Hallmark films have mastered the art of escalating low-stakes situations into high-stakes emotional emergency plotlines. They have made a lucrative business out of absurdities.
The town’s ice sculpture competition is in danger of being canceled forever. How can the Christmas celebration in Colorado go forward without a nice spruce? The only way to really save the bakery is to have a life-size gingerbread house competition.
It’s a proven formula that leans into the ridiculousness of mundane situations but earns its audience every holiday season. Whether it’s watching the movies for comfort or to turn a viewing party into a drinking game, millions of people tune in to laugh or cry watching them.
The Hallmark situations can be predictable, comfortable and wholesome, which can come off as absurd for a film plotline. Their sincerity and humor come from the cast’s commitment to the mundane, said Ron Oliver, writer and director of many Hallmark films.
A scene from “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
“Funny is only funny if you don’t think it’s funny,” he said. “We know that’s ridiculous. But at the same time, if the actor commits to it, it makes it seem real, then the audience gets it.”
He likes to think they’re laughing along with the idiosyncratic elements of the movies, and as long as it is creating a communal atmosphere, Oliver is all for it.
“If there’s anything we need these days, it’s a sense that people belong somewhere,” he added.
The formula isn’t what makes a movie a Hallmark movie. The structure has existed since God wore shorts, said Oliver. The channel’s achievement has been its ability to turn the structure into a recognizable brand through its stories.
When filmmaker John Wilson was in between jobs after finishing his HBO show “How To With John Wilson” during the writers’ strike, he attended a seminar on how to write and sell a Hallmark film.
After seeing what makes the Hallmark brand recognizable, Wilson decided to adapt the style into his own genre of making a documentary about concrete titled “The History of Concrete,” hoping the structure would help him finance the film.
John Wilson in “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
“But it’s very loose and almost impossible to even identify at points,” he said.
Instead of mocking the genre, Wilson subverts the Hallmark elements into his style of documenting, which finds the filmmaker recording trivial life moments — a person sitting on a pole, for example, or someone ruining a perfectly good jar of peanut butter by dipping their fingers into it — alongside his contextualizing narration.
“I both embrace but betray certain rules,” he said.
The seminar told him to avoid mentioning Christianity in the context of Christmas, so he pivoted to a Buddhist community with an annual tradition of running around a school in New York. The formula prefers to stay away from trauma. Instead, he made the death of one of his subject’s fiancées one of the main plotlines of the film.
“The actual Hallmark of it all fits in a way because that’s the kind of living proof that this rhythmic cyclical way of storytelling is actually soothing and attractive to people over long periods of time, to be able to return to this thing that they can trust and understand,” he added.
A scene from “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
In Wilson’s film, the entrance point is concrete, but what begins to unravel is a romance story involving a boy who has a movie idea, needs money to make a movie and tries everything he can to sell it — a signature love trope for most Hallmark movies.
Throughout the film, Wilson goes from pitch meeting to pitch meeting trying to finance his art. In the process, Wilson meets other eccentric characters that share his passion of filmmaking but have their own interests, like clearing gum from a sidewalk, immortalizing a person’s tattoo after they’re dead, and music.
“I’m just finding different ways to court this industry that doesn’t seem ready for this relationship,” Wilson said. “I’m trying to find some consensual way into it, but I eventually just need to perform the romantic gesture of doing what feels right and what comes naturally to me.”
The love story is the kind of theme that sometimes it’s OK to lean into, even though he’s constantly battling whether he should explore it in his films, Wilson added.
A scene from “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
Oliver believes that battle is a product of the cynicism that exists in society. Pledging love and respecting someone or a relationship can make people feel so uncomfortable that leaning into these tropes of life can feel humorous, and that’s where the laughs from a Hallmark film come from.
“They’re realizing that they’re being emotional about somebody who can’t find the right Christmas sweater,” he said.
The people in “The History of Concrete” aren’t funny because Wilson makes them out to be ridiculous. He doesn’t emphasize their eccentricities or tell the audience what makes them funny. He simply lets them be themselves. He captures their personality through a curiosity lens.
The humor comes from their passions not seeming worthy of the level of seriousness with which they pursue them. These people love something so much that their devotion mirrors the kind of energy normally reserved for higher stakes.
“There’s no definition of normal that sticks,” Wilson said.
A Christmas celebration isn’t objectively a life-or-death situation, and neither is concrete. But when people care deeply about them, those seemingly mundane things can take on an emotional significance the audience understands.
“Even if it’s something absurd … [the casts] are also committed to the idea of making it real,” Oliver said.
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