Only Frances Conroy is able to somehow transcend the clichéd script and bring a palpable sense of personhood to her role.
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The cover should have been a tip-off. Rob Lowe looks as if he'd been posed by a high school graduation photographer, wearing a Vaseline gaze and a candy cane in the pocket of his sportcoat. CHEEEEEESE!
Then again, so should the Johnson & Johnson sponsorship and TNT programming credits, or the "It's a Wonderful Life" flashback (come one, people, can't we come up with a different opening for a Christmas movie?) that shows poor Robert Harlan (Lowe) in a rented hotel room looking just as glossy-eyed out the window. Then the picture turns black and white and we see a "mysterious stranger" (Christopher Lloyd) standing in the streets calling up to him that he's brought this on himself. Whhhhooooooooooo!
After that, it's back to color and the narrative settles into a familiar TV framework, with stock situations, throwaway lines, and scenes that are just long enough to make a point we're supposed to "get" in order to appreciate the standard-issue plot. You know, live every minute of your life, and remember that family is more important than work. Just about every convention is used here: the rapid success causing a guy's head to swell, putting work ahead of family, missing the daughter's Thanksgiving play performance, not feeling his own Dad's approval, and backstabbing the agent who helped him find fame. The most original moment is ironically a negative: Beware of an O. Henry ending, named for the fellow who specialized in illogical "surprise" twists at the end, and who gave us that beloved Christmas story, "A Gift of the Magi." And prepare to be not even remotely dazzled by the performances.
"A Perfect Day," while innocuous enough, is yet another holiday film that will blur together with 10 or 20 other TV feel-good movies as they (and we) age. It's one of those "message" films that takes a foam noodle and beats you over the head with it, while constraining its actors to cheesy lines and hurt looks. Lowe had more of an acting stretch just trying to get through one of those quick-paced walk-and-talk scenes from "The West Wing."
After that totally derivative opening, we see Robert fired from his job right before Christmas and forced to take work as a ditch digger for a relative. While he's up to his elbows in septic-tank sludge, his wife rushes up with a cell phone. It turns out that the woman who called and wanted to be his agent had news: the book he'd been writing has sold (a book, it turns out, that was inspired by an incident that happened not to him, but to his wife, played here by Paget Brewster).
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