Have a holly Dolly Christmas
Singer's heartwarming special spreads cheer — and her sunny personality
Dolly Parton's
Christmas on the Square Netflix
Dolly Parton's no stranger to being the centre of attention, a place she's determinedly, deliberately put herself throughout the decades of her legendary career. In recent years, though, the conversation surrounding Parton has become one spoken in awed wonder about just how thoroughly she's charmed people from all walks of life — and more impressively, how little that's changed even now with the country so intensely divided that getting anyone to agree on basic facts has become its own infuriating game of politics.
Parton is, as Lauren Michele Jackson recently wrote for The New Yorker, “loved for being loved, and loved transcendentally ... A Dolly Parton concert is like a local census, bringing together peoples across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and, miraculously, political affiliation.”
In bringing a Christmas musical to Netflix, a streaming network that reaches nearly 200 million subscribers across the world, Parton's cannily universal brand goes into holly jolly overdrive.
The special brings together a consciously inclusive cast to sing with aggressive sincerity about the joys of Christmas, hope and faith.
Directed and choreographed by Debbie Allen, dancing comes as naturally to these characters as breathing, and even when Parton's songs start to blend together, they get a boost from the likes of Jeanine Mason and Jenifer Lewis belting them. The cheery town square, with its trinket shops and can-do spirit, immediately puts the likes of Stars Hollow to shame. And while most Christmas movies in Netflix's ever-ballooning sub-genre tend to celebrate the holiday as a generally pleasant family tradition, Parton's version is explicitly Christian to the point that one of the film's main characters is the local pastor whose name is, I kid you not, Christian.
This latter point might come as a surprise for those who will turn on Christmas on the Square in the hopes of a new camp classic starring Parton as a guardian angel opposite a slowly melting Scrooge, played by none other than Christine Baranski. But fans of the part of Parton's persona that's lacquered with rhinestones won't be entirely disappointed by the otherwise squeaky-clean narrative.
Lewis makes a meal out of the few scenes she gets, and Baranski is a stone-cold pro at playing a steely woman singing her way through a mission.
Parton, meanwhile, makes her first appearance in the movie as a homeless busker — still in immaculate makeup, of course.
And if you don't like it, well, no matter. A merry Christmas to you and yours from Dolly Parton, in all her all-encompassing benevolence, anyway.