I love Thanksgiving. It's unabashedly a holiday about stuffing your face and then collapsing into a food coma, which are two of my favorite activities. It's the only day of the year on which it is not only acceptable, but expected, to eat a full stick of butter over the course of your meal. For this reason, it's not exactly a romantic holiday. So, after I got home, put away the leftovers, and settled down to digest a week's worth of food, I was delighted to find Pumpkin Pie Wars. While it is not technically a Thanksgiving movie, it got me primed for my upcoming Holiday Movie Extravaganza and had enough food porn that I considered someday eating again.
Faye (Michelle Scarabelli) and Lydia (Jennifer-Juniper Angeli) were best friends until Lydia went behind Faye's back to open the bakery they'd always dreamed of building together. In retaliation, Faye decides to start her own bakery, and a legendary rivalry is born. You see, the small town of Emeryville, Ohio, hosts a yearly contest that is apparently the Olympics of pumpkin pie baking, and Faye and Lydia compete fiercely for the title every year. When Faye is injured, she enlists her daughter Casey (Julie Gonzalo) to fill in for her at the contest, even though Casey is notoriously bad at baking.
In an effort to stoke up the rivalry, Lydia convinces her son Sam (Eric Aragon) to enter as well. After a couple of bumpy encounters where Casey displays a psychotic level of over-confidence, Sam and Casey find that continuing their mothers' rivalry isn't what either of them wants. If they can figure out a way to mend fences between their mothers and win the contest, they might be able to usher in a new era for both businesses and their families.
This movie is smart to get the "enemies" part of "enemies-to-lovers" over with pretty quickly. The fact that Casey and Sam are able to identify that their mothers are nuts makes them much more relatable, despite the fact that Casey went to Wharton (as she tells us multiple times) and Sam went to Le Cordon Bleu (in either London or Paris, the movie seems unsure). Sam teaches Casey how to bake (sexy stirring), and Casey helps Sam put together a business plan (sexy spreadsheets). They are extremely bad at sneaking around, and the gossip around them whips the whole town into a frenzy over the upcoming baking contest.
When they are betrayed by a spy who steals their recipes, they have to join forces and win the contest together. Seems kinda unfair to their competitor that they're allowed to gang up on her, but okay. They also bring in their mothers to assist in making the best pie ever in history of pies. Again, seems kinda unfair, like they are only winning the contest because their mommies helped out, but OKAY. The mothers mend fences, and by the end of the movie everybody is happy except for the people who wrote the rules of this pie contest.
My favorite part of this movie was Casey's dad Reggie (Pete Graham) who is a prime example of one of my favorite movie tropes: The Golf Dad. It's established early on that he and Sam's dad were golfing buddies before their wives became rivals, and it's later revealed that they kept up their friendship in secret during the intervening years. There is never any discussion of what Reggie does for a living, or why he can't help his wife out in the bakery when she's injured; clearly, his golfing schedule takes precedence over his family's financial security. At one point, when Faye and Casey are agonizing over whether the business is going to collapse, he selflessly declares, "Faye, if you need me, I will cancel my tee time." Then he immediately leaves to make his tee time. What a legend.
Overall, I really liked this movie. If you're a baker, I'm sure you'd be able to point out all the glaringly bad baking going on, which in my book is a good time. This would be a good choice to have on in the background while you make Christmas cookies.
Pumpkin pie may bring enemies together, but sometimes all you really need is a mutual hatred of your exes. Meet the charming, chaotic couple at the heart of Rye Lane. Read more!
What's your favorite movie dad trope? Let me know!