Love’s Unfolding Dream is the sixth movie in the Love Comes Softly series, based on the popular Christian historical romance novels penned by Jeanette Oke. The series, initially directed and now only written and executive produced by Michael Landon Jr., has featured a series of tales centered around three generations (so far) of the same pioneer family. Romantic enough to draw in the female audience and just slightly Western enough to keep the men from fleeing the room, the series is as squeaky-clean as you might expect it to be, avoiding profanity and excessive violence in much the same way as Daddy Landon’s “Little House On the Prairie” NBC TV series did.
Despite remaining mostly true to the series, the latest installment veers furthest yet from the plot of the book after which it is titled; in the print version of “Love’s Unfolding Dream,” there are three young women, lifelong friends, vying over the attention of the same young man, but that subplot is missing in action in this film. Also, one of the main story points of the movie is Belinda’s ambition to become a doctor (not a nurse), yet in the novels, Belinda’s biggest ambition is to be a nurse.
The most notable change, however, is that the movie version of Love’s Unfolding Dream has Belinda (played capably by the appealing and spirited Scout Taylor-Compton) nursing an elderly matron suffering from the after-effects of a stroke back to health, only to be offered a chance to return with her to the East Coast to pursue her medical dreams. Unfortunately, in the books, that is the entire main plot of the seventh novel, Love Takes Wing. (There are a total of eight books in the series to date, ending with Love Finds A Home.)
How borrowing the main plot of Love Takes Wing to power through Love’s Unfolding Dream will affect the final two installments, which seem likely to be made (as were the rest of the films) for the Hallmark Channel prior to being released on DVD, I’m not sure.
Scout’s Belinda is a refreshing mixture of a woman of faith who nevertheless is an advocate of equal opportunity for women, and her character is given plenty of opportunity for emotional growth as well as some comic moments in the film. Of course, Dale Midkiff returns as the patriarch of the family, always handy to lend some sage advice about the nature of love, just when it feels like a couple may never find each other past the barriers in their way.
Sure, it’s slightly-sappy family-oriented stuff, but it mostly achieves that in a good way, ala Little House On the Prairie, rather than the saccharin-sweet family entertainment that has less substance and gives a bad name to the genre. In the early films, the matriarch of the clan was appealingly portrayed by 27 Dresses’ Katherine Heigl, but she only stuck around for the first two films and has been replaced for the past few films by Samantha Smith.
Despite feeling a bit too made for TV, Love’s Unfolding Dream is certainly family-safe entertainment that comes off as a couple rungs above After School Specials about the best acne treatment. Instead, it’s more of a callback to the sort of stories Little House On the Prairie featured, and that’s not an entirely bad thing, and certainly offers a welcome respite from the Quentin Tarrantino’s Grindhouse-style moviemaking that too often dominates release lists of late. Like father, like son.