Happiest Season (2020)

Great watch, would watch again, and do recommend. There is a huge advantage in knowing as little as possible about a movie before watching it: mostly it removes expectations, and allows little surprises to delight you through the movie. I watched it because it was a Kristen Stewart movie, but was happily surprised to see Clea Duvall involved, and continually delighted to see familiar faces appear: Mary Holland, Alison Brie, and Aubrey Plaza especially. I'm honestly not familiar with "a lot" of "coming out of the closet, but not quite yet" stories, but I have seen a lot of "secrets for the holidays", and "don't tell my family x", and this is very interesting that it uses that concept to knock the wind out of the sails of the story so early. While the majority of the story is basically abuse humor, it's delivered in a way that manages to both garner sympathy for Abbie and be charmingly amusing. If the movie has a real downside, then it's that it tries to do (almost) too many things, but manages to pull it off. Yeah, I pretty much hate Harper, but that's by design, and she's a victim as much as a villain. The shift in stories as things all start to resolve is the "worst" part of it, but ultimately makes for a satisfying ending.

I was surprised by how much I liked this Hulu Christmas offering, since you can get jaded at the number of holiday romantic movies the various sources crank out every year. The movie seems to combine several sub genres here, the familiar gay coming out, dysfunctional holiday family, even bordering in romantic triangle territory. Martin Levy’s son does him proud, as Dan Levy was a real scene stealer here. I quickly decided the more of him, the better. The chemistry between the two leads wasn’t quite evident to me and I am not sure why. I saw more chemistry between Harper and Abby’s ex-girlfriend Riley, actually. Also, I think an opportunity was lost in the perpetually frowning two kids. They should have been allowed a bit more personality I think. (And what is up with all the gender neutral names for many of the female characters here? Harper, Tipper, Sloan, Riley, Harry, Kelly and Ashley. Weird. Mary Steenburgen does her usual competent job playing the wife and matriarch, though I felt they let her fade a little into the background until she asserts herself near the end. So while this movie won’t enter my cycle of Christmas movies to watch annually, I enjoyed it just fine (tinged with the shadow of regret that it wouldn’t have taken much more to be very good). The writers do not have many film credits, so I hope they continue to write and improve. I won’t change the channel if I run across it in the future.

I usually avoid Christmas movies but some of those names grabbed me - Mack Davis, Aubrey Plaza, Dan Levy, and more. All put in a great performance, the story made sense, the plot was well done, and it was a nice little town - all good.