Review: Happy Endings

A quirky comedy/drama in which various characters lives intersect; Lisa Kudrow works in an abortion clinic, and has a masseuse boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale). Into her life comes wannabe filmmaker Jesse Bradford, promising to give her the whereabouts of the son she gave up for adoption if she’ll just let him document the reunion on film. Steve Coogan is Kudrow’s gay stepbrother who along with his partner are friends with a lesbian couple (Laura Dern, Sarah Clarke). The couple have a baby from a supposed anonymous donor, but Coogan is suspicious. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays an amazingly charismatic and charming gold-digger who gets her hooks into confused gay man Jason Ritter, but might actually be more interested in his nerdy dad (Tom Arnold). But could there be more going on?

This 2005 comedy from writer-director Don Roos (the OK Christina Ricci flick “The Opposite of Sex”) is quite liked in most quarters of the critical community, but I found it a teeth-gratingly annoying, aimless, and pointless film full of truly unpleasant people. We get off to the worst imaginable start, with annoyingly cute and quirky title cards that are unfunny and lazy. Meanwhile, the movie is called “Happy Endings” and Lisa Kudrow has a massage early in the film- Get it? Yes, I do, and it’s not funny. At all.

The incandescent Maggie Gyllenhaal is a bright shining light, but even she can’t work miracles. There’s just something so...naughty about her, isn’t there? She’s terrific. I don’t know what was being said here, all I know is that a whole film with the Maggie Gyllenhaal character at its centre (and she’s not even all that likeable) would be so much more worthwhile than this crap. I can only imagine how horrible the film would be if the originally intended choice of Gwyneth Paltrow came to pass. So let’s all be thankful to Ms. Gyllenhaal for making this film a little less painful. She also sings a couple of Billy Joel covers, including an OK version of ‘Honesty’.

Tom Arnold is well-cast (Kudrow too, but horribly unlikeable), but his role is a total cliché, and Bobby Cannavale’s role and terrible performance are a cliché of a stereotype. As for Steve Coogan, all I have to report is that back in 2005 he looked a whole lot younger. Oh, and his character is absolutely unbearable and basically gets everything he deserves (though, because this film is terrible, we don’t get a great idea of just what that involves. Mr. Roos clearly doesn’t care about this story strand as much as the others). Jesse Bradford’s performance and character are especially stupid, and it’s easy to see why he stopped appearing in quite so many films on my radar after this (He used to turn up in everything I was watching, it seemed). It’s not entirely his fault, though, because his character is just ridiculous and clichéd.

I also have absolutely no idea why the film’s cinematographer J. Clark Mathis is using handheld, given this is a quirky character piece.

What was the point? Why was I meant to care? This is like sub-par Woody Allen territory, only even worse. Sorry, but I got nothing out of this film at all, except the desire to scrub myself clean afterwards. Actually, the “American Beauty” reference was funny, but the rest...pitiful. Sorry, critics, but audiences got this one right. It deserved to flop.

 

Rating: D-