Happiest Season (2020)

Around this time last year, I wrote a review for the unexpectedly outstanding “Last Christmas” (2019).
You know, from a decade ago when we were allowed to go see movies in theaters and see the full faces of people we didn’t live with.
So when Megan and I sat down to watch “Happiest Season” (2020), I commented to her that no Hallmark holiday flick would ever stand up to “Last Christmas” and I expected this to be an absolute dumpster fire.
Well, it wasn’t as good as “Last Christmas, but it wasn’t a dumpster fire either, and for that, I am grateful.

“Happiest Season” opened with a weird cartoon montage of the previous year, showing 20-somethings Harper (Mackenzie Davis) and Abby (Kristen Stewart) falling in love and moving in together.
I don’t know who animated those still images, but they need to be fired – they were terribly drawn, and I don’t know why actual pictures couldn’t have been used.
When the movie transitioned to live-action, it was revealed that Harper was obsessed with Christmas and all the trimmings, while Abby was magnitudes less enthused. Having dated for a year and lived together for six of those months, Harper decided to invite Abby to her family’s Christmas celebrations that year.
The catch: Harper hadn’t bothered to tell her partners that she was lesbian, and that Abby was more than just a roommate – a fact that her parents should have immediately figured out when they learned that Harper had a one-bedroom apartment in Pittsburg, and that Abby had moved in with her.

Unfortunately, not only had Harper failed to spill the beans, but we quickly found out that the entire family was a wreck: older sisters Sloan (Alison Brie) was an ice-queen with an inferiority complex, and younger sister Jane (Mary Holland) was just… super weird. It turns out that Harper’s parents Ted (Victor Garber) and Tipper (Mary Steenburgen) had spent their entire lives – as parents and professionals – worried about public opinion and looking like they had the picture-perfect Hallmark-card family. That weight was especially heavy this year as Ted sought to start a gubernatorial campaign (presumably for the state of Pennsylvania).
As Harper explained to Abby, to rationalize not telling her parents about their relationship status, her sexual orientation never fit that ‘perfect family’ facade.

There were many other problems on display too, from Sloane’s marriage to the way Tipper demanded the house look at any given time, to whatever it was Jane was expected to do when she was on screen. They weren’t the focus of the movie so I’ll let you discover them as you watch, but they made for good B, C, and D subplots that all showed just how flawed the family was behind the veneer that Ted hoped would net him the governorship.

It’s hard for me to remember that there are people out there, in 2020, who aren’t okay with non-traditional(?) sexual orientations. I went to public school and then a liberal arts college, where “be straight or be gone” was never an acceptable answer. While I’m painfully aware of bigots out there – Westboro Baptist Church-style – there are people who just quietly don’t accept homosexuals either, which in its own way, was actually far more disquieting to watch, both in real life and in this movie.
It’s really easy to listen to someone spew a curse-filled tirade, because they make it very easy to identify them as someone you shouldn’t interact with – they might as well just hang a sign around their neck that says “I’m a bigot” and leave it at that.
The insidious alternative is the kind of person who silently invalidates the existence of others. Pretending that gays and lesbians don’t exist, citing it as a mental disorder, or disregarding social norms around courtship because the couple is something other than a hard-binary man and woman.

While the movie wasn’t shot from Abby’s perspective, it did follow her – there were only a few times when the camera followed Harper without Abby also being in the scene.
Abby put up a good fight – she played along with Harper’s lie of simply being roommates, she smiled and stood in the background when Tipper wanted a ‘family picture’ that didn’t include her, and she didn’t complain when she was uninvited from one of the myriad parties that Ted and Tipper threw in the course of five days, because they didn’t think Abby’s working-class chic would fit in with the rich guests.

But, as expected, with Harper climbing back in the closet to avoid rocking the family boat and Ted and Tipper apparently trying to will Abby out of existence for intruding in their perfect life, Abby started to question her relationship and what she was doing dating someone who wasn’t ready to admit their sexuality.

Stewart did an outstanding job as Abby – easily the best performance in the movie – her facial expressions and body language were so key and crucial to showing how the week was wearing her down, how every day became more and more lonely for her, and you could feel it every step of the way.
You could feel for Davis as Harper too, but not nearly as much – she’d grown up finding ways to turn truth and rumors against other people so she could stay in the family lime-light, which she started to do to Abby as the week wore on. I even told Megan how much I disliked Harper for her apparent spinelessness, and even when we got the Hallmark ending, I didn’t really feel like Harper had earned it.

So that Hallmark ending. This movie did still end on a high note, because duh.
But fortunately, it wasn’t saccharine-sweet.
While Ted and Tipper did have a realization that they’d thoroughly screwed up their jobs as parents and Harper and Abby made up, it wasn’t instantaneous and it wasn’t “oh, I was wrong, and now everything is all better!” – you could see reality dawning on everyone’s’ faces and the recognition that they were wrong and the baby-steps that were reasonable to expect.
Compare that to the color-by-numbers of a regular Hallmark movie where idiot-tier miscommunication or misunderstanding drives a couple apart, only for them to live happily ever after despite only being together for 36 hours, and you can see why this ending actually meant something.

Side-character John (Daniel Levy) had a recurring bit part as Abby’s gay bff. Having now seen him as a normal human in this versus the world-ignorant man-child form “Schitt’s Creek” (2015-2020), it’s clear that part of his charm as an actor is his general flamboyant personality, much like how Robert Downey Jr. is cast for his aloofness, or Ryan Reynolds for his dead-pan delivery.

My biggest critique for this movie is actually the title.
At no point did anyone call Christmas, or the season at large, the “Happiest Season,” nor is that a way that anyone normally describes the holiday.
It’s not as bad as “Always Be My Maybe” (2019), but it’s really close.

Being a Christmas movie, there were various covered and remixed holiday carols, and considering we’re now post-Thanksgiving, that’s acceptable.

There were no special effects, and the scenery was almost entirely inside Ted and Tipper’s house so… I’m glad they found a house that looked like a house.

There now appears to be a sub-genre of Hallmark-holiday movies that actually have emotional weight to them! Movies where the characters behave like normal people instead, of two-dimensional imbeciles who shouldn’t be able to master using a spoon and exist solely as devices to make a plot happen.
I’m desperately hoping that studios keep making and releasing the diamonds.

Like I said at the top: it wasn’t as good as “Last Christmas,” so I won’t be giving it a 5-Claw, but it absolutely earned 4-Claws.
This movie is streaming on Hulu, and it’s definitely worth taking an evening to watch.