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 Bobbleheads at rest: Christina Ricci and Ivan Sergei in Don Roos’s directorial debut, The Opposite of Sex and famous playing small parts and the opportunist looking for a place to crash, tracked a frenzied bleach-blonde Jackie has-beens playing leads. But he takes the meets one of its employees, Otis (Jason Rit- Kennedy obsessive (Michelle Pfeiffer) on a baggy plotting of the Altman picaresque ter), a talent-free drummer. Otis is gay and cross-country bus ride to JFK’s funeral, and into web territory: in Happy Endings hasn’t come out to his father, but he sleeps Boys on the Side (95), in which three playing games with time and personal his- with Jude anyway. Otis’s father Frank (an women (Whoopi Goldberg, Mary-Louise tory are a given, and there are more plot ineluctably transcendent Tom Arnold) then Parker, and Drew Barrymore) hit the road twists than at the John Bolton hearings. falls in love with Jude. in a bid to escape their pasts and, in the The film starts off with sour, dowdy Like all hyperlink films, Happy End- case of Parker, her walled-off life as a Mamie (Lisa Kudrow)—who, as a teenager, ings toggles back and forth between its woman with AIDS. Roos’s first directorial gave up for adoption a child she had by her ending and beginning (three interwoven effort was the knowing, punchy The gay stepbrother—encountering inept aspir- storylines track the destinies of 10 charac- Opposite of Sex (98), wherein luscious, ing filmmaker Nicky (Jesse Bradford) who ters in all). When we’re given information bobble-headed teen trollop Dede Truitt claims to know her now-grown son and about a character’s fate, the action then (Christina Ricci) takes a number of tries to blackmail her into participating in clicks back to fill in the missing pieces. extended trips. She first takes off after the an exploitative documentary about their Letting the air out of audience story anxi- death of her stepfather; later, having N O I reunion. Mamie manages to divert Nicky’s ety, it is, to paraphrase the title of Roos’s seduced her stepbrother’s gay lover, she T C E L creative interest into making a film about first film, the Opposite of Narrative. heads out again with the new boyfriend in L O C her lover Javier (Bobby Cannavale), a Mex- tow, who’s under the impression that he L A B ican massage-therapist-cum-gigolo. At the THERE WERE FEW SIGNS of such has impregnated her. O K E same time, Mamie’s stepbrother, restaurant manic storytelling originality and almost The Opposite of Sex was a Sundance H T / manager Charley (Steve Coogan), has blog-like sensibility in the 50-year-old darling and for good reason. There was a S E R U become obsessed with the suspicion that his director’s earlier screenwriting, even serrated cleverness to its dialogue (“I T C I P boyfriend Gil (David Sutcliffe) is the bio- though the road movie, with its “fluid” don’t have a heart of gold and I don’t Y N logical father of a lesbian couple’s toddler. properties, has always been his favorite grow one later, okay? But relax. There’s O S : O And it’s at Charley’s restaurant that Jude genre. In the Nineties, Roos scripted sev- other people a lot nicer coming up—we T O H (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a karaoke-singing eral, including Love Field (92), which call them losers,” Dede confides to the P July-August 2005 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.

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