Roos Delivers Happy Endings
The three main plot lines in Endings center on an opportunistic young woman who seduces first a young gay man and then his wealthy father; a gay couple who suspect their lesbian best friends have stolen their sperm; and a morally-challenged wanna-be filmmaker who blackmails a woman with information on the child she gave up for adoption 20 years ago.
Roos, himself a gay man, seems understandably compelled to explore gay relationships in his films; Sex features a gay central character, and his project in between that and Happy Endings, Bounce, was his self-professed litmus test to see if he could “write straight” again.
It is perhaps ironic, then, that the gay subplots in Endings are the least interesting of the film-maybe this territory is a bit too familiar for him. (Sometimes writing what you know just produces pedestrian results.) What resonates most here, in large part due to sublime performances from Lisa Kudrow and Tom Arnold (yes, the same) in the roles, are the characters of the two parents: Frank, the wealthy dad, and Mamie, the woman who gave up her child years before. Both characters provide wonderfully vulnerable canvases on which Kudrow and Arnold paint heart-breaking portrayals. The rest of the cast rounds out a little unevenly, though.
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Steve Coogan (recently of 24 Hour Party People) seem intent on making their characters as unlikable as possible, even though their parts don’t necessarily demand it. Bobby Cannavale as Mamie’s Mexican masseuse boyfriend delights as usual, though, and Jesse Bradford gives a wonderfully wounded, layered performance as Nicky, the documentarian. But even among such storied costars, Kudrow and Arnold offer textured, vulnerable performances that stand out as exemplary.
Kudrow’s Mamie pretends to have a blasÃ?© exterior but is in actuality filled with deep emotion and longing, while Arnold’s Frank has every reason to be hardened and detached but is instead a hopeless, incurable romantic with a deep capacity for love.
It is precisely this optimism in the face of a sometimes harsh reality which is Roos’s signature as a filmmaker. Both Happy Endings and Sex have a cuttingly sardonic quality to them which masks a latent sentimentality. They also both feature young, pregnant women who have no interest in or business being mothers.
In both films, however, the pregnancies consistently help them become better people, once again betraying Roos’s penchant for childlike optimism. This is not a bad thing. It shows sophistication on his part that he can simultaneously portray humanity both at its most cruel and at its most vulnerable and promising-it is this skill which brought Alexander Payne, for instance, such recognition for his film, Sideways, last year.
As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Roos’s Bounce was lacking in the gay department, and also lacking in the delightful edge that his other two films have-making one wonder if in “writing straight” Roos loses the essential, scathing counterbalance to his softie inclinations.
Happy Endings certainly has its flaws. The structure of its first several minutes, with the cutesy, wink-wink captions, feel like a forced joke, and the music gets obtrusive at times. Also, as alluded to above, it’s hard to find an emotional inlet to some of the storylines and characters. But the elements that do ring true break your heart, and more than make up for these deficiencies. This is a movie for those who, in spite everything, still harbor a wry, cautious optimism about the world.
