‘Must Love Christmas’ mixes up the holiday tropes

Bells. Sweaters. Mistletoe. Cookies. Those are the usual ingredients for a Christmas movie.

But “Must Love Christmas,” written by veteran Mark Amato, “was much more nuanced and had its moments of subtlety,” says actor Nathan Witte. When he read the script, it wasn’t like a typical holiday film. “It was more like ‘This Means War’ with a sprinkle of Christmas on it.”

For Amato, the inspiration was Kathleen Turner’s character in “Romancing the Stone.” “My version was if you had somebody who was so completely introverted, who’s just lived in her novels (what kind of) occupational hazard would that create?” he says.

In the CBS movie, Liza Lapira, one of the stars of “The Equilizer,” plays Natalie Wolf, the queen of Christmas romance novels. Because she can’t come up with a new story – and a deadline is looming –she decides to go to Buffalo, the city that inspired her first best seller. On the way, she encounters a snowstorm and is stranded until a tow truck arrives. Surprise? It’s driven by her first high school crush. She’s taken to an idyllic small town where her own Christmas story begins to unfold.

Instead of one potential suitor, however, she has two. Neil Bledsoe and Witte play the men in question.

“This really allowed the people themselves to be real,” says Bledsoe. “So often in the Christmas film landscape, the problems of the people are eroded away to absolutely nothing. There’s no hurdle to overcome.

“These characters all teach something to each other. Because of that, there’s this extraordinary human web. They come across as utterly human in a way that I don’t think I’ve seen in pretty much any other Christmas film that I’ve been in.”

Amato admits he didn’t want to recycle anything from other holiday stories. To make sure it doesn’t end the way others do, he “reverse engineered” it. “The ending completely predicts or dictates how I’m going to get these two characters to clash.”

Says Lapira: “For this movie, I had two ‘meet cutes.’ I got the meet cute with the high school crush, the guy in my dreams who I haven’t seen in forever, and then I got the ‘antagonistic-banter-witty’ meet cute.”

Witte’s Caleb (the high school crush) was into sports and popularity and probably didn’t pay much attention to Natalie. Her return “was a nice reminder” of those years, he says. “It’s kind of like a refresher…almost like opening up a brand-new present.”

For Natalie, “Caleb is this shiny, glittering illusion,” Lapira says. “I don’t even think he plays into it because that sounds manipulative. I think he’s just a charming guy. He is who he is. Even at the end of the movie, you don’t hate him. He’s just that guy who does that thing and has his own life.”

Bledsoe says there’s a real question viewers could ask themselves: If we get those things we thought we needed as children would they make us the best version of ourselves?

“Once we get them as adults, we’re allowed to re-examine them and say, ‘This doesn’t matter as much and I am whole without this thing,’” he says. “They become totems and the totems, then, become illusions.”

“I guarantee no one is going to be able to predict the ending,” Amato says. “If I get to a situation where it feels a little too comfortable and a little too easy, I haven’t tested myself.”

“Must Love Christmas” airs Dec. 11 on CBS.