The old formula still brings a tear

Rating: Null/10 (28 November 2008)

The retelling of a Christmas Carol, even more than It's a Wonderful Life, by resort to a gadget - a supernatural remote control that literally alters time for he who operates it. I caught the broadcast premiere, probably in the effort to make this yet another 'holiday' favorite (and which is appropriate, if the 'holiday' meant more than simply - holiday). It's a 'Capra-film' (Frank Coraci, actually), nonetheless, just not quite as good.
A struggling junior architect, happily married with two small children, wishes to become partners in a firm designing large projects. He's having trouble with their domestic squabbling, like George in the 'fixer-upper' after having lost the day's cash, and wants time to himself for an important presentation. More importantly, with the various remote controls around the house, he keeps picking up the wrong one. Finally frustrated, he takes off late one evening to pick one up. For some reason, the device mysteriously appears in a Bed, Bath and Beyond store, down the end of a dark hallway and inside a mysteriously gigantic warehouse - the mystical genie or fortune teller at the carnival that later disappears, as it were. Walken is the 'angel', appearing as some 'nutty professor' at first, that delivers this pact, and this device, without ever quite explaining how it works.
Our hero, Newman, returns to find it operates his TV, but doesn't notice it also operated his wife. Soon he starts to notice that he can adjust the volume, and the world around him becomes mute. He can pause/stop time with the pause button, and so on. He finds he can skip uncomfortable family meals and outings, or skip to a possible promotion day, by hitting fast forward. And as soon as he discovers this power, even someone unfamiliar with Dickens is going to say - that way lies tragedy. And of course it does.
Eventually, he returns to the store, finds the same hallway, and questions the 'angel'. More about the device is explained to him. At this point, he'd rather pass. But now he can't get rid of it. Try as he might to destroy it, it keeps coming back. It does proves its worth, in a way, in overhearing and translating a Japanese contingent complaining about the project he had proposed. He presents their complaints back to them, before they leave, and wins the contract, and is on his way . . eventually . . to partnership and to wealth and power at the head of a large firm before he dies.
In the meanwhile, the remote is firing off fast forward even when he doesn't push the button. He lives his life on 'auto-pilot', it's explained in those periods. He can return as an observer to those times he missed, but cannot do them over. Years are lost to him. He wife leaves him. And at the end, he speaks badly to his father over a game of a 'magic coin' that had always been their secret and bond. Dad leaves the room in tears, and dies not long afterward, all of which our hero missed for fast forward.
Standing at his father's grave, the 'angel' again shows up and says - I am the angel of death. The device had been the trick of the genie, basically. You asked the devil for a favor, and it wasn't quite the bargain one imagined.
Oddly, though, as he dies in the rain, in the street, having run out of his son's wedding to warn him - take time with your family, because his son was up against the clock on yet another project of his own at the same firm - the 'angel of death' for some reason relents and hits the reset button. Our hero awakes in BBnB just before he discovered the hallway that night so long ago. And like Scrooge, like George Bailey, he appreciates what he had that he hadn't before. He gets his second chance. In fact, as a final temptation, the device again appears before him, supernaturally, one last time. He throws it in the trash.
It's the same moral or object lesson. We don't really get do-overs, which is probably the source of pathos in these stories. But we can by such stories learn to be thankful and appreciate our loved ones, and even all those around us. In Dickens, the angels or phantoms were doing as told. In Capra, Clarence got his wings. In this one, however, we tend to forget the 'angel'. Seems like he might just have gotten a reprimand.