I like watching movies over and over.  Not all movies, of course, but they don’t really have to be good movies.  In my first approach, I think of myself as an audience member and I consult myself about whether I am pleased by the performance.  Often, I am unimpressed.  Maybe I should watch better movies.

In the second approach, I move the level of understanding up so that I am looking at things like the nature of the obstacle the characters need to overcome and the inner and outer resources they mobilize to do it.  I look at the whole arc of the plot and wonder if it would be better in another configuration.  It’s still an audience kind of role, but it looks for different things.

In the third approach, I look at the project the way I imagine the director looks at the project.  To make a theme meaningful to the audience, it needs to be introduced and reinforced and eventually you cash those investments in by revealing something the audience really gets and that matters.

It will not surprise you, I suppose, to learn that I have a recent experience and a recent movie in mind.  It is the Hallmark movie, “A Christmas Visitor.”  I’m not going to mess around with what the plot is really about, but there are two moments that I saw (finally) side by side and enjoyed immensely.

You have to know something about the plot, of course, but I will keep it brief.  John, the first-born son of the Boyagian family, enlisted in the military against his parents’ wishes and was killed in Operation Desert Shield.  Both George  (William Devane) and Susan Boyagian (Meredith Baxter) were saddened by the loss of their son, but it became a cause for Susan and one of the ways she expressed her sadness and her anger was to refuse to celebrate Christmas.  This was not entirely by happenstance; they received word of their son’s death on Christmas Eve.  As a result, the Boyagian family had not celebrated Christmas, by the time the story begins, for twelve years.

Susan is angry at George for “permitting” John to enlist.  We see in flashbacks how eager John was to enlist, so these are things the audience knows, but that Susan does not know.  She is angry at God and at the church they used to attend and at George because something precious was taken away from her.  When she expresses this anger, it is not pretty, but we feel that we understand her point.  If the director (Christopher Leitch) had failed to get that done, nothing else would have worked.

I said there were two scenes that I had (finally) seen back to back.  In the second of these two scenes, George and Susan’s daughter, Jean (Reagan Pasternak) confesses to Susan that she has thought that the reason the Boyagian family had been refusing to celebrate Christmas was that they didn’t love her the way they did John.

There had been nothing like an introduction to this issue so far, so it comes to us like a revelation from nowhere.  That is the way it comes to her mother, too, but she knows immediately that this is something she should have known.  To Jean, she says, “I’ve been so selfish.  I never considered how it would seem to you.”

And that makes instant sense to us.  How could Jean not have felt that way?  How could Susan not have known?  But the answer to the second question is that we have been given an emotionally plausible reason.  She is angry at George (and God and the church and the army).  To the degree that grievance makes emotional sense to us, we should not be prepared to see it in another way.

And we aren’t.  At least, I wasn’t.  And I really enjoyed seeing the turn I had not foreseen and also feeling a little bit as if I really should have seen it.