It’s the most wonderful time of the year: snow is falling, lights are twinkling, children travel home to visit their families and make new memories together. Everybody wants to have a perfect Christmas. But what happens when you throw in a secret that could potentially ruin everything? It’s what the women of Happiest Season — director Clea DuVall, co-writer Mary Holland, and stars Mackenzie Davis and Kristen Stewart – present with generosity, wit, love, and plenty of Christmas cheer.
Harper (Davis) and Abby (Stewart) have a perfect relationship — loving, patient, understanding — but the stakes are about to get higher, and their devotion is about to be put to the test: Abby is planning on asking Harper to marry her on Christmas Day, and Harper has invited Abby home to spend the holidays with her family — who think both women are straight.
Stewart plays the frustration of keeping Harper’s secret perfectly, her often chilly physicality softening a bit in the name of love — the star infuses her performance with a sense of control, conveying moments of both comedy and vulnerability. She is aided by a sharp script from DuVall and Holland, so quotable you can already see the Happiest Season Cinematic Universe (HSCU) expanding before your eyes (“She is not a rice cooker,” Abby’s best friend points out, offended by the potential marriage proposal). Davis is engaging, too, as Harper, channelling a similar scared but loving energy to her character as that exhibited in Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’ episode – although where that storyline felt evenly split between its two lovers, this film belongs more to Abby.
A lively, attractive paean to impressing and caring for the ones you love.
Happiest Season also thrives on the chemistry between its family members: Alison Brie has a blast playing uptight and acerbic older sister Sloane; Mary Steenburgen is endlessly entertaining as the self-conscious, social media-savvy matriarch; and every scene Mary Holland is in becomes all the better for it — no-one is better written than the desperately peppy middle sister, Jane. And then there’s Abby’s best friend John (_Schitt’s Creek_____’s Dan Levy on tremendous form) and Harper’s ex-girlfriend Riley (Aubrey Plaza, always a joy).
It’s an embarrassment of riches, a lively, attractive paean to impressing and caring for the ones you love which grapples with the impossible expectations of perfection and happiness — all in the name of a good Christmas. It’s more complicated than just saying the right words at the right time: the glee of the holidays, here, must be earned.
