(REVIEW) The Farmer and The Bell: Saving Santaland, a new faith-based Christmas romance film, tries to level up the genre with a strong message, explicitly Christian, and smarter writing. And while it stumbles at times, it makes great strides in bringing authenticity and faith to a popular modern Christmas movie tradition.

The Hallmark Christmas movie has become a staple tradition of the season for many households. Every year, Hallmark — and now Netflix — produce a slew of heartwarming and cheesy Christmas romances that millions of people tune in to watch. According to Vulture, Hallmark Christmas movies each regularly attract about 2.5 million viewers. Their recent film A Timeless Christmas brought in about 3.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched program of the entire week. 

The creators of The Farmer and The Belle hope to have the same kind of annual love for their new film.

“We wanted to create a fun family movie to usher in the Christmas season on a yearly basis as a family tradition,” explained Jenn Chandler, who plays the lead Belle Winters in the film and is married to Jim Chandler, who plays her fellow lead Josh Carpenter.  “It is a fish out of water story inspired by my visit to Jim’s family farm while I was doing a modeling campaign in China.”

The Farmer and The Belle is about an aging model named Belle Winters who reconnects and rekindles a romance with childhood friend Josh Carpenter on his struggling family farm where he shows her that she’s valuable beyond her good looks. The film is based on the real-life romance of Jim and Jenn Chandler, two actors who met and married in real life much like the events depicted in the film.

“The primary message to help women and girls understand their true beauty was inspired by my personal story overcoming the negative lies I felt about my own physical appearance as an actor and a model, and I wanted to help many others, since 90% of girls struggle with lies and negative thinking about their looks,” Jenn said. “When Jim and I were dating we took our fun experiences and wrote it into the story with our team of writers, including the farm animals, the pig slop, the penpal letter writing, the wedding and the Christmas farm.”

One of the film’s biggest appeals is combining the strengths of both Hallmark Christmas romances and faith-based films. It has the sweetness of a Hallmark Christmas movie with the strong messages of a faith-based film. For people who are fans of both, this will be enough to recommend it.

In fact, there are already many similarities between Hallmark Christmas movies and faith-based films — in both the good and bad ways. Both tend to be feel-good stories promoting old-fashioned values, and both tend to have a reputation for being overly-sentimental and formulaic — but while Hallmark Christmas movies’ flaws tend to be embraced as part of their charm, faith-based films tend to be heavily critiqued for their flaws since they ask to be taken more seriously. 

According to Jenn, this strong focus on taking their message seriously and on elements beyond the Christmas setting and romance are what kept The Farmer and The Belle from being part of the Christmas lineup on traditional networks like Hallmark or Netflix. 

“We spoke with the buyers at both of those networks and Lifetime and were passed because our message is about discovering inner beauty with a Christmas backdrop and they solely look for Christmas romance in their stories,” Jenn said.

The filmmakers are very cognizant of their opportunity with this movie to give real answers to young people on how to deal with lack of self-esteem based on looks.

“90% of women, starting at age six, believe that their worth and ability to be loved is based on if they are pretty,” Jenn said. “We wanted to destroy that lie to help millions of women feel confident about how they were created by God as a magnificent masterpiece.”

The film’s team researched with psychologists, pastors and test groups to identify what “renews the mind” about inner beauty. The five principles they came up with are from the Bible (one is “obedient to my calling” and another is “magnificent masterpiece”) and are engraved on a charm bracelet that is part of The Farmer and The Belle story and available for purchase. 

But the film also goes a tad further than most faith-based and Christmas romance films. It leans into more of the authenticity and grounded conflict that come from a real-life story. Because much of the story is based on real experiences, you feel that extra level of honesty. The cute couple moments that build the two leads’ romance feel more like they could have really happened because many of them did. When the two characters have a misunderstanding, they don’t wait the whole movie to try to clear up the misunderstanding.

There is no suspension of disbelief needed to believe that a model would suffer a crisis of identity when she starts to age out of her industry’s ideal age range and her fiancé leaves her for a younger woman. All of this makes both the moments of sweetness and the moments of conflict feel more real rather than manufactured. It’s an encouraging step that I would like to see more faith-based films take and continue to expand on.

Of course, this combination of the faith-based film genre and the Christmas romance genre combines their weaknesses too. Some of Christmas romance’s more annoying tropes — like the convoluted misunderstandings meant to stretch out the film’s running time or the cliche’d groaner jokes — make it in there. And like most faith-based films, the acting is sometimes cringey, the low budget sometimes obvious (like with the distractingly CGI snow), and the messaging can be heavy-handed and rely too much on telling us the message rather than showing us. This is most problematic when the film is dealing with its central message to young girls that true beauty comes from within.  

We are told that Belle regains her self-worth because of the message of the bracelet, but we are shown she regains her self-worth when she starts getting romantic attention from Josh. It can be easy for girls to get the opposite message than what the filmmakers intended and see attention by men (as long as they’re good Christian men) as the sign that you are lovable. This is potentially especially hurtful to young women who struggle with their body image specifically because they’ve experienced continual rejection from men. It also remains to be seen whether those who like to watch Christian romance films ironically will find the same enjoyment with so much seriousness involved in the story.

That said, for those who love both Christmas romance films and faith-based films, the audience this film was made for, the combining of the Christmas sweetness and the faith-based messages is going to far outweigh any of the film’s weaknesses. For those people, this film is definitely one to check out and add possibly add to their Christmas movie staples.

“The Farmer and The Belle: Saving Santaland” is on DVD now and free to watch on Amazon Prime with an Amazon Prime subscription.

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast The Overthinkers and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.com where he discusses art, culture, faith and art with his fellow overthinkers.