Hallmark - Country at Heart (2020)
What's a natural pairing with the glorification of Americana that Hallmark specializes in? Country music!
IMDB: Hallmark → Country at Heart (2020)
Currently available to watch: Hallmark Movies Now, Peacock, Pluto, Amazon Prime Video
Is this connected to any holidays?: Nope. It features a Fall Music Festival so I surmise this was a Fall Harvest offering. IMDB tells me it first aired October 3, 2020.
Synopsis: Shayna is having a hard time making it as a country music singer so she returns to her dad’s ranch in Silverado, Tennessee. Grady is a song writer who needs to write a hit single for country star Duke Sterling, but they have a challenging history together. Grady is given one week to create a song for Duke, so he goes to a famous music festival in Silverado for inspiration. Grady and Shayna meet and start writing music and performing together. Duke sees them and becomes interested in Shayna, so now we get a love triangle. Grady tells Shayna that Duke isn’t to be trusted, but she doesn’t believe him so she shows Duke their song and agrees to sing with Duke at the festival.
At the festival Duke and Grady compete for Shayna’s favor with a bunch of carnival games (is this a music festival or a county fair?). Then Shayna and Duke sing together at a local music venue, which prompts Grady to explain that Duke stole one of his songs. Duke explains his side of the story to Shayna and she has mixed feelings.
The day of the festival performance Shayna jeopardizes her career to finish song writing with Grady. Grady tries to sacrifice himself for Shayna’s career opportunity by leaving town, but then returns to sing the duet with Shayna. He surprises her onstage during her performance, they sing their song together and finish with a kiss on stage as the crowd cheers.
Leads: Jessy Schram plays Shayna Judson with a lot of aw shucks-ness, and good ol’ Niall Matter shows up as Grady Connor. Both actors have been in a bunch of Hallmark offerings, but Niall Matter is a regular in both seasonal movies, Hallmark shows, and Hallmark Mysteries. We last saw Niall Matter in Aurora Teagarden’s Til Death Do Us Part which I posted about on May 4.
Other actors who regularly feature in the Hallmark universe?: I recognize Lucas Bryant, most well known for Haven and Queer As Folk, Zach Smadu, and Tommie-Amber Pirie.
PoC characters?: I don’t believe so.
LGBTQIA+ characters?: Country Music likes its closets.
Tropes: Making It In the Music Biz Is Hard; Of Course This Tiny Town Hosts a World Famous Music Festival; Of Course It Happens At the Family Ranch of the Female Lead; Love As Security; Incredibly Insecure Yet Talented Female Doesn’t Know Her Own Worth; Love Triangle; Carnival Games As a Masculinity Test; Villain Was Just Misunderstood; Lots of Dramatic Self Sacrifice; Romantic Lead Leaves Town; Bro Bonding; On Stage Love Declaration; It Ends With a Public Kiss.
Does this pass the Bechdel test?: No. It could have been so easy. Shayna and Jenny could have had a single discussion about the festival or the weather or anything really, but no dice.
Meet cute: Grady is sitting in a town square in downtown Silverado, noodling around on a guitar to write a song. Shayna hears him, thinks he might be stuck, and offers her opinion on the chord progression he’s working on. Grady acts offended/emasculated by the fact that she has a music idea, and Shayna leaves.
Does it seem like the leads actually want to fuck?: Not really. They work well together creatively, but that is not the same as love or sexual attraction.
Are there any kids in this and are they realistic?: Kids aren’t interested in this country music festival.
What city is this supposed to take place in?: Nashville and Silverado, which is a small fictional town also in Tennessee.
What crazy occupations do the leads have?: Aspiring country singer and professional song writer.
Hallmark-ism (aka a “truism” that Hallmark treats as universally agreed upon): If someone really, really, really wants it and is decently talented than they deserve to, and will, make a living in the entertainment industry, and they will never have to compromise their values to achieve that career.
Which performance of femininity does this value?: The Rural Renaissance woman, aka a woman who is just as good at making pumpkin pies from scratch as she is at singing and also ranching.
Did anyone else notice?: This movie features a lot of dumb, entertainment industry platitudes like “Nobody said the music industry would be easy.” Shayna’s response to that is the snappy: “Yeah, but nobody said it would break my heart either” which is entertaining but highly unlikely. I’ve never tried to be a country music singer but I did work in a different entertainment industry and we were definitely told on a regular basis that it would break our hearts. In fact we were frequently told that if we weren’t prepared to spend our whole lives heartbroken we should find a different career. And it is true that no one said it would be easy, but it was regularly implied that if you had talent and worked hard and really wanted it enough it would happen in a relatively easy and organic way. This was utter bullshit. Nothing like getting people to blame themselves for not making it in one of the most mercurial, challenging, and precarious industries ever. Make systemic issues internalized and individualized, it’s the American way!
Grady tells Shayna “I’ve been in this business for years. Voices come and go all the time, but the ones who last are the ones who have something special, something nobodies heard, nobody expects. And you have that.” It’s the old ‘cream rises to the top’ argument, which is an actual thing that a theater teacher told me once and it is bullshit. Plenty of talented, hard working people don’t make a career in a creative industry and it’s not because they aren’t special. It’s because the set up of these industries is designed to keep people out. It is because aspirants get tired or sick or have to take care of family or maybe they just don’t want to live at poverty levels constantly being told they aren’t good enough. Maybe they don’t fit whatever random, arbitrary rules of beauty are circulating in the culture at the time. The idea that people who are really worthy “make it” completely ignores the reality. Yes, some talented people make it, but some talented people don’t. A career in the arts is not a reward for being a moral or skilled person.
At one point Shayna and Grady have a conversation about their respective childhoods. Shayna grew up on the ranch that everyone is spending so much time on. Grady however, grew up on the “mean streets of Nashville.” He talks dismissively about growing up in Nashville, a “big city compared to all this [nature], with its sidewalks, playgrounds, skateboards, guitar lessons” and clearly believes that everything available to him in Nashville was subpar in comparison with the comparatively untamed land of the ranch.
This idea that more natural settings have a greater authenticity of place than a city is common in Hallmark films. Reference every Hallmark movie where someone from the “Big City” realizes that life is so much better and more genuine in a small town. I think it is worth questioning how much of this romantic ideal of rural settings comes from the American myth of the supposedly untouched North American wilderness, which was actually carefully cultivated by generations of indigenous peoples. This belief connects American expansion and its settlers to nature through the Manifest Destiny of land ownership across vast swathes of territory described as wilderness. But the land was never truly wild or unpopulated, instead this was accomplished through mass genocide and violent relocation of the people already on that land. Maybe that’s a thing we don’t want or need to glorify and romanticize?
Things that work for me?: Jessy Schram, Nial Matter, and Lucas Bryant all do their actual singing and guitar playing, which I always appreciate. That was only one sentence, so it looks like I don’t have very much that is nice to say about this movie, but the singing and musicianship are pretty big deals. Both in general, the actors having those skills, and in general in that there is a lot of singing and guitar playing throughout the movie.
In theater training people will often talk about a performer who is a “triple threat,” aka someone who can act, sing, and dance well. Hugh Jackman is a triple threat. Kristen Chenoweth is a triple threat. You find a lot of them in musical theater, because musical theater requires all three skills, sometimes simultaneously, but it’s less common in film and TV. I propose we include instrument playing in this list of important skills and say that this movie features a triple, triple threat.
Final Thoughts: This movie aired in October of 2020. Given the large groups of people all over it I have to assume it was filmed pre-pandemic because all those extras would have been very hard to coordinate and isolate during the major lockdown months.
I also found myself wondering about people who write songs for movies about people who write songs. Did the screenwriter write these, or did they outsource that labor to someone who has experience with song writing? One song gets attributed on the IMDB page, but not in the credits, and there is more than one original song in this movie. This isn’t a big budget affair where Hallmark can hire a big name musician for a tent pole song that will anchor the film, but they repeatedly featuring a couple of songs from Shayna, and then the big duet co-written by Shayna and Grady. Either way, the songs are forgettable (no catchy ear worms) and the last minute drama unnecessary.
But your average viewer won’t care about any of that, because we all love to see a supposedly deserving person get their dreams. That is the juice of this movie, the wish fulfillment factor. I am betting most people will have at least one personal goal or dream that never quite happened in their adult lives. Seeing it happen for the character in a movie we are meant to identify with and root for, especially if our real life chances have vanished, is viscerally satisfying.
Stars out of 5: 3, one star for each lead and all the work they did with the singing and music.