| Plot Synopsis Three loosely interrelated stories of dysfunctional relationships are played for edgy laughs in this dark comedy drama from writer and director Don Roos. An unexpected assignation between stepsiblings Mamie and Charley results in Mamie becoming pregnant, with the child being put up for adoption shortly after birth. Twenty years later, Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) is approached by Nicky (Jesse Bradford), an aspiring filmmaker with an abrasive personality who claims to know where her long-lost son is living. However, there's a catch - Nicky wants to shoot the reunion for the student film he's working on, and won't tell her about her child unless she agrees, though her lover, Javier (Bobby Cannavale), attempts to work out a compromise. Meanwhile, Charley (Steve Coogan), now out of the closet, has a longstanding relationship with Gil (David Sutcliffe), and the couple are involved in a legal battle over whether or not Gil's donated sperm produced a baby who has been adopted by a lesbian couple they know (Laura Dern and Sarah Clarke). And finally, Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a bohemian malcontent who becomes involved with Otis (Jason Ritter), a sexually ambiguous rock musician. Otis has a difficult relationship with his father, Frank (Tom Arnold), but when Jude meets Frank, she likes him fine - in fact, she soon falls in love with him and leaves Otis for his dad. Happy Endings had its world premiere at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. - Mark Deming Reviews PERRY SEIBERT All Movie Guide A fascinating situation is rarely enough to sustain an audience's interest in a film. There must be characters onscreen to care about. Don Roos' Happy Endings offers three different storylines, but fails to create enough engaging characters. Only in the remarkably dysfunctional relationship between the manipulative and wickedly intelligent Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and the nebbish middle-aged Frank (a never better Tom Arnold) does Roos create people interesting enough to hook an audience. Whenever the film spends time on the other two stories, both more original situations to be sure, viewers will tire of them fairly quickly and simply wait out the time until they see more of the characters they have invested in emotionally. Roos is too talented a writer for the film to be a total disaster, but he can't make the drama and the comedy in these other two sections take flight. Individual lines and moments "work," but they do not add up to much. Most disconcertingly, Roos has not been able to come up with a way for these stories to merge together. The resolutions of the various characters do not feel motivated by anything that happened in the film, they feel like arbitrary decisions made by a screenwriter who was unable to find a satisfactory way to catch all of the balls he was attempting to juggle. MAITLAND MCDONAGH Tv Guide's Movie Guide Don Roos' overlapping stories of Los Angelenos blindsided by love add up to a bleakly funny and sneakily moving examination of mistakes made and their unexpected, far-reaching consequences. When patient-advocate Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) was 17, she seduced her new stepbrother, Charley (Steve Coogan), and later gave up their baby for adoption. Two decades later, aspiring filmmaker Nicky (Jesse Bradford), desperate to score an AFI scholarship, contacts her claiming to know where her son is; he'll tell her if she'll let him make a documentary about their reunion. Mamie's boyfriend, Javier (Bobby Cannavale), a professional masseur, makes a counteroffer: the information for the chance to document Javier's life as a specialist in massages with "happy endings" for wealthy, unsatisfied housewives. Charley, who runs the last remaining restaurant of the chain he and Mamie inherited after their parents' death in a car crash, lives with Gil (David Sutcliffe), his boyfriend of five years, and is about to stir up a baby drama of his own. Two years earlier, Gil donated sperm to help his longtime best friend, Pam (Laura Dern), and her girlfriend, Diane (Sarah Clarke), conceive a child. Pam and Diane said the donation didn't take, and turned to a sperm bank instead. But their 2-year-old son looks exactly like Gil at that age, and Charley is convinced that Pam and Diane, who have an abrasive controlling streak, lied so Gil would never be able to assert parental rights. Determined to make them admit the truth, he concocts a sitcom-worthy scheme that triggers a decidedly unfunny chain of events. Meanwhile, rootless, casually opportunistic singer Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who's drifting through life on impulse and attitude, meets sexually confused rich boy Otis (Jason Ritter) at Charley's restaurant on karaoke night. She impulsively agrees to join his band, seduces Otis and sets her sights on his wealthy widowed father, Frank (Tom Arnold), coercing Otis' cooperation by manipulating his fear that Frank thinks he's gay. By the time the games have ended, a small army of skeletons has come clattering out of various closets, demanding that attention be paid. Roos underscores the film's fablelike nature through intertitles that reveal hidden truths and peek at future developments that take place years - even decades - after the film ends. But the stylization never compromises the emotional truth that underlies the baroque dilemmas, and Roos' sly, throwaway insights into the ways people deceive and undermine themselves are both ruefully funny and painfully on the mark. - Maitland McDonagh RUTHE STEIN San Francisco Chronicle Movie characters tend to be awfully anemic. They're often little more than functionaries, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, created to make a plot point then exiting screen right. It's as if the screenwriter doesn't care a fig about them. Don Roos is the opposite of that, a writer and director who cares desperately about the confused souls populating his movies. His affection for them spills over in "The Opposite of Sex" and "Happy Endings," his latest effort that is extremely pleasurable and well worth seeing, even if it never hits the highs of "Sex." Like a fortune-teller, Roos divines the past, present and future of a large eclectic group spread out over the vastness of Los Angeles and Phoenix, a mini L.A. Everybody is some way connected to either Mamie (Lisa Kudrow), an emotional basket case permanently scarred by her teen pregnancy, or her British stepbrother Charley (Steve Coogan), who fathered the baby before realizing he's gay. A scam artist claims to have information about the son Mamie gave up for adoption, while another scammer (the always adorable Maggie Gyllenhaal, demonstrating that she can sing as well as act seductive) attempts to trick a well-to-do developer (Tom Arnold) into marrying her. There's a lesbian couple whose baby may have been conceived using Charley's lover's sperm without his or Charley's knowledge. Finally, there's Mamie's masseur boyfriend Javier (Bobby Cannavale), whose trade secret known to lower-end practitioners of his profession supplies the movie with its title. (It refers to providing clients with "a full release," as he euphemistically puts it.) That's a lot of stories to cram into dialogue, even for this chatty group. So Roos has devised an unusual mechanism for unloading additional biographical information, more than we really need to know. Using a screen split vertically, the action continues on one side while, on the other, words describe what transpired before this moment and after. Like subtitles, these occasional side titles are distracting because your eyes dart around. Yet the little asides are incredibly sweet. Sometimes even magical, as when, watching a mismatched couple in the throes of passion, we're told that on his deathbed, the man smiles while uttering his long-lost lover's name, and a nurse thinks he's smiling at her. Roos has a novel in him that I, for one, would eagerly read. Meanwhile, his directing is catching up with his masterly writing. As he did in "The Opposite of Sex," Roos coaxes the best out of Kudrow. (If only he'd been behind the camera on her disastrous "The Comeback.'') Her Mamie is ditzy -- nobody since Judy Holliday does ditzy better -- but Kudrow also communicates the sadness that fuels her quirkiness. In an ensemble cast without a single misguided performance, Arnold is a standout. Underrated as a screen actor, he breaks your heart as a decent guy predisposed to do the right thing even if it means blowing $36,000 on jewelry, furs and cars for women who don't deserve him. Cannavale is laugh-out-loud funny slapping on a mustache for a starring role in a faux documentary about how Javier left his poverty- stricken Mexican village and became an American success story by supplying rich women with happy endings. It's not giving anything away to say that "Happy Endings" ends happily. All that's missing is a side title cueing you to smile. |
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| HAPPY ENDINGS 2005 - USA - 128 min. - Feature, Color Director -Don Roos |
| Genre/Type -Comedy Drama, Gay & Lesbian Films, Ensemble Film Flags -Not For Children, Drug Content, Sexual Situations, Adult Humor, Adult Situations, Profanity MPAA Rating -R Keywords -abortion, adoption, blackmail, filmmaking, lesbianism, masseuse, sexual-orientation, sperm-donor Themes -Fathers and Sons, Filmmaking, Sexual Awakening, Mothers and Sons, Suburban Dysfunction, Blackmail, Adoption Tones -Bittersweet, Biting, Quirky, Talky, Witty, Irreverent Produced by -Holly Wiersma / Lions Gate Films Release -Jul 15, 2005 (USA - Limited) Released by -Lions Gate Films DVD Street Date -Nov 15, 2005 Studio -Lions Gate Cast Tom Arnold -- Frank Jesse Bradford -- Nicky Bobby Cannavale -- Javier Sarah Clarke -- Diane Steve Coogan -- Charley Laura Dern -- Pam Maggie Gyllenhaal -- Jude Lisa Kudrow -- Marnie Jason Ritter -- Otis David Sutcliffe -- Gil Randy Landas -- Musician #3 Rayne Marcus -- Annette Ramon De Ocampo -- Alvin Emma Hunton -- Becca Rob Macie -- Steve the Lawyer |
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