Happiest Season
Hulu cements its status as this year’s much-needed rom-com MVP with director/co-writer Clea Duvall’s Happiest Season, the streamer’s Christmas rom-com-dram starring Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, and Aubrey Plaza. After the smashing success of its Groundhog Day-at-a-desert-wedding summer hit Palm Springs, Hulu became the talk of Film Twitter with its starry, splashy, Sony-produced holiday love story. And for good reason.
Per Slate, Happiest Season marks a major moment in movie history: it is apparently the first major studio-backed romantic comedy centered around a queer couple. It’s a trailblazing enterprise, yes, but more importantly it’s just quality holiday fare.
Happiest Season is a surprisingly affecting tale of family, secrets and lies, all the best ingredients in any good festive jaunt. Following an adorable pre-credits establishing montage that tracks the inception and gestation of their relationship in illustrated picture book form, we join Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist Harper Caldwell (Davis), as she invites parent-less live-in girlfriend Abby (Stewart), an art history PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon and a Christmas agnostic, to accompany her home to the suburbs for the holidays.
What Harper has failed to mention until they are moments away, however, is that Harper has not told her parents that she is gay, let alone that Abby is her lover. Abby must pretend to be merely Harper’s roommate — the kicker: Abby has to pretend to be straight. Meanwhile, Abby is keeping a secret of her own from Harper: she intends to propose to her over the holiday break.
The warmth of the Caldwell family home’s decorations is contrasted by the parents’ cold treatment of their adult daughters. Harper’s father Ted (Victor Garber) is a presumably conservative councilman-turned-mayoral candidate, and her uptight mother Tipper (the always-terrific Mary Steenburgen), named after another famously prudish political spouse perhaps, is obsessed with curating a perfect holiday soiree to help Ted’s chances of securing the higher office. As we meet Harper’s sisters, we realize just how much their parents’ expectations have weighed on them. The parents specialize in dishing out cutting passive aggressive remarks to relay their disappointment about their daughters’ career and family choices.
Jane (Mary Holland, also the screenplay’s co-writer), Harper’s eccentric older sister, clearly occupies the lowest rung on the totem pole, primarily relied upon by Ted to help with technology and air filter troubleshooting problems. Easily the most lovable Caldwell sister throughout the movie, Jane is a frustrated author, and has been spending a decade happily building out an elaborate mythical fantasy world that fails to capture the attention of her family. She also paints and is sweet, open, and honest — personality traits that evade her siblings. Jane and Harper’s cruelly dispassionate older sister Sloane (Alison Brie), who has clearly inherited her mom’s uptightness, soon arrives to the family’s deluxe suburban home to cattily compete with Harper and belittle Abby as often as possible.
The fact that Sloane surrendered a promising legal career for apparent marital bliss, with husband Eric (Burl Moseley) and adorable-but-mischievous twin kids Matilda (Asiyih N’Dobe) and Magnus (Anis N’Dobe) in tow. Harper is her parents’ “perfect girl,” as Ted himself reveals.
The plot thickens when we meet two key figures from Harper’s past, her old high school girlfriend Riley (Plaza) … and her old high school boyfriend Connor (Jake McDorman). We discover that Harper’s parents are not-so-subtly conspiring to reunite Connor and Harper, inviting him to family functions without Harper’s prior knowledge. Harper finds herself being pulled away from Abby repeatedly, by her father, who recruits her to reshape his campaign stumping speeches, and her hometown friends, all of whom are pining for her reunion with Connor, too. Soon Abby finds herself on the outs with the family, she finds herself confiding in Riley about her relationship with Harper and Harper’s uneasiness with her authentic self. Things come to a head at an intense Christmas Eve party, as naturally they should in this kind of movie.
Our three leads are typically high-quality. The supporting cast, too, is absolutely stacked. Beyond terrific turns from Steenburgen, Garber, and Holland, Dan Levy is reliably great as Abby’s attentive best friend, John, who works in publishing (you can probably guess who this works out well for), cheerfully tracks everybody in his life as he’s in the NSA, and doles out sage advice for Abby at crucial moments, and Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer plays Harry Levin, a wealthy possible donor for Ted’s campaign, who is incredibly thorough in her vetting of candidates’ families.
Beyond the excellent cast and some well-executed set pieces, Duvall and her team deftly juggle slapstick and biting character-based exchanges with equal aplomb. Composer Amie Doherty’s delicately festive score (replete with clever chiming bell cues) and cinematographer John Guleserian’s cozy holiday framing choices chip in to make this a stellar all-around production.
We’re about to dive into deeper spoiler territory after the picture below. So steer clear if you haven’t given this gem a gander just yet.
This critic is not the only viewer who feels that this cute, festive rom-com ends with our heroine choosing the wrong gal. The furor grew so much online that Duvall herself chose to respond to it. In a typical romantic comedy, Abby would have a dalliance with Riley, Harper’s justifiably miffed high school ex, and ultimately either pick one or the other. Here, though, Abby’s relationship with Riley is decidedly chaste, there is never a moment where they develop any kind of romantic feelings towards each other. Riley instead becomes just a friendly sympathetic sounding board as Abby works through her feelings about Harper covering up their relationship and being receptive to Connor’s pursuit.
As The Ringer notes in an essential podcast conversation, by the third act, we realize the extent of Harper’s selfishness. Riley reveals to Abby that, when they dated in high school, Harper threw Riley under the bus and outed her girlfriend to protect her own reputation. As Harper digs further into the lie covering up her relationship with Abby and continues to ditch her at practically every opportunity, this critic at least found himself hoping for a Riley and Abby union. Both characters are incredibly comfortable with who they are, and seem to click pretty easily. We are rooting for Abby when she ultimately breaks things off with Harper, frustrated at the way her girlfriend has minimized her to family and friends and has let Connor continue to obnoxiously, persistently pester her. Harper also quickly falls into petty, childish violence against her sisters.
That is not to say that these characters are not very well-realized (because they are) or that their decisions don’t make sense to us within the logic of this world (because they do). This is a very good, family-friendly holiday movie. People make choices in real life with which we can disagree, and ultimately that is what happened here, for this viewer at least. Abby deserved more than Harper was ready to give her until very, very late in the game. In a mid-credits scene, it is at least heartening to see that Riley remains friends with the re-coupled Abby and Harper.