Happiest Season is an elevated Hallmark Christmas movie. In everything from the story set-up to elements of the comedy to even its’ set design, colour grading, cinematography, and lighting, the resemblance to those schmaltzy affairs featuring actors you might vaguely recognize from some commercial or forgotten family TV show is incredibly stark. They might even be the direct influence on writer-director Clea DuVall, whose general approach to the film seems to be to have it resemble a very ordinary kind of holiday movie… but gay. The movies’ whole existence is predicated on traditional heterosexual Christmas rom-coms, but subverted slightly to be a margin more relatable to the queer experience and more accessible to people with taste. It improves on formula, but is also to some degree constrained by it. And the result is a movie that is pretty okay overall with spots of greatness, but not a lot of substance beyond its basic aims and purpose.
That purpose is to basically just be a mainstream holiday movie about an LGBTQ couple dealing with a unique conflict for members of the LGBTQ community: the stress, anxiety, and fear of coming out to your family. It is perhaps the most basic storyline for queer fiction (this was the premise of Love, Simon a few years ago, the first mainstream Hollywood comedy about a gay teen), but it isn’t a bad or illegitimate one if it’s the only one Hollywood feels particularly comfortable with. DuVall probably knows this, hence why she portrays it without a lot of easy broad comedy and as a genuinely emotionally difficult issue, which also helps cultivate sympathy for Mackenzie Davis’ Harper, who might otherwise, and at times does, come off as selfish or hurtful.
It’s certainly unfair of her to impose a facade of straightness on her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart) when she herself invited her to her familys’ Christmas in rural Pennsylvania. And while Abby goes along with it, it’s not a comfortable ruse -the film stresses this emphatically. So that while the characters’ gayness is a key facet of the plot, it’s never a vessel of humour, which the film prefers to mine from other sources, such as the repressed dysfunction of Harpers’ family and the attitude, advice, and light political satire of Abby’s friend John (Daniel Levy) -there’s one exceptionally fun running gag about him looking after Abby’s fish.
DuVall wrote the film with Mary Holland, who also appears as Jane, Harper’s underachieving little sister (Harper is ostensibly the family favourite, while oldest sister Sloane, played by Alison Brie, is the most successful). There are some cracks to their script, bouts of awkward dialogue or characterization a bit too indicative of the sort of films Happiest Season is evoking. It also relies too often on conventions of romantic comedy, classic misunderstandings and jealousies. But it does have a deep regard for the essence of the material. The frustration of Abby is innately felt, Kristen Stewart does a very good job of simmering in this identity crisis thrust upon her, especially as Harper grows ever more distant under the circumstances. Harper is a hard character to like for much of the film but the script never loses empathy with her, even as she makes some dire mistakes, and that’s largely down to its’ treatment of the family.
For as much as the Caldwells are played for light comedy: Sloane’s resentful competitiveness to Harper, their mothers’ obsessive perfectionism, the random deviousness of Sloane’s children, and Jane’s whole complex; there is an underlying severity to their faux wholesome image that’s about as bitter as this movie gets. They don’t have to do or say anything outwardly homophobic for their nature to come across -it’s all there in father Victor Garbers’ cordial concerns for his political career, in Sloane’s prideful presentation of an idyllic nuclear family, and in mother Mary Steenburgen’s constant emphasis of the strict reputation the family must maintain. The movie doesn’t ever confirm it out loud, possibly not to alienate that part of their demographic, but “reputation” is clearly a code for Christian. The familys’ whole aesthetic is very Christian, at least as its depicted in Hallmark Christmas specials and Evangelical propaganda films: a homestead that’s immaculately clean with decor fresh from the department store catalogue and an incredibly straight-laced yet classically elegant attitude to fashion that communicates the wealth and status one is rewarded with for worshiping God. I think DuVall chose to represent them this way not out of a particular anti-religious sentiment as much as its’ the easiest context for the sake of dramatic tension. The family and their situation ascribe to plenty of other iconography of old-fashioned Christian conservative values in their home and relations; and they’re even guilty of that all-too-familiar transparent meddling in encouraging a reconnection between Harper and her high school boyfriend, who stayed close to home while she moved to the city.
And so it’s perfectly understandable why it’s such a hard thing for Harper to do to admit she’s gay to her family, and why even comical scenes in the climax revolving around it are tinged with a lot of real intensity. That part at least justifies the films’ existence, articulating well the significance of what Harper is going through, what Abby is going through too, and the emotional devastation it’s causing her to be a part of this. But Abby is also our avatar, and though this requires her to be a little naive so that DuVall can speak directly to us straights, its’ necessitated by the urgency of her message. As is pointed out, in families like Harpers’, coming out may mean being disowned or disgraced, and the film gets the gravity of that across more thoroughly than I think I’ve seen in a movie before.
This subject matter is somewhat haphazardly tied into the holidays, and I don’t think it entirely works, as much as the film is inundated with Christmas imagery to convince you otherwise. But then so many of the movies it emulates have only that loose relationship to the seasonal themes, and at least this one has Kristen Stewart aptly playing the outsider to their conventions. Happiest Season, like almost every movie this year, got moved from its theatrical release to streaming, but I think it belongs on Hulu. It’s a very average film that boasts greater talent and a sharper, more critical aim than the dozens of cheap holiday TV movies that pop out of the woodwork every year, and is a reasonable, if uninspired alternative. But I feel like, for the first gay Christmas rom-com, it could have played it less straight.
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