At Home in Mitford

Welcome to Mitford, a town so small "the country club" is referred to as just that. There's one bookstore, one church, one realtor, and endlessly sunny days where the sun still shines even after a dinner date. Welcome to Mitford, a town so small that two women spend their morning gossiping about why one woman arrived unannounced at a man's house and wasn't introduced to the other woman sitting in his living room. "That's...odd." "That's what I thought!" Welcome to Mitford, a town so small no one has any secrets for long, proving to be the perfect place for a big-city writer to go to when she has writer's block.

Andie MacDowell leaves Boston for a stay in her uncle's country house to help her write her next children's book. Her next door neighbor is Cameron Mathison, the ridiculously perfect Episcopalian priest with absolutely no flaws. He might be one of the most perfect Hallmark heroes ever, which is saying something. If you're not in the mood for something so corny and unrealistic, you might want to put this one on hold for a while. He's handsome, fit, good with kids, caring with animals, handy around the house, keeps a clean house, has good fashion sense, endless patience with listening to people's problems, gives gentle advice just at the moment someone needs it, never loses his temper and speaks so soothingly he could put the most agitated person to sleep, talks about his feelings easily, and rides a motorcycle. Anything else? Oh yeah, his idea of a problem is spilling club soda on his outfit.

If you're at all worried about Cam and Andie's budding romance, you should remind yourself that this is a Hallmark movie. If you're still worried, here's your guarantee: Immediately after the rival love interest, Ken Tremblett, staggers from the house, sneezing because of his allergy to Andie's cat, Cam smiles and tells Andie and the audience, "I love cats!"

The good news is if you've had a really bad day and want to watch a movie where everyone's problems get resolved, you can pop this Hallmark romance in and have a wonderful stress-free evening. At my house, the Hallmark channel is on for three weeks straight in December, so sometimes, these movies come in handy. You'll also get an enormous amount of eye candy. Cam is handsome and clean cut, Andie is breathtakingly beautiful, and Andie's ragdoll kitty is so precious.

The screenplay writer took a wonderful book, used two characters, Father Tim and Cynthia, eliminated the other characters. The book's plot was rewritten as a romantic TV movie. It would have been much easier to stick to the original Jan Karon story line. The lead characters were too young to play the characters. Hope that others will complain to Hallmark Channel

So disappointing! I am a huge fan of the books and had hoped this would be made into a film for a long time. This mess doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. Father Tim is supposed to be 59 and balding! Major characters are missing like Puny, Miss Sadie Baxter, Uncle Billy and Miss Rose. Instead they throw in new characters that are not needed to hold the plot together. I am sad they did such a poor job of filming a lovely book! Now I know why the author has done no promotion of this film.

I haven't read the book to compare it to, but the story arc was standard with some interesting characters and a beautiful setting. I expected a little more from a movie made in 2017, but I can't grasp exactly what was missing, though.

If you can suspend your attachment to the books you can enjoy this sweet romance. I'd like to tell Hallmark that I love their movies but would they please stop ruining my favorite books! Maybe they could ask someone who loves the story to review and give input? We have the Focus on the Family Radio Theater version of the first Mitford book and my children are familiar with the story too. My 12 yr old son's comment after watching five minutes was "it's like they asked someone who hated the books to write the script!"