Happily (2021)

Imagine me and you, I do

The least surprising thing about Happily is that it’s a debut feature. It has all the telltale signs of an inexperienced but ambitious voice behind the camera: a few too many darlings left unkilled, clever ideas that probably looked razor-sharp on the page but fizzle into fog on the screen, a sharply off-kilter first half that the second half can’t quite cash a check for. The most surprising thing about Happily is just how charming it is in spite of that messiness.

This is a true original: an unpredictable story with a premise that doesn’t ask “what if?” once, but keeps asking, scene after scene. What if the conflict in a relationship drama wasn’t strife but compatibility? What if a stranger straight out of an episode of The Twilight Zone told you that you were a glitch in the matrix and your continued contentedness was your fatal flaw? What if every normal-seeming friend in your friend group was secretly hiding a deranged secret, and what if those deranged secrets were, in turn, hiding something even more mundane underneath? Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski manages to turn left at every possible point without really coming across as a provocateur or prankster.

Tom (Joel McHale) and Janet (Kerry Bishé) are the oddballs of their friend group because, fourteen years married, they remain as lustful and lovestruck as the day they met. Their sex life is fiery. They genuinely enjoy spending time together. Grabinski gives us a savvy early scene of the two getting on each other’s nerves on a weekday morning, but the very next scene shows them apologizing and making it up, no grudges to nurse, no festering resentment. This rift and quick recovery prevents their love from becoming a cartoon or parody: It’s just real, healing love, and how great is that? So great that it’s making everyone around them lose their minds. How can these two be doing so well when everyone else has slid into various flavors of romantic malaise, if not calamity?

Then Tom and Janet have an unexpected encounter with a mysterious man (Stephen Root, pitch perfect) that ends abruptly and violently, and suddenly the film is something totally different. The obvious story would be to use this as the wedge that finally splits the perfect couple apart. The film does eventually kick that tire, but only long after the inciting weirdness has pulled them even closer.

I don’t want to drill any further into specifics, because half the joy of Happily is not knowing what genre it’ll be five minutes from now at any point during the runtime. That looseness is also where the film occasionally trips itself, mistaking more ideas for better ideas and, from there, mistaking ambiguity for provocative ambivalence. The third act is where those chickens come home to roost: once the central mystery starts cashing in its chips (or, rather, not doing so), the contrivance pulls you out of a story whose premise was specifically compelling because its destination was unclear. I usually hold it against movies when their first half is much better than their second, and it is a sin I do, in fact, hold against this one. And yet I emerged with a deep affection for this mess for its whole runtime. It won me over for its duration, right down to the mind-meltingly perfect closing needle drop of Nick Cave’s “People Ain’t No Good.”

A big reason it works is that Grabinski stocks the cast with comic actors with dynamic range, and so even the slower stretches have a prickly wit. McHale and Bishé are wonderful at the center, and McHale especially is doing maybe his best work outside of Community. Bishé is just as much the engine of the movie’s heart, and the chemistry between them is convincing enough that you buy the fourteen happy years. The supporting cast, including Paul Scheer, Natalie Zea, Jon Daly, and (be still my heart) Natalie Morales, fills out the friend group with personality even when the screenplay doesn’t always meet them there.

Adam Bricker’s cinematography is another one of Happily’s charms. He shoots Happily with a fun impression of the sleek surfaces and disorienting gloss of a more muscular thriller, and that visual confidence keeps the film humming with slow-boil dread even during its hangout passages. Joseph Trapanese’s score, meanwhile, leans into ’80s and ’90s synth, lacing the getaway mansion most of the story takes place in with a kind of erotic unease. It’s a remarkably cohesive look and feel for a first-time director, the kind of confidence in tone that suggests Grabinski will continue to make interesting and unusual films.

What the film ultimately suffers from most is widening its lens from the central couple to the whole friend group, who are more filler than fully drawn, and headlining them in a panoramic finale that doesn’t entirely earn its wide scope. Still, the thematic punch — that we’re all a little fucked up, that this is perfectly normal, and that this is also perfectly sad — is moving and well-realized. It’s the kind of bittersweet sigh of an ending I’m a sucker for in dramedies like this. (Or maybe it’s just Nick Cave I’m a sucker for.)

Grabinski wrote the script as a spec, a passion project he wrangled into a budget after a tenure working as a TV director. You can really feel his personal belief in the project. His sophomore feature, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, threads its tonal needle a little more consistently (with more laughs and action), though it has the same first-half-stronger-than-second-half problem. But in some ways I think I love Happily more for all its idiosyncrasies and strange tensions. This is the kind of flawed and fascinating gem that slips through the cracks at festivals like Sundance and SXSW (and in this case, the COVID-canceled outing of Tribeca) and ends up living its second life as a streaming discovery years after the fact, often on Tubi or Pluto or Kanopy. I’m always happy to find one of these. And I’m even happier to have a new director on my radar whose work will probably keep flying under the critical consensus, and who I plan to keep seeking out anyway.

Is It Good?

Very Good (6/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.