Happiest Season (2020).
Directed by Clea Duvall
Written by Clea Duvall and Mary Holland
Starring Kristin Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Mary Steenburgen, Allison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Mary Holland, and Dan Levy
1. (The Stage)
Harper asks her girlfriend Abby to come home with her for Christmas. The catch? Harper’s family doesn’t know she’s gay and they’re going to need to keep it a secret, because her family is filled with image-obsessed assholes. Unfortunately for Abby, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
2. (The Good)
This film has a bevy of talent attached, and they all play their roles well. Dan Levy as John is a ray of sunshine. He’s very funny and oozes charisma. Aubrey Plaza plays it straight here (insert sly smirk) instead of her normal sarcastic demeanor, which was refreshing. I also thought that Mary Holland, who plays Jane, was really great. She stole just about every scene she was in, even when the “jokes” the script was trying to ram through her didn’t work out. Kristin Stewart was good, even if she did fall back on the ‘brooding’ technique that we so often see her portray. Mary Steenburgen was really good too.
The best scene in the movie is a very touching one between John and Abby, in which John explains to Abby that everyone has a different version of their own ‘coming out’ story. Some are good and some are bad, and each person should only come out when they’re ready. Unfortunately, this amazing scene is lost amongst countless others that made me want to shut the movie off long before this happens.
3. (The Bad)
Despite all of the talent attached, a film is only going to be as good as its script…and this was a bad script. It essentially asks the audience to hate every single person in this family (aside from Jane, who is made to look like a caricature of an actual human being until the final five minutes) and then instantly forgive them in a thin veil of redemption after an extremely superficial “Hey look, they’re not that bad after all!” moment that just doesn’t feel earned.
Harper does not deserve Abby. She’s an asshole the entire trip towards her and just seems like a bad partner (and has a history of such). If I were Abby, I’d have bounced two days into that trip. I was sincerely hoping that during the ‘One Year Later’ segment that we’d get a “happy ending” with Abby snuggled up on the couch with Riley while Harper and her family deal with their issues in a healthy way.
Almost every character in this film is a piece of shit, but Sloane (played by Allison Brie) is the worst of the bunch. Not only is she insufferable every time she’s on screen, she participates in a cartoonish fight ending with the classic Tom & Jerry “smash a painting over someone’s head” ending, and she’s bred two little shit kids that act the same way she does. The kids would probably be worst people if we’d seen more of them, but they are simply used as a plot device to get Abby in trouble for shoplifting at the mall in a scene that might just make your eyes roll so hard they pop out of your fucking skull.
4. (The Ugly)
This was supposed to be a great moment in cinema, a widely distributed movie with a great cast that was focused on a lesbian couple. Unfortunately, we got an unenjoyable mess that got tossed on Hulu. The LGBTQ community deserves better than this.
5. (The End)
I love a good Christmas movie and I was really hoping that this one would find it’s way into my yearly rotation. Instead, I watched a movie packed with unlikeable characters and found myself rooting against the relationship that the filmmakers posited as the ‘happy ending’, which is a huge death knell for any romantic film. I thought this movie was terrible and a waste of a good cast.
