Carol of the Bells is a 2019 holiday film about a young man with a troubled past who seeks out his biological mother, only to make a troubling discovery.
Scott Johnson (RJ Mitte) and his pregnant wife Karen (Yuly Mireles) are raising their little boy, Jeremy (Elijah Maximus). Times are good, Scott running an auto body shop, but there are troubling things on his mind. Jeremy is turning five-years-old, the same age Scott was when tragedy struck, he being in a car accident and learning he was adopted when his adoptive parents are killed. He recovered but bounced around foster care as a kid, always blaming his biological mother for his struggles, even though he’d never met her. Now, after an extensive and expensive search to find her, Scott learns, to his surprise, that she is developmentally disabled. It’s gonna take a family effort to bring everyone together.
Set during the Christmas season, director Joey Travolta‘s independent film Carol of the Bells is a small endeavor with a rather challenging story, all things considered, putting its focus on a complicated connection that doesn’t get all that much attention in movies. Written by J.C. Peterson, it’s clearly a personal effort among the filmmakers, working hard to create a family-friendly movie stacked with plenty of questions but not so inaccessible.
While holiday themes lie mostly to the peripheral, the angst of choices made and haunted pasts play on more than one generation as truths come to light. Scott struggles with what to do about his mother Carol (Andrea F. Friedman), while Carol’s mother Helen (Donna Mills) grapples with her own demons, all the while Karen trying to bridge the gaps that have left them separated for far too long. This leaves the film spinning a few emotional plates for a short while, Carol living in a specialized residential home with other developmentally disabled members of the community, knowing full well she had a baby but never able to raise it.
As such, there are few turns in Carol of the Bells, aside from the one at its heart, the film purposefully toned down for a family viewing experience. This is a micro-budget story with few sets and a steady play of somber piano notes keeping company of a small cast mostly taking hold of the poignancy the plot unpacks and convincing us it’s all real. What’s truly of note though is actually not what you see on the screen but how it got there, with most of the film’s crew themselves developmentally challenged, which is a mighty achievement and one well worth recognizing (Friedman for example has Down syndrome and has been acting periodically in movies and TV since the early 1990s). Try for a moment to think about the challenges involved in accomplishing what they did, and you can’t help but see the movie with new eyes. It truly makes watching an entirely different experience, as it should.
Either way, Travolta has a long history in the business, both in front of and behind the camera, here offering up an innocent and honest little movie that knows which strings to tug, and while it might not have the production to level a more hearty emotional boom by its end, seems not aiming for such anyway, rather looking to keep Carol of the Bells a modest and sincere family drama.