Growing the Big One (2010)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) I’ll admit it — Growing the Big One ground me down. It’s obvious even from the short TV Guide blurb that it’s a low-budget Hallmark movie, and I normally wouldn’t be interested. But it kept showing up on Cable TV channels — being an innocuous Canadian production, it’s a boon for channel programmers looking for some of those sweet CanCon credits, and that probably explains why it still regularly shows up on listings more than a decade after production. Upon seeing it show up once again, I sighed, recorded and watched knowing that I would finally be able to start ignoring it again. Predictably enough, there aren’t many surprises in the result: faithfully following the now-famous formula of Hallmark holiday movies, Growing the Big One follows a career woman (played by Shannen Doherty) as she heads back to a small town, gets her hands dirty in the community (in this case, growing a gigantic pumpkin) and finds the love of a bland but good man. It plays according to the usual beats, protecting sensitive audiences from being surprised at anything. The pumpkin-growing aspect could have been interesting, but it’s handled with twee romanticism that prevents any interesting details from being highlighted — I would love for an engineering-minded film to take on the same subject, just to see the difference. The narrative contrivances, stock characters and formula-driven plotting do lead to something mildly entertaining — by playing it safe all the way, the film ends up with something that few will deem bad… but this is really not a film meant to stick in mind as anything but “that pumpkin-growing movie.”  At least I’ve seen it, so Growing the Big One will release its hold on me.