Happy Endings

Happy Endings weaves multiple stories to create a witty look at love, family and the sheer unpredictablity of life itself.

AMG Plot: 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

AMG Review: 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. — Perry Seibert