A Christmas Prince (2017)

A Christmas Prince arrives from Netflix with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing. Amber Moore, an aspiring magazine journalist, travels to the fictional Aldovia, impersonates a tutor, and falls for the prince she was sent to profile. The machinery is familiar: mistaken identity, a scheming cousin, a hidden document, a Christmas Eve ball. It is a greeting card with a bigger budget and a Romanian castle standing in for a kingdom that exists only in screenplays.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is mostly content to decorate. Amber is a working woman with a career she cares about, and the script notes in passing that young Princess Emily cannot inherit the throne because she is a girl. That observation is raised and then quietly abandoned, since the story's true destination is a marriage proposal. Emily herself has spina bifida, and the film treats her mobility aid and her limits as ordinary facts of her life, which is a quiet and genuine grace. A Black supporting performer appears among the palace staff. The ensemble remains overwhelmingly white, and no one in Aldovia has ever heard of a queer person.

The ledger of absent concerns is long and unremarkable. Race is never examined. The climate does not exist. The monarchy is presented as a benevolent institution, so no knives come out for the wealthy. Bodies are uniformly slender. Neurodivergence goes unmentioned. History is invented wholesale, so there is nothing to revise. And the film never once stops to lecture, which is its most underrated virtue. It wants only to be pleasant, and it succeeds. We have sat through worse sermons disguised as entertainment. This one offers cocoa and a tiara and asks nothing of us, which, at the end of a long year, is its own kind of mercy.