Happy Endings

Movies with a big ensemble cast are usually ok to great. If it works on the whole, and all its parts are satisfying, it ends up great like I Heart Huckabees last year for example, or The Royal Tenenbaums a few years ago. Those two movies were written by excellent screenwriters though. Writer/Director Dan Roos' first movie was The Opposite of Sex, which was good, and then he made Bounce, which was really good. Now the filmmaker brings us Happy Endings, and it's just ok, and for an ensemble cast movie.

Various separated stories, all starting with Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) and Charley (Steve Coogan), teen stepsiblings who are moving in together after their parents got married. It seems to be the first day of the move, and maybe the first time they meet, but it's just a quick attraction and they sleep together. She's no longer a virgin, she gets pregnant, and after their parents find out, she gets an abortion.

We jump 19 years into the future and they don't see each other much. Mamie is now an abortion counselor who's dating a Mexican immigrant named Javier (Bobby Cannavale), who works at a massage parlor. Nikki (Jesse Bradford) is a young man who aspires to be a filmmaker. He knows Mamie didn't have that abortion, in fact, she gave birth to the child and gave it for adoption. He knows where the now teen is and so he blackmails Mamie by giving her the info on how find her son and in exchange he wants to film the reunion. That documentary will be his ticket to get into AFI he thinks.
Mamie doesn't want to, so Javier helps her by letting Nikki film him in the massage parlor, where he pretends to be a sex worker for depressed women. The documentary would also tell his story as an illegal immigrant.

On the other hand Charley is now gay, living with his boyfriend Gil (David Sutcliffe). Gil's long time best friend is a lesbian named Pam (Laura Dern), and she and her girlfriend Diane (Sarah Clarke) have a 2 year old. The kid was the result of artificial insemination, for which Gil donated the sperm once but it didn't work. But Charley suspects it did work, and Pam and Diane said it didn't so they wouldn't have to share the kid.
Charlie is the owner of a caraoke bar where a still on the closet young man named Otis (Jason Ritter) works. Otis is secretly in love with Charlie, but he doesn't say anything. Instead, he steals the security tapes of the bar and masturbates to the images of Charlie cleaning the place. Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a free spirit homeless girl who seduces Otis and sleeps with him. And then she seduces his rich father Frank (Tom Arnold) and sleeps and gets engaged to him. She's just after his money, at first.

Lots of things happen and at the end of the movie the stories interconnect and we get the happy endings. At least at that point because as the director tells us during the movie, their lives will be different in the future. And this is an interest idea that Roos uses in the movie. Instead of having narrator in voice over, he splits the screen in two and gives us comments cards about what's going to happen to the character like "...will be a virgin for 10 more minutes" right before the teens' sex episode and even comments on what will the last words before he dies for one of the characters. It's very well used at first, but then it gets overused.

The acting ranges from ok to really great like Gyllenhaal, and Kudrow and Arnold give their best performances ever on a movie after their very successful TV careers. But it mostly works because their stories are more interesting than the other characters'. The others in Kudrow's group, Cannavale and Bradford, are also great, specially the latter who gives a very energetic performance.
The story I could live without was the one involving Charley and Gil and their lesbian friends. Though I can't think of it right now, I'm pretty sure I've seen that story developed somewhere else. And so I didn't care for them at all.

The movie as a whole is ok as I said before, thanks to the Kudrow and Bradford's and Arnold and Gyllenhaal's stories, which would really work as their own movie even. The music also helps, specially when Maggie Gyllenhaal herself sings on screen such classics as Billy Joel's "Honesty" and "Just The Way You Are", or any of the three other songs she performs.
Happy Endings' big problem is that its big plot is not very clear, parenting would my guess. Still, by the end the characters connect, and Gyllenhaal's voice closes the movie giving us that happy ending we are waiting for.