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Happiest Season Movie Review

Happiest Season is a 2020 romantic comedy film directed by Clea Duvall and starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. It’s basically an LGBT version of a clichéd romantic comedy.

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“Have they ever met a lesbian?“

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It is about a lesbian couple where one is out and the other is closeted. She brings her to her family for Christmas, but repeatedly fails to admit everything to her parents. Eventually, everything turns out great and the family rejoices of course. There are many things here that I absolutely loved, but most of those came in the first half of the movie with the second half being an utter disappointment.

Everything in regards to the coming out process was greatly handled. The speech at the end that Dan Levy’s character gives to Kristen Stewart’s character was important as it grounded the previously overly black and white movie in the grey reality. Some people just can’t come out as easily as others, or ever really. And everybody should respect others’ choices.

Harper’s former girlfriend was great and Aubrey Plaza was very well cast in the role. All of the scenes between Abby and her were terrific. Another standout was Dan Levy. Although nowhere near as funny or as memorable as he was in the great ‘Schitt’s Creek’, he was still very good here and most of his scenes were among the funniest in the entire flick. Abby and John’s friendship was wonderful.

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But that’s pretty much it. I strongly disliked most of the other characters. Abby herself is amazing, a lot of fun and very likable and relatable to me. Kristen Stewart delivered one of the better performances of her career and the casting of her was pitch-perfect. Mackenzie Davis was also very good as Harper, but the character to me was quite off-putting. She’s well developed and you do get where she’s coming from, but in some scenes she went too far, making me question whether or not she deserves Abby in the first place.

I despised Harper’s whole family. They were all terrible American stereotypes. Christmas here was ruined with their obsessive planning, and thus the movie was nowhere near as charming as it sought to be. And how many times before have we seen a family led by parents who attempt desperately to be perfect as well as their children? I am tired of this particular family dynamic in American comedies and I want it to die off already.

Sloane is very unlikable and bitchy, Jane is your standard offbeat geek archetype and both of the parents are also stereotypes, both underdeveloped and one-note. Most family sequences in the movie were frustrating how clichéd they were and the fact that the film put those in first place and the lesbian romance in second spelled its doom.

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Happiest Season ended very predictably and I really disliked the entire third act. That conflict between the sisters was just so nineties in its tiresome, over-the-top rom-com shenanigans. So yes, this was the LGBT version of the standard romantic comedy, but I myself dislike such movies, so this one was very disappointing to me.