Happiest Season (2020)

Review Essay

I’ve tried my best to avoid spoiling the final acts of movies here at Film for the Holidays, but it’s going to be tougher than usual in this review, since so much of what I think works best about this film happens in its final third.  I’m committed to not giving up all this movie’s secrets, though, so if you come away from it thinking, “I still don’t get why he likes this movie,” I hope you can trust that there’s some depths in its final minutes that I couldn’t talk about.  Happiest Season is uneven, like many of the romantic comedies I’ve watched for this year, but when it’s on its game, it has an incredible power.

I think part of the confusion, for me, is that the film is trying to sandwich together really painful (if sometimes painful and funny) realities about life as a closeted adult with the kind of over-the-top goofball comedy of the agonies of being around your partner’s weird family and childhood friends for the holidays.  The realities about the closet really work: it’s so clear from the beginning that Harper both thinks she can earn her parents’ acceptance and love if she closets herself just a little longer and understands that in fact that’s not really true at all and that the idea of being who she is at home terrifies her almost as much as it would terrify her parents if they ever figured it out.  Abby’s road is so hard to walk — as someone who clearly hasn’t hidden herself from anyone in years, the act of hiding becomes exhausting fast.  She has to start asking herself if Harper’s so good at hiding from her family that maybe she’s been hiding from Abby too….maybe, even, that she’s more hidden around Abby than around her family?  This is a bittersweet movie, then, but one that’s got my attention.  The problem is that it is grafted onto the broadest possible comedy: this family isn’t just performatively happy at Christmas (like many families are), the dad is running for office and it is in fact imperative that everyone self-consciously perform happiness this Christmas at an endless string of semi-public social engagements.  Harper’s sisters aren’t just weird and competitive: one is so weird it feels like she only is allowed to speak to other humans for a week at Christmas, and the other is so competitive that she can grab Harper in a WWE wrestling move and we don’t find it surprising.  It’s not just awkward being back around your partner’s childhood friends who know stories you don’t: Harper literally has not one ex in her orbit but two, one her secret lesbian soulmate from high school and the other the boy her parents always figured their straight daughter would marry someday, and she ends up hanging out with the latter at the world’s most garishly overbearing sportsbar that’s literally called “Fratty’s”.  The script is worried we won’t get it and therefore piles on the awkward until the situation can barely hold up underneath it.

The way I survive the movie’s long second act as a viewer, then, is by latching on to some really good acting work that’s showing up on screen. Kristen Stewart was much maligned back when everyone thought she was just the awkward vampire girl in the Twilight movies, but I think by now most folks know she’s a real talent: in Happiest Season, she owns the screen with incredible poise and calm, almost like a young Jodie Foster (speaking of folks who had to stay closeted publicly into their adult years).  Another incredibly successful performance is Abby’s best friend John, a flamboyantly gay man played by Dan Levy — on the page, he really shouldn’t work, since he switches back and forth so freely between acts of outrageous stupidity/goofiness and moments of incredible candor and insight, but I don’t know what to tell you.  Levy is really, really good at both sides of this, ultimately selling me on John as a gay man who masks the pain of his past with comedic patter that feels like something out of a Will & Grace episode, but who is ready at any moment to draw back the curtain and reveal enough of the truths he’s earned by living to help pull somebody else (in this case, Abby) out of the flames.  I wish the film established his depth a little earlier, but there’s no question he comes into his own as it progresses.  And the other brilliant light in the supporting cast is, as should come as no surprise, the effortlessly deadpan Aubrey Plaza playing Riley, Harper’s high school lesbian girlfriend who got not just dumped but outed by Harper in a desperate but selfish act of self-preservation.  Plaza is always wry and compelling, in my experience, as a performer — she knows how to be both cool and genuine in the same moment, which is hard to achieve — and as Riley she is given a part that somehow isn’t a corny caricature, unlike literally everyone else from Harper’s hometown.  Instead, she gets to play this nuanced, wounded but still walking young woman who’s never fully escaped the social ostracism she faced as a teenager but also has never fully achieved the kind of exit velocity she’d need to exit the gravity well of this Stepford town with its white elephant gift exchanges and ladies who lunch and a single, lively drag bar that seems like the only place to have any fun at all.  The movie could definitely use some more of Riley and John at the expense of Harper’s weird family, whose screentime seems to mostly consist of flailing attempts at humor that land only intermittently, for me.

As I said up front, there’s a lot I want to say about the final third of this movie, but I’m going to try to steer around most of it so you can experience this film on your own terms.  In the end, the tug of war I’m describing above, which kept pulling me into this film and then knocking me back out again, is finally and powerfully resolved by the movie pushing in all its chips on being honest and authentic and a little painful in facing what it’s like to come out (and what it’s like to bear the burden of being kept in the closet by the person you love).  Characters start to get a handle on themselves, a handle on how the things they’ve been saying or doing have affected other people without them knowing it, and a handle on the question of what it means to be a part of a family (whether that’s a couple in love or a collection of parents and kids sharing a holiday together).  Not everyone grows up in the ways or at the speeds you want them to, and not every resolution is satisfying, but I have to be honest — I cry at Happiest Season, every time I watch it, because it does achieve the agonizing truth of all of these things at once in a couple of powerfully written and delivered speeches by characters who are finally opening the doors to themselves.  The movie’s ultimate commitment to saying what it means rather than trying to fit into some imagined Hollywood formula is maybe a bit too late for this to be a great motion picture, but that doesn’t mean that the moment itself isn’t great.  Because it is, every time, for me.

As is often the case here at FFTH, I’m left pondering what a Christmas movie is about, and what it’s supposed to be about.  Here, I think the movie is about the second chances in life — those we give and those we get, even when we’re giving them to the undeserving or getting them while being undeserving ourselves.  It’s about the ways in which we apologize inadequately because we can’t understand the harm we’ve done, and how even an inadequate apology builds enough of a bridge for understanding to cross it.  It’s about love — and the difference between love as an exhibition for the audience you think is watching and love as the desperate and daring act of selfless devotion that it has to be if it’s going to do anything worthwhile in our hearts.  Those things resonate, for me, as Christmas messages — tied to the best Christmas stories I know, and to the underlying power of the feast I celebrate at Christmas — and therefore Happiest Season, in the end, sticks its landing, no matter how many minor deductions it received from the judges while it was spinning in mid-air.

I Know That Face: Aubrey Plaza, who here plays Riley Johnson, Harper’s first girlfriend, previously voiced the role of Grumpy Cat in Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever — a movie that, I am informed by a relative, may be one of the most unsuccessful things ever committed to film, but surely we can’t blame Aubrey for that: the project is astoundingly ill-conceived at takeoff.  Mary Steenburgen, here playing Harper’s painfully superficial and tightly-wound mother, Tipper, is a veteran of television and movies: for the holidays, she’s been Maggie in Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas (a Roku Channel movie, I am informed), she played Marilyn (one of the quartet of divorced parents being visited) in Four Christmases, and back in the 1980s, she was Ginny Grainger, a cynical mother learning the meaning of the holiday in Disney’s One Magic Christmas.  And Victor Garber, who here plays Harper’s ambitious politician father, Ted, has been in everything, of course: in terms of holiday fare, he voices Fluffy in Bob’s Broken Sleigh, he’s Taylor in Call Me Claus (a TV movie in which somehow Whoopi Goldberg has to become Santa Claus), he is the voice of the never-seen “Irate Neighbor” in the painful “comedy” Mixed Nuts, about which I have already probably written too much, and lastly he is Greg (Tom Hanks’s brother-in-law) in Sleepless in Seattle, a film whose inciting incident, of course, is a long appearance by a widowed father on a nationally syndicated radio call-in show on Christmas Eve.

That Takes Me Back: There’s not much here to be taken back to, it’s so recent.  My guess, though, is that a lot of the suburban sheen of Harper’s hometown is going to feel more and more painfully “early 2020s” over the years ahead.

I Understood That Reference: It’s a Wonderful Life is playing at the Guthrie Theater downtown — seemingly every year, which seems both plausible and like a nice tip of the cap from this film to a movie that was even more interested in second chances, etc.  And Santa Claus is making multiple appearances here, including references in conversation with the twins, a mention in the crowd participation song from the drag queens, and a plastic Santa being wielded as a blunt implement in a sister fistfight.  Oh, and Abby, very early in the story, accidentally bodyslams an inflatable Frosty the Snowman by falling off the roof onto him.  The film is a lot of things, but it’s never subtle.

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Holiday Vibes (9.5/10): This movie really hits almost all the notes I could expect it to, from the glitter of a competitively decorated neighborhood to the agony of gift exchange, from the strain of trying to cooperate in the taking of the perfect family group photo to the cringe-inducing tedium of finding yourself at a holiday party with your partner where you know no one and are almost instantly abandoned.  The only reason I’m not stacking it up at a 10 is that Harper’s family are so over the top bizarre in some scenes that I think it takes me out of the moment a little and diminishes the reality I’m otherwise feeling.

Actual Quality (8/10): It is so hard to rate this film — the scenes involving Harper’s sisters (or, to a lesser extent, her parents) are excruciating enough often enough that I fidget while sitting through them.  But then I’m back in a scene showing me Kristen Stewart and Dan Levy or Aubrey Plaza, and everything is firing on all cylinders.  Enduring the movie’s roughest middle patches ends up being worthwhile, since the finish connects for me.  But what does that mean, in score terms?  I could argue this up a little and down a little, and I ended up trying to split the difference.

Party Mood-Setter? The tonal shifts would make this impossible, I think — at its goofiest it could be on in the background while you did something else, but you’d feel weird and sad trying to go on with mundane Christmas activities when characters start opening themselves up to each other tearfully as the film progresses.

Plucked Heart Strings? As I’ve already said, I can’t deny what this movie does to me.  It hits like a truck.

Recommended Frequency: I don’t think I would watch it every year, but I’m glad I’ve seen it, and I know I will watch it again.  I do think it’s strained a little by needing to break new ground here, though, and to some extent I’d rather hope for more inclusive Christmas movies that are a little better managed in terms of tone and intention.  I think this one opens the door for other kinds of storytelling that trust the audience just a touch more, but regardless of the films that follow it, there’s no question it achieves some moments that stick with you, and for that reason alone I would encourage you to make it a film you visit at least now and then at Christmas time.

Happiest Season is easily streamed if you’re a subscriber to Disney+ or Hulu. Sadly, though, that’s about the only way to view it, that I know of — it doesn’t appear to be rentable from any other service, and I can’t find a DVD of it in the English language that’s not an Australian regional disc that won’t play on most American setups.  Worldcat claims to know of disc copies in 90ish libraries, but I’m not sure those are any more playable in most systems in the United States.  If you don’t have Disney+ or Hulu, I think it’s worth a try geting a hold of one, though, if you can!