Heart of the Matter

In my top ten hallmark Christmas movies Ms Teagarden has two. The Christmas miracle on, forget the name, and my Christmas Family Tree. She is great onscreen. This one misses a beat( pun intended).

I watch the other two over n over but will wait awhile before I watch this one again. It wasn't ad it was just kidding something always there in her previous movies.

Very happy hallmark signed her to a longer deal. Her movies and acting are usually spot on.

This is a powerfully emotional movie. It is not a romance movie. The story of the main couple is totally secondary to the main thread of the movie which is about a doctor who breaks several conventions, and ignores common sense self-protection.

I love Aimee Teagarden. This is the fourth Hallmark movie I've seen her in and they all touched me. I would love to see her in many more.

It's true that Doctor Andie does some stupid things in response to her guilt. It is because for her, being a doctor is not a job. It's a responsibility and an honor. And she loves her patients. Toward the end of the movie, a lawyer of all people says that we need more doctors like her. That is partly gratuitous and totally true.

Some of the issues in the movie, especially the legal ones, pushed buttons for me that made it impossible to sit through, so I used the FF button, but I did watch most of the climax and end.

The acting by every single person was absolutely outstanding. Seriously hallmark really did great. It feels like a Hall of Fame movie.

I watched it twice with my family.

We watch non-hallmark and hallmark and this is just a spectacular.

Hallmark should make more productions like this.

Well, colour me completely and absolutely surprised! A deep, complex Hallmark movie where romance isn't the main plot? What is going on!

What's going on is Aimee Teegarden - one of my favourites, right back to her Friday Night Lights days - playing the role of a doctor who is responsible for the death of her patient. The decisions she made and the fallout deeply affect her life and she faces further complications when she approaches the dead patient's mother (well played by Gail O'Grady of NYPD Blue fame - remember the Rangers-obsessed receptionist Donna Abandando?) to try and apologise, leading to disciplinary action.

Don't watch Heart of the Matter if you want the usual family-friendly, tropey Hallmark movie. This definitely isn't one of those...but it is one of the best Hallmark films ever made.

Like others, I'd watch any story with Aimee Teagarden ever since I first saw her in "Once Upon A Christmas Miracle", and she'd done some work that would never air on Hallmark, yet this movie was quite different from what I expected from the previews. This was almost pure drama, and the romance was incidental to the story. The overriding message is how one can be one's own worst critic, and potentially forfeiting a promising future over tragic lapses in judgements, and yet one can rise above that by being open and honest with those who care, and even with those who have every right to hate them, if only they are brave enough to rise to the challenge. At the time of this writing, Hallmark is barely airing this story at all, and that seems like such a bad idea.