“Breakup Season” Bundles Reality with Holiday Warmth
The holidays are supposed to be a wonderful time of year, when families come together, eat, exchange gifts, and enjoy each other’s company. They’re supposed to be a break from a world that seems to be growing more fast-paced every single day. Anyone who’s experienced the holiday season will know that it’s never as relaxing or peaceful as you hope it will be. Perhaps one of the worst ways to spend Christmas creates the basis for the plot of H. Nelson Tracey’s Breakup Season. Who would want to spend Christmas snowed in at the home of their ex-partner’s parents?
Ben (Chandler Riggs) and Cassie (Samantha Isler) have been dating for a while now. Things are good, but clearly not the best they could be. The couple are traveling to Ben’s parents’ (James Urbaniak & Brook Hogan) house in rural Oregon for Christmas. Also present are Ben’s older brother, Gordon (Jacob Wysocki), and younger sister, Liz ( Carly Stewart). Tensions are running high as the siblings fall into their familiar bickering ways, but no one could have imagined that Ben and Cassie would break up on night one. Cassie isn’t able to get a flight home for a few days, so now they must all figure out how to coexist and celebrate the holiday season.
Courtesy of Breakup Season
There are many ways that Breakup Season could have let Cassie down. She’s a stranger in a strange land, trapped in a home that feels suffocating. At the risk of providing a spoiler, there’s a version of this movie where Cassie and Ben get back together. The script plays with you a few times, making you believe that maybe the couple will reconcile, but ultimately, they end up apart. That story decision is what ultimately makes Breakup Season so strong. There are a million red flags in Ben and Cassie’s relationship. They’re two people who like each other and get along, but eventually come to realize that’s not enough to sustain a relationship. It’s one of the hardest lessons a person can learn.
While Breakup Season takes place over the Christmas holidays, it’s not trapped in the season. Some holiday movies feel as though they should only be watched during the season they take place in. Viewing Love, Actually in the summertime might be a crime. Breakup Season, though, because it’s so focused on Ben and Cassie’s relationship, doesn’t feel pigeonholed into strictly seasonal viewing. Tracey’s script smartly uses the rural town and the claustrophobia inherent to the holidays to make a pressure cooker about the nature of relationships. What do we owe our romantic partners when we’re together? When we’re apart?
“Things change, kiddo, it be good to change with it,” Kirby, Ben’s stepdad, tells Gordon. Change happens every single day, in ways we like and ways we don’t, but it’s how we react to the change that is the ultimate indicator of our growth. Breakup Season is a hard dose of reality wrapped in a warm scarf.
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