Life lessons

Our rating:

With movies like The Opposite of Sex and Bounce under his belt, you can be assured that Don Roos is anything but a conventional filmmaker. That certainly goes for his latest offering, Happy Endings, a multi-stranded drama set in Los Angeles; but if that sounds a bit like Oscar winner Crash, it couldn’t be further from the truth.

While Crash dealt specifically with an issue – racial tension – Happy Endings is really about the characters. Weaving story lines into each other with style and apparent ease, Roos (who also wrote the script) takes us on a journey into the wonderful unpredictability of, well, everyday life. There are no secret agents, conflicted cops or troubled geniuses here – just regular people trying to make their way in the world.

Among them are Mamie Toll (Lisa Kudrow), a woman who still feels guilt about events that happened when she was a teenager; and her brother by adoption Charlie (Steve Coogan), a gay man who believes the baby of two lesbian friends (Laura Dern and Sarah Clarke) has been fathered by his partner Gil (David Sutcliffe). Then there’s Javier (Bobby Cannavale) a masseur who treats Mamie perhaps a little too well; Nicky (Jesse Bradford), a filmmaker who’ll go to virtually any lengths to get his movie made; and Otis (Jason Ritter), a drummer whose band occasionally plays at Charlie’s restaurant. Otis is gay, and is keeping that fact from his father Frank (Tom Arnold), but he starts to question his feelings when he meets the alluring Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

I guess that simplified outline might suggest that this movie is squarely in soap opera territory. Well, to some extent, it probably is; but the quality of Roos’ script and direction, coupled with a superior cast, elevate this far beyond your regular TV soap. While a lesser filmmaker would simply have played out the situations for the sake of playing them out; Roos plays them out in order to ask questions about how we would react in similar situations; what our morals would allow us to if confronted by the same circumstances. As such, Roos is much more interested in the psychology behind his characters, not just what they do on-screen.

It’s also by turns very funny, very dark and very touching. Roos makes sure we never slip into depression (even though some of the characters are clearly depressed) by throwing in just the right amount of humour at the right times. He also uses half-titles as a kind of narrator to fill in some of the gaps. This actually works very well most of the time, as they fill in background information about the characters and their situations, without the need for laborious flashbacks.

Roos handles the large cast with assurance. Lisa Kudrow is a world away from her ditzy Friends character as Mamie; Steve Coogan is great as Charlie and Tom Arnold suitably sleazy as Frank. The rest of the cast are solid, with Jesse Bradford making a mark as the driven but erratic Nicky. But it’s Maggie Gyllenhaal who absolutely walks away with the movie as the seductive but hard-edged Jude.

Happy Endings, despite its title, isn’t all that happy. But it is an insightful, funny and intelligent look at the tribulations of everyday life. For that alone, this film should be commended; but the style, subtlety and energy Roos and his cast bring to this production make it one to seek out.

David Edwards

Send us your feedback on this article or anything else in The Blurb

Happy Endings

Director: Don Roos
Cast: Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan, Jesse Bradford, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tom Arnold
Release: Nationally on 23 March 2006
Rated: M