NETWORKED Dysfunctional Families, Reproductive Acts, and Multitasking Minds Make for Happy Endings

NETWORKED Dysfunctional families, reproductive acts, and multitasking minds make for Happy Endings

BY ALISSA QUART

DON ROOS IS A clever guy. You can week of his life a nurse will remind him Like many other multitasking web- tell by the way that, with his new film of Jude, and she will think his smiles are inflected films, Happy Endings is set in Happy Endings, he’s stopped worrying for her.” These cinematic footnotes are Los Angeles. But its lush, bright look and learned to love his web browser, con- neither postmodern pom-poms nor per- departs from the grim neo-noir-morbid necting one scene to the next through versely interjected spoilers. Rather, they L.A. we’ve grown accustomed to at the happenstance and linking text. It’s all give us information in a way that reflects movies, evoking a sense of fertility and, as very Google meets Robert Altman. our mental processing. After all, how Roos put it during our interview, “a Gar- In fact, Happy Endings could serve as often in “real life” do we hear the end of a den of Eden feel.” Like Magnolia and proof for the currently fashionable theory Crash, as well as more conventional Los that we shouldn’t worry that our web- Roos takes the baggy Angeles–traversing narratives like Collat- based, video-game-loving culture is dumb- eral, Happy Endings is predicated on the ing us down. Watching Happy Endings plotting of the Altman feeling generated by the act of de-repress- you too can conclude, as some of our picaresque into web ing the city, foregrounding it instead of brightest young pundits have, that multi- using it as an anonymous, generic back- task entertainment actually makes us territory: in Happy Endings drop. Roos plays up the L.A.-ness of L.A., sharper. If this is true, the new genre Happy playing games with time but what results isn’t a teeming melting Endings belongs to—hyperlink cinema— pot, à la Crash. It’s “about fluid, about could be the most IQ-enhancing of all. and personal history are a pools, lotions, and semen,” Roos says, Happy Endings, which Roos also given, and there are more with glorious precision. “I am fascinated scripted, joins his The Opposite of Sex by the idea of fluids and fluidity.” (98) in the hyperlink canon, alongside the plot twists than at the In its Age of Adderall mindset, its Los likes of Magnolia, Time Code, and, most John Bolton hearings. Angeles setting, and its own affinity for recently, Crash (with a special mention liquidity, Magnolia might be Happy for TV’s 24). Of them all, Happy Endings Endings’s clearest antecedent. Thankfully, is best in show. story first or see it unfold while a third though, Roos avoids P.T. Anderson’s dime- Some of this post-web film’s click-here- party explains the beginning to us? And store eschatology, cokehead metaphysics, we-want-your-eyeballs gimmicks are actu- how frequently do we wonder more about and amphibian rain shower. Roos pro- ally profound (in a glib sort of way, of how a present situation will resolve itself fesses to be a bigger fan of 24 and the course). Roos favors one device in particu- 20 years hence than how it will turn out stoned modernism of Robert Altman— lar: captions underneath or alongside a next week? The footnotes accompanying Short Cuts and Altman protégé Alan split-screen image. At the start of the film certain images cater to these and other Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. are obvious the words “She’s not dead” accompany information-processing proclivities, mak- forerunners. Like Altman and Rudolph, the image of a woman who’s been hit by a ing viewers feel that their minds have Roos is dependent on actors acting: car and lies broken and bloody on the been, well, understood. Happy Endings playing ugly, singing improbably, or unex- road. Later, when Frank, a middle-aged anticipates what viewers want to know pectedly appearing nude, with the great widower, has an affair with Jude, a lubri- about a given moment and fills them in cious grifter half his age, their lovemaking before they even realize what they wanted. TOP: A post-jiggy Lisa Kudrow and Bobby is annotated: “He will have sex with just By preempting the audience’s narrative Cannavale. BOTTOM: The Happy Endings clan two more [women] past Jude. In the last desire, Roos speaks to it directly. have their cake and eat it too

July-August 2005

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audience, anticipating the premonitory through these acts: emotion, identity, and captions of Happy Endings). The film had DNA, rather than disease. Indeed, all three of a bunch of similarly bratty assets: Ricci and Happy Endings’s storylines involve preg- an acerbic Lisa Kudrow, and a mock-homi- nancy and a gay father. Each outcome sug- cidal hatred of the nuclear family (remem- gests the highly variable permutations that ber when a mock-homicidal hatred of the the act of intercourse can produce. One family was an indie-film prerequisite?). In pregnancy storyline combines gay patri- The Opposite of Sex, the family is a mony and adoption. Another, in which a twisted thing, but no more so than Roos’s wife-to-be almost gives birth to her fiancé’s nonnuclear menages. Nevertheless, his grandson, is narrowly averted. films always let us know that our best hope Roos is more comfortable talking about lies in the families we make as opposed to his film in terms of sexuality than gay par- the ones we’re born into. enthood, although he admits that he and Roos’s debut earned him the chance to his male partner recently adopted a child direct the $35 million Bounce (00) from his and that the film probably enabled him own script. Its premise contains a pair of to work out some of his own issues. Roos fundamentals: an offscreen death “Happy Endings is about the strangeness that triggers a strange new romance and a of sex,” says Roos. “It’s about the inability toxic falsehood at that romance’s root. to accept ourselves as sexual people and Unfortunately, the film, starring Ben the transmission of consciousness through Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow when they sex—that through sex you can give birth were still a celebrity couple, became an to another consciousness. When the char- overfed paint-by-numbers tearjerker. acters unite it is like original sin: two peo- “After feeling like I had taken off my ple who shouldn’t be together getting clothes with The Opposite of Sex, I wrote together. They then need to be forgiven.” a straight film that was meant to be Happy Endings’s various original sin directed by someone else,” says Roos. narratives, in which action multiplies like “No one wanted to direct it. Initially, it reproducing cells, echo the way informa- was an uneasy picture, but then they tion proliferates on the web. If Roos and tested it in New Jersey. As a result, they other hyperlink directors keep going, went and made it more middle class. Ini- hyperlink cinema might end up being the tially, the main character was unlikable, new Hollywood we’ve been waiting for. and you felt unsafe about the two leads Zola, Six Feet Under, and a search engine ending up together, but then they made all rolled into one: what could be better? the Affleck character less unpleasant. The narrative cleverness of the film Today I like it for its performances, but I may borrow something from popular am not a fan of the film.” Roos swears he technology. But Happy Endings neverthe- will never make a movie like it again. “I less gets at something very human, can’t work in a system where my job is traversing from one state of unfulfillable not to offend people,” he says. “The trick yearning to another, from one replacement is to make a film for so little money child to another, from a gold-digging nobody cares. Then you don’t have to do grifter to a blackmailer, from resentful gay an audience test. I’ll never test a film ever, parents to bad straight relationships, from ever again.” the film’s self-reflexivity to a docudrama- within-the-film. AND SO, IN SHARP CONTRAST to The best thing about Happy Endings is Bounce, Happy Endings cost only $5 mil- that, like hyperlinking itself, it’s irremedi- lion. As well as returning to a smaller ably relativist. Information, character, and scale and the creative freedom that goes action co-exist without hierarchy. And we with it, the film also revisits the same are always one click away from a new life, moral landscape as The Opposite of Sex: a new story, and new meaning, all equally both movies seem heavily defined by captivating but no better or worse than notions of original sin and AIDS-as- what we have just left behind. n metaphor. At the beginning of both, the important deaths have already taken Alissa Quart, author of Branded, is writ- place. And, in both films, the outcomes of ing a book about American childhood. Her all sexual acts are narrative pivots. What last feature for FILM COMMENT was on The matters is what can be transmitted Stepford Wives.

JulJuly-Augusty-August 2005