Review: ‘Happiest Season’ Shares A Fatal Flaw With ‘Crazy Rich Asians’

A desire to provide underrepresented demographics with their fairy tale rom-com happy ending ignores whether the core couples of Crazy Rich Asians and The Happiest Season even belong together.

Clea DuVall’s Happiest Season was supposed to be the first major studio same-sex holiday romantic comedy. Like Love, Simon, it’s exactly the kind of film that might have become par for the course following The Birdcage and In and Out had Hollywood not spent the post-9/11 era swept up in global franchise action fantasy tentpole fever. It’s not so much “the movie we need right now,” but rather the movie we needed 20 years ago, but I digress.

In another cruel irony, the film will not play in theaters this Thanksgiving, with Sony (understandably) selling the film to Hulu, where it premieres this morning. It’s also not very good, so caught up in providing a generic rom-com holiday flick for underrepresented demographics that it fails to see that its main couple is doomed.

As I noted in 2018, the crux of Crazy Rich Asians was that its core relationship was rooted in willful deception and that the “trip to meet the family” plot demanded that its sympathetic heroine be put on the defensive for the duration of the movie. Henry Golding’s Nick was, at best, naively deceptive in not telling his girlfriend (Constance Wu) that he was the Singapore equivalent of Prince Harry and heir to a family fortune.

This time, Mackenzie Davis’s Harper invites her longtime companion Abby (Kristen Stewart, giving a superb dramatic performance in what is supposed to be a frothy comedy) to spend Christmas with the family. Abby’s parents died years ago during the holiday season, which would leave her prickly enough even before the reveal that Harper lied about having previously come out to her parents. Abby has to spend Christmas with her girlfriend’s family “disguised” as a platonic and hetero friend.

That’s a fine hook, but The Happiest Season tries to have it both ways. It offers generic rom-com conventions, paper-thin characters and holiday cheer while also playing things so seriously that the film’s idea of romance starts to resemble Crimson Peak (“It’s a gothic romance…” even though they are planning to murder her). We’re left with an endless swell of pity for one half of the couple and not a little disdain for the other half.

Stewart and Davis have zero chemistry together, which may partially be because we spend little time with them before they have to put on proverbial masks. It also creates a situation where 90% of the film’s character interactions are rooted in artifice and deception. Stewart’s scenes with Aubrey Plaza (as an ex of Harper’s who platonically bonds with the new girlfriend) have real grit, emotional honesty and authenticity.

I suppose there is a version of this film where Stewart realizes that Davis isn’t “the one” and hooks up with Plaza, and that would be another way in which this films reminds us of the superior (and personal/specific) The Family Stone from 2005. Regardless, Plaza is acting in a better and more specific dramedy that isn’t concerned about being a “generic Christmas rom-com for LGBTQIA viewers.”

That lack of specificity extends to the stacked supporting cast, where Alison Brie’s icy sister, Victor Garber’s image-obsessed patriarch and Mary Steenburgen’s uh… matriarch are stuck playing stock types instead of sketched-out characters. Mary Holland does what she can as an the underappreciated sister. This makes Happiest Season into a deeply unsatisfying experience where Abby is gaslit by her girlfriend and spends the movie miserable and in emotional pain.

Yes, the movie is well aware that there’s valid reason as to why Harper might not have come out to her family yet, and Dan Levy (as the gay best pal) gets a lovely scene spelling out the stakes. However, Harper’s willingness to throw her girlfriend under the bus, in more ways than one, points to a movie with real consequences to the shenanigans. Alas, because the film’s goal, an admittedly noble one, is to offer an LGBTQIA-friendly version of the Christmas rom-com, the film presses on with its happy ending.

Likewise, the conflict between Rachel and Michelle Yeoh’s Eleanor over whether Nick was the right match (or whether Rachel would be happy within the traditional family) seemed to be a deal breaker had the movie been less determined to give Asian American moviegoers their Hollywood “happily ever after.” Despite the movie desperately trying to convince us that Abby and Harper are a “forever” couple, well, imagine Jordan Peele’s Get Out if we were supposed to somewhat sympathize with Allison Williams’ Rose even after the plot against Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris was revealed.

We’ve had plenty of conversations about how movies aimed at “not a white guy” demographics should be allowed to be as mediocre as the white dude fantasies. The Happiest Season shows why that shouldn’t be the goal.