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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: Lions Gate
Salesrank: 30351
Released: November 15, 2005 |
| Our Price: $2.93 |
| Used Price: $0.97 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
THIS WEAVES MULTIPLE STORIES TO CREATE A WITTY LOOK AT LOVE,FAMILY & THE SHEER UNPREDICTABILITY OF LIFE ITSELF.
Description of Happy Endings:
"It's a comedy, sort of," a title card announces at the start of Happy Endings--just after Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) has been hit by a car. So it is, but talk about an unhappy beginning! Never fear, writer/director Don Roos will fulfill the promise of that title in several unexpected ways. The story then flashes back to 1983 for Mamie's life-altering encounter with her stepbrother. Mamie and Charley (Steve Coogan) will struggle with its consequences for the rest of the film. Does her teen pregnancy explain the fact that she became an abortion counselor or that he came out of the closet? Roos doesn't say, but nor does he judge. He loves his characters--foibles and all--in his ambitious, Altman-esque follow-up to the acerbic, yet heartfelt The Opposite of Sex. As before, Kudrow is the center around which the other plotlines revolve (and her uptight, yet likable Mamie couldn't resemble TV’s Phoebe less). In the end, though, Maggie Gyllenhaal's seductive Jude and Tom Arnold's sensitive Frank are Roos' most inspired creations. Their relationship is one of contemporary cinema's oddest and most touching. The happy ending for one will be real, the other imaginary, but everyone will earn the one they get. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Happy Endings Reviews:
Classic indy-type effort 
2008-03-26 - Lots of hand-held shots and relationship-driven drama get around a limited budget. The knowingly self-referential indy filmmaker also has an important part in one of the three Pulp-Fiction-style relationships that eventually intertwine, somewhat incoherently.
Was the movie worth the investment in time? Yes, it's good enough for that. Lisa Kudrow and Tom Arnold are great in their roles. I wouldn't make a monetary investment in the movie though. It's not *that* good.
Multiple Plots And Intersecting Characters Make This Relationship Comedy An Ambitious Success 
2007-03-27 - When Don Roos' "The Opposite of Sex" dropped into theaters almost ten years ago, I instantly became a fan. That film featured Christina Ricci's first grown-up character and easily her best and most fully realized performance to date. Wicked and cynical and bitterly funny, it is a film that manages to strike an unusual balance. Taking the coming-of-age genre, turning it upside down with great doses of political incorrectness, but ultimately grounding things with a realness--it is a deft comedy that stands the test of time. Taking a detour with the Paltrow/Affleck weepie "Bounce," Roos fashioned an earnest if not particularly entertaining film. Finally, after a five year hiatus, Roos returns with another film--the coyly titled "Happy Endings." An ambitious, and heavily populated, ensemble comedy--"Happy Endings" may be gentler in spirit than "The Opposite of Sex," but it is no less worthy.
In the film's opening moments, a woman is frantically running down the street and is plowed into by a car. The accident appears to be serious, but as we pull away from the wreckage--the film announce itself as a comedy. It's hard not to appreciate that! However, I was still fearful that this was going to be one of those impossibly quirky pictures that people seem to love so much. But I needn't have worried. Telling multiple intersecting stories, "Happy Endings" puts together an unlikely cast including Lisa Kudrow, Jesse Bradford, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter, Tom Arnold, Laura Dern, Steve Coogan, and Bobby Cannavale (and many others). And while there is a certain preciousness to the film, and while some of the situations seem unlikely or outlandish--the film's contrivances end up be overshadowed by the able cast and genuinely funny script. The characters, even engaged in the most bizarre circumstances, are still grounded in a reality that makes this relationship picture work.
For, at heart, "Happy Endings" is all about exploring different relationships. Covering plotlines involving abortion, blackmail, golddigging, incest, stolen sperm, prostitution, and sexual variations of all kinds--this film sounds much more distasteful than it actually is. It is within these deviant stories that we uncover the dynamics that make complex relationships work or not. The film's many entanglements include different variations--brother/sister, gay couples, father/son, younger woman/older man, heterosexual couples, counselor/client, and so much more. With smart and funny dialogue and appealing performers, it's hard not to get caught up in the film's ribald spirit.
I'm not saying that "Happy Endings" is a perfect film, but I admired it's scope. I was fascinated by the various stories--even the ones I didn't particularly believe. The picture wraps itself up fairly neatly--which one might suspect from its title. But overall, I found "Happy Endings" to be engaging, witty, and entertaining with some nice dramatic moments sprinkled in with the outrageousness. It's all edited together deftly as you spend just the right amount of time with each story before moving on. Never dull, the intriguing "Happy Endings" is definitely worth a look. KGHarris, 03/07.
3.5 stars really. Excellent performances with a muddled script
2007-01-07 - As others have indicated, HAPPY ENDINGS just has a few TOO MANY storylines going on. It is inevitable that some of them get short shrift. I'd say the story line about the lesbian couple working on having a child that might or might not be the offspring of one partner in a male couple feels just a little contrived and a bit uninteresting. That's a bit of shame, because the result is that Laura Dern is wasted.
The primary "plot" deals with Lisa Kudrow's character, who gave up a child for adoption as a teenager, and is now confronted with the possibility of knowing what happened to her child...but in order to do so, she must work with a blackmailing documentary filmmaker wannabe. Confusing? Well, it's not confusing when you watch it, but it also doesn't make much sense. She becomes interested in both the making of a documentary and the loony-tunes filmmaker himself. The way this film progreses and the work they do on it is not constructed very convincingly...and while I REALLY like the work Lisa Kudrow does, this plot point was meandering at best.
But the performances ARE very lively and convincing for the most part. Kudrow is very good indeed, as is Maggie Gylenhaal. And I want to give kudos to Tom Arnold. This man is often thought of as a mere bozo or an idiot, and he has indeed played that part in many awful movies. But once in awhile, he does something to make me wish more directors would give him more to work with. TRUE LIES was a great movie that he nearly stole. And in HAPPY ENDINGS, he plays something kinda rare...a well-to-do middle-aged white man who is actually a decent person. And he pulls it off. Arnold has an air of humbleness to him that he incorporates well into his part. I certainly haven't approved of much of his public behavior, but his problems have molded the things he can draw on as an actor, and they served him well.
Bobby Cannavale is a fun actor, but his part is very underwritten. I REALLY liked him in THE STATION AGENT (a must see). Steve Coogan's role is also written a bit broadly, but he does a fine job nonetheless.
See it for the acting, and a few affecting moments. But if you want taught construction, an effective resolution, deeper meaning, you'll be disappointed. My wife and I enjoyed watching the film, and didn't feel we had wasted our time...but it does have its problems. Not for children!
The moral to the story of this film is... 
2006-11-15 - Trying to create an art film by pretending to question what they pretend are not actually the very controversial topics that they are (i.e. abortion, homosexuality, invitro fertilization, etc) within many subplots...this film ultimately fails by purposely failing to make a main plot out of any intellectual points of question brought about in the story.
It is almost like the director Don Roos had just taken a screenwriting class and was trying to incorporate various taught film mechanics into an independent film. The captioning that is spread throughout the film is almost cliched and ultimately leads the viewer down deadends.
Does Mamie regret not aborting the son she later meets after the whole movie is intertwined with what blackmail she goes through to meet him? She seemed to have no intention of hunting down her given-up child before being blackmailed to do so. After she does meet him, which is shown without any audible dialogue or real interaction, there is nothing more shown about the subject, other than her dancing at the end and he is in the room.
All we know is that she nervously claims not to be "pro-life" after Jude derides her for referring to her fetus as a baby. The only real reaction we are given is overblown and questionable.. after she runs out of the boy's home and is subsequently hit by a car. We are told at the beginning that she is not dead, and we are shown this at the end. But to just be "not dead" at the end is not a very good character analysis.
Most of the characters are dealing with new cultural troubles such as: questions about who a son's sperm donor was, a homosexual affair, a gay boy being blackmailed for his very gayness, a girl questioning abortion because she does not know if the child is this gay boy's or his fathers...this all seems to be presenting us with problems that are problems of problems.
I think Roos is just trying to present these problems as problems to be considered as "normal problems," and not for what they are. He does not help us understand these problems through any point of view on his part. Maybe this is because he does not know anything more about them than just being able to identify them. It is as if he had originally been unaware that adultery, sex business work, and abortion causes such identifiable problems? Well, I guess it's a start, but it makes quite an intellectually devoid and soul-less film experience. It's almost like he has just made a trite list.
I think the actually presented irony of "happy endings" by Mamie's anxiety over what Javier says they are for the women he lays is one of the few real clues given that could help to really identify this "sad" film...but this is definitely not a purposeful premise on the part of the director.
A brilliant beginning and middle can only reap a happy ending! 
2006-09-15 - I have to say that `Happy Endings' will go down as one of the most fulfilling experiences I've had with cinema this year. At the film's closing I was left content and approving, never once feeling gypped or left wanting. I was completely satisfied, which is funny because I've read a few reviews where people loved everything but the ending, but to me you can't go wrong ending on a close-up of the wonderfully talented Maggie Gyllenhaal singing us a lullaby.
`Happy Endings' (a title made in reference to the act of making a massage customer EXTRA happy) is a collage of people's lives interacting and eventually coming together for a `happy ending'. We have Mamie (Kudrow) who at a young age was impregnated by her step-brother Charley (Coogan) and since then they've had very little contact. Charley is now `out of the closet' and living with is boyfriend Gil (Sutcliffe) whose best friend Pam (Dern) and her lover Diane (Clarke) have just had a son (Pam being the mother) and are starting to ware on Charley's sanity. Mamie on the other hand is involved with massage therapist Javier (Cannavale) and is not the slightest bit happy with her life, and that only gets worse after meeting Nicky (Bradford) who claims to know where her illegitimate son (the one she had with Charley and then gave up for adoption) is and wants to reunite them under the circumstance that he can film it for his documentary submission into film school.
Then we have Jude (Gyllenhaal), a young attractive floozy who joins a band fronted by Otis (Ritter), a young boy confused about his sexuality and somewhat obsessed with his boss (Charley). Jude exploits that fact, manipulating him into have sex with her in order to steer his father Frank (Arnold) away from speculation his homosexuality, and then using it as blackmail against Otis, forcing him to help her hook up with his father. She is clearly only after his money (he's loaded) and this upsets Otis, but the idea of his father condemning his sexuality leave him no choice but to assist Jude.
As these stories collide we are only drawn to each character, good and bad, and brought to an understanding of what each of them needs to be truly happy. In the end we are given one long `happy ending' showing the outcome of all of these situations and how everyone involved was affected by the outcome...all except for Jude. Her ending is pure speculation, and while that may distress some it really made sense to me. Jude was by far the most engaging and interesting character in the film, due in part to Gyllenhaal's brilliant Oscar caliber performance, and to have her be the only one to get nothing out of the interaction in a way leaves me satisfied, for she was also the most mysterious of the group, for while her intentions where clear what was unclear was her motivation.
Gyllenhaal did absolutely outstanding here, delivering a performance that outweighed most I've seen all year and definitely deserved some awards attention. Also, Kudrow did wonderful, playing against type, but not `Wonderland' against type for her character still infused the comedic timing she is so well loved for...she just honed it into a more mature comedy. Tom Arnold and Steve Coogan are also wonderfully cast, and while she's only on screen a short time, Laura Dern is always a pure delight. I would recommend this film to anyone for it truly was the most satisfying experience, one of at least, I've had for all of 2005.
