie MacDowell) to sell the cash-eating monster. He’s been paying the mortgages and taxes for several years, and is convinced his ranch-loving mother would be better off living in the city.

      What he hasn’t been prepared for is the fact that, in his absence, Deb has hired a new hand, Heath (Juan Pablo Di Pace) who lovingly cares for the horses, including Wyatt’s horse Dasher, and totally enjoys his work of taking children on a sleigh ride through the ranch’s back acres, the ranch’s only money-making effort. Everyone, including another farm hand, Blake Berry (Caroline Harris)—Wyatt’s high school girlfriend—and even the Sleepy Hollow natives love the hunky ranch hand Heath. So naturally, the prodigal son, now almost an interloper, and Heath spar almost from first sight.

      We’re told by Blake and by his sympathetic mother, that Wyatt is a good and kind man, but it’s hard to detect how this gay man from the Big Apple is going to eventually find himself in love with the gay Columbian-born worker Heath. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first film to feature a couple who fight halfway through the movie before realizing they’re in love. Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn spent most of Bringing Up Baby at each other’s throats. But that was different since the gay nerd was resisting the lures in that film of a lesbian siren. Here we’re almost afraid that our two leading gay boys won’t get an opportunity to shake hands and wrestle things out, let alone get in a kiss.

      Obviously, Wyatt has conflicting feelings about the old homestead, which we gradually discover he too dearly loved until the death of his beloved father. Blake, this film’s resident advisor, tries to explain to Heath just how difficult it was for the good-looking and popular school kid to come out as gay in the small town in which he grew up. His former girlfriend and school prom queen, Blake, is black, and Wyatt still seems popular and accepted as the gay man he announced he was during his graduation speech, so we have to wonder just how narrow-minded these small town folk truly were.

    But this is fantasyland, both in the genre and in the location of a Christmas fairy-land nestled into the hills of a stunningly beautiful landscape, and eventually, we know, it will wear down all of Wyatt’s resistance; especially when Heath explains how as a young kind, at the worst time in their lives, his mother took him for a Christmas ride on the ranch—then a popular holiday destination—where he fell in love with the place.

     In Dashing these two beauties even have the opportunity to see one another half-naked, Heath in a towel, Wyatt in his undies—a moment in this picture postcard territory that might make even a feisty Midwestern matriarch blush. That may be as close to sex as any Christmas celebratory film ever gets.

     And then, of course, these men do fall in love, Heath setting up an entire wonderland ballroom in which to court Wyatt, dancing for the very first time in his life, so he claims, with another man. The kiss that follows is so memorable that even I shed a tear. So, it’s finally happened, I said to myself; gay men have come home to roost even in the fantasy imaginations of the heterosexual homebodies who watch these annual sentimental ditties.

     Of course, someone has to throw a wrench into the finely tuned engine of love, and in this case it’s Wyatt himself who takes to task his three loved ones, his mother, Blake, and Heath for hiding down on the farm from the truths they refuse to face: that they can’t afford to live in the real world which requires an acceptance of change, challenge, and, obviously, money.

      It takes him a while to realize that it is he who lacks the first two, using his money and another investor’s money to buy himself back into the love of Deb, Blake, and Heath by turning the ranch into a corporate farm, as well as retaining it as a Christmas amusement spot and place to board their horses. Even his neglected horse Dasher grows to love him again, as the would-be farmer dresses up in cowboy duds to get closer to the heart of the man with whom he hopes to spend the rest of life.

     

Los Angeles, December 24, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).