>>REVIEW
HAPPY ENDINGS
STARRING Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan and Maggie Gyllenhaal
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Don Roos
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Writer-director Don Roos has made one really good film (The Opposite Of Sex) and one that started out good and died by the end (Bounce). He knows his subjects and infuses them with a caustic wit. His movies are harmless pieces of pop culture that have a thing or two to say about the state of people and how they relate. The reason I generally like his films is that he keeps his scope fairly tight – until now.
Happy Endings is a multi-layered omni-plotted film about 10 people living in Los Angeles. The film centres on Maime (Lisa Kudrow), a fortysomething abortion counsellor who, at 16, instead of having an abortion herself, secretly gave up her child for adoption. Now she’s being blackmailed by an aspiring filmmaker, Nicky (Jesse Bradford), who has information about the son she gave away and won’t give it to her unless she helps him get into film school, which she does by getting her lover and massage therapist, Javier (Bobby Cannavale), to agree to be the subject of a fictitious documentary about massages with "happy endings," Then there’s a story about a closeted gay karaoke host, Otis (Jason Ritter), who is in love with his openly gay boss, Charley (Stephen Coogan), but dates Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a gold-digging couch-surfer. Jude makes a deal with Otis that she won’t "out" him as long as he doesn’t interfere with her plans to pursue Otis’s rich dad, Frank (Tom Arnold). Phew.
Happy Endings is a two-hour-and-15-minute exercise in human behaviour that works for one hour and three-quarters. As far as plot points and exposition, Roos does something that audiences will find either very clever or very annoying, depending on their tolerance – using a split screen and text, he tells you what the characters on the other side of the screen are thinking or what they will do later in the film. I loved this cinematic trick. By doing this, the entire cast has been freed from exposition and, in turn, does some fantastic moment-to-moment acting (every performance in Happy Endings is great).
The problem is that as soon as the characters fall apart emotionally so does the movie. Roos fails to reel in his actors at crunch time, letting them just scream at each other or wallow in guilt, rather than figure a way out of their predicament. It’s just lazy writing and directing and it gets tiresome when characters stop listening to one another. Plus, the story doesn’t support the film’s running time – Happy Endings would be perfect if it was 30 minutes shorter, but it’s so in love with its characters, that it tries the audience’s patience.
A lot of filmmakers feel the need to make their coincidence-is-God’s-way-of-remaining-anonymous films – the kind of movies where many seemingly random acts come together in a serendipitous fashion. Roos gets full marks for trying to be like Robert Altman, who specializes in this type of narrative (see his masterpiece Short Cuts). Happy Endings has a great spirit and a wonderful wit, but Roos has simply bitten off more than he can chew. |
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