Durango has another movie credit to add it its résumé.
“Tangled Up in Christmas,” directed by Michael Joseph Nelson and written by Nelson and Molly Flanagan, began streaming earlier this month on Amazon Prime.
Nelson and Flanagan, who also star in the film, have been to town before, courtesy of the Durango Independent Film Festival. It was through the festival they met a host of Durangoans, including Cornelius Hurley and his son, Aiden, who are credited as a producer and associate producer, respectively, on the film.
In the film, a family Christmas turns into chaos when Elizabeth (Flanagan) returns home and must plan an annual charity event with her free-spirited sister Sam (Tess Rianne Sullivan). They must learn to work together or Christmas is ruined, according to a synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes.
“It’s about a big city girl going back to a small town and rediscovering her love of Christmas. But we wanted to break the mold a little bit,” Nelson said. “I love these kind of movies. I feel like a lot of lot of films that we have right now, they’re missing something. And when you look back at the movies from the ’90s that we grew up on, there’s certain realism, romanticism to them, and not just the way that they’re lit or filmed but in every aspect of it. So we wanted to bring that feeling to this movie; we wanted everything to be real to life as much as it could be romantic – we wanted to break the mold a little bit on the Hallmark cookie-cutter thing. And so we wrote it about two sisters coming together, type A, type B, very odd couple.”
The film also gave Flanagan and Nelson a chance to share the screen, something Flanagan said is rare.
“Michael and I are both actors, but there’s not a lot of chances that we get to actually act and work together,” she said. “We’re normally very separate in the different projects that we get to do, and we always really wanted to act together. I think we worked really well together.”
It’s also their first feature film – one they self-funded. They’ve written and produced a couple of short films before “Tangled,” Nelson said.
“We want to make movies for a living. We want to do this,” he said. “So we started writing a feature film together. We had an idea for a Christmas movie. We love Christmas. We got really excited about it, so we started writing it, and it just fell onto the page.”
They then got back in touch with Cornelius Hurley, who helped them with figuring out the logistics of shooting some of the movie in Durango, where the exteriors were filmed. The interiors are Flanagan’s mother’s house in Missouri.
“The whole town of Durango came together and opened their doors to us to make it happen,” he said. “It really just highlighted not just the beauty and love of a small town, but the love of Durango specifically. Everybody there was just so happy for us to be there, and so excited for us to do our thing.”
And while people can get wrapped up in the stress of the holidays and the sometimes-complicated relationships within families, Nelson hopes – and has already seen – viewers take away a bigger message of the season.
“I think the thing that has been so surprising is what audiences are already taking away from it, that I’ve heard so far, is this message that even though family is messy, you really understand the meaning of Christmas, which is, love, support, togetherness, even if it is messy,” he said. “Christmas doesn’t have to be, the holidays don’t have to be perfect. It’s really the people that you spend it with that makes it perfect.”
katie@durangoherald.com
