Happy Endings

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What’s the Story?

HAPPY ENDINGS is organized around three very different characters, each apprehensive that a past or present secret will disrupt their fragile peace. Abortion counselor Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) starts the film off by getting hit by a car -- seemingly a very unhappy ending. But onscreen text explains that she's not dead, that no one dies in this "comedy." We then see Mamie as a teen, seducing her stepbrother Charley (played as an adult by Steve Coogan). She gets pregnant, her father sends her away for an abortion, and the film returns to the present. Here, Mamie is haunted by the past. Aspiring filmmaker Nicky has news about her baby -- which she had, after all -- and offers details if she lets him make a documentary about the reunion. In a second story, Charley believes that his boyfriend Gil (David Sutcliffe) has unknowingly fathered a baby by artificial insemination for their friends Pam (Laura Dern) and Diane (Sarah Clarke). Charley convinces Gil to distrust the women. Meanwhile, Charley's closeted employee, drummer Otis (Jason Ritter), has a crush on him. When singer Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal) seduces Otis, she tells him "You should try it. You might not be who you think you are." Indeed, this might describe everyone in the film.

Is It Any Good?

Much like director Don Roos' other films, Happy Endings features eccentric characters trying to construct stories for themselves, in particular, stories that will make them feel happy. The movie's interest in storytelling -- as a way to order experience or engender emotions -- is at once formal (as split screens offer textual commentary on events and characters) and thematic (the characters lie to one another and themselves).

Jude provides a second framing device, alongside the textual comments. When she first sings for Otis, she's angry at another boy, a cheater, and performs Billy Joel's "Honesty," plaintively. At film's end, when the stories seem resolved -- Mamie's been hit by the car, Charley and Gil have faced a calamity, and Frank has proposed to Jude and then discovered her deceit -- Jude sings again, now set apart from the other characters, rejected and moved on to another town. In another, unidentified space, she sings another Joel anthem, "Just the Way You Are." Here, she just seems sad, far from her own desired ending.