Who hasn’t heard of Thomas Kinkade, the “Painter of Light”? At one time, and still to some extent, his work could be found on everything. Furniture, rugs, throws, coffee mugs, stationary, ballpoint pens, embroidery kits, T-shirts, purses. Pretty much anything that can hold an image. I myself still use a Kinkade Bible cover and my parents have a Kinkade lithograph.
Kinkade is, or was, also a Gold Country person like I am. He used to sell his paintings outside of Raley’s before he got really big, and for many years, the Auburn Courthouse has displayed an authentic Kinkade painting that the artist gifted the town in honor of Auburn’s centennial. I sat across from it whenever I had to man the Placer County Museum as a docent. It’s pretty amazing.
It’s not exactly surprising that Kinkade is loved by the public but reviled by the art world. My husband’s uncle was an artist, and he didn’t like Kinkade’s work because he thought Kinkade’s skills were mediocre and that he was way too commercial. Joan Didion once wrote in her memoir, Where I Was From, that she found the lighted windows in Kinkade’s buildings to be sinister. I wonder if anyone thought to remind Ms. Didion that there’s a reason we tell kids to only visit well-lit houses on Halloween.
Anyway, 2008 saw the release of Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, which went straight to video in America but made minimal money at the overseas box office. The film is presented as a biopic of Kinkade, who was born in Sacramento and grew up in Placerville.
It opens at UC Berkeley in 1977 right before school lets out for the Christmas holidays. Thomas (Jared Padalecki) is sketching his girlfriend, Hope (Gina Holden), but something doesn’t seem right, and he draws a strike over the picture.
Then Tom and his brother, Pat (Aaron Ashmore) are off to Placerville, where they come in contact with lots of familiar townies, such as Mr. Rosa (Jay Brazeau), the town mechanic and resident gossip. There’s also electrician Big Jim (Richard Moll) who has a rivalry with his neighbors, Lloyd and Evelyn (Malcolm Stewart and Gabrielle Rose) as to who can put up the best light display, not to mention annoy the heck out of each other, and the town sexpot Tanya (Kiersten Warren).
Tom and Pat are horrified to find out that their mother, Maryanne (Marcia Gay Harden) is about to lose her cottage because she’s gotten behind on her bills. Estranged dad Bill (Richard Burgi) is no help because he’s kind of flakey, so Pat and Tom both decide to get jobs. Pat works for Big Jim and the mayor, Ernie (Chris Elliott) commissions Tom to paint a mural of Placerville’s main street on the side of the grocery store.
From there, things are a crazy mess of interacting with the townies, getting the Christmas pageant together, and Tom figuring out what to do with the mural. And of course, Tom goes to see his mentor, Glenn Wessels (Peter O’Toole) who’s having a crisis of faith because he knows he’s got one last painting in him and he can’t bring himself to get going on it. Glenn is very old and a recluse in an old barn, and not many people come to see him.
Hope, meanwhile, gets impatient to see her boyfriend and comes to town, but Tom, who suddenly sees her in a new light, isn’t impressed for long, especially since he’s reunited with Nanette (Tegan Moss), a girl he’s had a crush on forever.
Like the majority of Christmas movies, things always get darker before they get lighter, and just when all seems lost, certain people come in the clutch and things end happily. And it’s not exactly a spoiler to say that we finally get to see Tom’s mural and he finds his style as an artist.
OK. Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage has some heartwarming messages and ticks off the usual Christmas movie boxes, but it’s got some major issues. The biggest problem is, while the movie is presented as a biopic, only about six percent of it seems to be even remotely true, and there’s no way to confirm any of it really happened. If any of it did, it must have been heavily condensed (See a short video about Kinkade’s life here).
The most glaring distraction for me is the filming location. It’s obviously done in Canada, which is to be expected because it’s cheaper to film in, but would it have killed anyone to actually film in Placerville, or somewhere in Canada that looks at least a little bit like Placerville? Whistler, for instance, wouldn’t have been bad, because it’s a mountain town. What they show in the film is generic and bland, with none of Placerville’s unique charm and history. By the end of the movie I flinched every time someone mentioned Placerville.
Also, college-aged Thomas Kinkade never painted any murals on any Placerville grocery stores. In fact, his actual painting, “Christmas Cottage,” was done specifically for the movie, which he and his wife, Nanette, helped produce.
The film was accurate when it portrayed Glenn Wessels as Kinkade’s mentor. Wessels did in fact spend his last years in Placerville, where he died in 1982. From what I read about him, though, he didn’t seem to be reclusive or holed up in a barn getting frustrated over artist’s block.
Other than that, it feels as if Christmas Cottage tries too hard, and some of it isn’t exactly family-friendly. Tanya, for instance, can’t enter a room without someone spouting a double-entendre. Even the pastor gets in on it at the pageant rehearsal when Tanya gets cast as Mary and the pastor blurts out, “Evelyn? Did you want two humps…on the camel?”
Eeek. To be fair, remarks like that will probably go over the average child’s head, but the average child might ask questions when they see Mommy and Daddy making faces.
And the casting is funnily random, as if the casting agent went out with a butterfly net and nabbed some familiar character actors who weren’t busy. On the bright side, Jared Padalecki puts in a very competent performance, and this may be the only time we get to see JarPad ugly-cry, but he’s the anomoly. Peter O’Toole wasn’t at all bad as Glenn, but he was painful to watch, as he was clearly ailing and barely able to stand. The poor man should not have been in front of the camera. The rest of the cast were mostly types. At least they seemed to be having fun.
Still, it’s hard to feel excited about this movie. Kinkade’s legacy is rather mixed, seeing as he wasn’t the nicest fella towards the end of his life, so I guess the best thing to do would be to separate art from artist, and for that matter, biopic from subject. Kinkade deserved better.
Another post is coming out on Wednesday. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…
Thomas Kincaid’s Christmas Cottage is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon. It is also free to stream on Prime and Tubi.
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