Happiest Season (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

Oof. A wildly uncharacteristic misstep for Clea DuVall takes its form in Happiest Season, a Hulu original flick that breaks some ground as one of the first gay-themed Christmas movies. But even that sentence requires some unpacking. This movie, while arguably important simply as a result of its lesbian romance in a genre created and controlled by aggressively heterosexual folks (and overwhelmingly white), still isn't really mainstream. Unless Hulu originals are now mainstream, and now that I've said that, I need a Xanax. Regardless, this movie never ends up feeling like anything but a cheap Hallmark knockoff with a slightly comedic bent as a result of its queer focus. Think I'm being unfair? It's a standard story of someone with a secret and the comedy of errors that occurs as she tries to hide her secret; her secret is her identity, and you can't tell me what results isn't commodifying her exploitation.

Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) have been dating a year, and Harper spontaneously invites Abby home for Christmas. This happens during the first scene, and let's just be clear about the unbelievably expository screenplay by DuVall and Mary Holland. People don't talk this way, first off, and so the scenes pile up with absurdities and stupidities multiplying until I half expected a band's vamp to play them off the screen like the end of bad comedy club sets. They're self-aware enough to be aware, it seems, that their audience needs information about their lives, but not self-aware enough to know that their behaviors are problematic at best and downright cruel at worst. Cruel, you ask? Cruel, says I.

Abby, you see, hasn't liked Christmas since her parents died (as her partner robotically spells out for us in the aforementioned cringe-worthy scene). Harper invites Abby on a whim, and Abby is determined to use this opportunity of meeting her parents and enjoying the holidays to propose to her girlfriend. En route, ring in the pocket and parcels packed, Harper reveals that she is not out to her parents and has only invited her apparently straight, orphaned roommate for the holidays. As an act of charity. It appeals to her wealthy family because they want to show themselves off as the perfect Americans they are. Victor Garber plays the politician father who is probably conservative even though we never hear about his platform; Mary Steenburgen plays his fastidious wife, obsessed with social appearances and her Instagram feed.

Meanwhile, Harper's siblings enter the picture as the caricatures they are meant to be. Holland plays Harper's younger sister, a stay-at-home neurotic mess who would apparently be an embarrassment to all were she not sweet with her eccentricities. Alison Brie pops in as Harper's elder sister Sloane, trapped in an unhappy and unfaithful marriage but carefully planning a separation so as to keep up appearances. And Aubrey Plaza (the only truly interesting part of the film) graces the proceedings occasionally as Harper's ex, who commiserates with Abby's pain in a series of fascinating and potent scenes. Then again, the always delightful Dan Levy is wasted utterly as Abby's gay best friend, spitting out morals in what is meant to be a humorous fashion. It's as if DuVall keeps smacking us over the head with archetypes, and each time one is introduced she eagerly reminds us to pay attention because she's going to teach us a moral lesson. DuVall, whose own work especially in queer cinema has long been insightful and even crucial to the form, must simply think a gay-ass story about festive lesbians is enough on its own merit.

I don't even like saying I don't like this movie because it is a vanguard into the religiously hetero genre of holiday fare. If we had more of its ilk, I'd cast this trash aside faster than a reindeer flying. As it is, I watch its insultingly simplistic worldview eke out of the screen in bland production design with generic red, green, and gold trimmings, in dull and absurd conversations between self-absorbed jerks, and a relative lack of joy that denies the movie's titular reason for existence.