Movie Reviews: Happiest Season (2020) & Uncle Frank (2020)

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'Tis the season of giving... and the season of needing a rest. The weeks between Thanksgiving all the way up through Hanukkah and/or Christmas and New Year's are often dubbed the happiest time of the year. But it's also undeniably the most stressful period of the calendar year as well. And this is particularly true for those of us returning to our childhood homes for the holidays as we come face-to-face with family, old friends, and all of the judgments and pressures that go along with sudden reunions with the people we were once closest to in life, the ones who know us the best, that is if they even know us at all.

Although there's a tendency to revert back to old patterns and behavior when surrounded by nostalgia, not too many of us are the same people today that we were in high school, and sometimes it's hard to make loved ones see you not for the child you were in the past but the adult you are today. And while this might be anything from annoying to awkward for a majority of heterosexuals, it can be absolutely terrifying and life-changing to LGBTQ adults who haven't come out to their family and/or friends as just the act of returning home to old wounds (and a place where you must push that part of you deep down), can be traumatic.

Fittingly, two brand new films releasing onto streaming platforms the day before Thanksgiving tackle the hopes and fears of coming out head-on, first in co-writer and director Clea DuVall's comedy "Happiest Season," which takes place during Christmas week, and the second, which is primarily set at a funeral nearly fifty years ago in writer-director Alan Ball's drama "Uncle Frank." 

An earnest and affable lightweight comedy that – thanks to its dynamic cast of Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Dan Levy, Mary Steenburgen, Aubrey Plaza, and Alison Brie – has quickly become one of the most anticipated holiday releases of 2020, "Happiest Season," plays like an overlong, sweet yet slightly stale sitcom.

Impulsively inviting her beloved partner Abby (Stewart) home for the holidays during a romantic evening out, it's only once they're in the car heading towards Harper's (Davis) family home that she confesses that she's actually never told her parents and two sisters that she's gay. Although initially shocked, Abby agrees to play the orphan roommate with no place to go since the charade will only last five days. Predictably, however, things get out of hand almost as soon as they arrive when Harper's parents (Steenburgen and Victor Garber) try reuniting her with her high school boyfriend (Jake McDorman), only for the women to bump into Harper's first-ever girlfriend (Plaza) less than five minutes later as well.

Cliched and largely laughless, as novel and (incredibly) welcome as it is to watch a gay-themed movie jump through the same formulaic hoops that we so often see in made-for-cable-television holiday romances this time of year, sadly, "Happiest Season" is a work to admire and politely smile through more than it is one to wholeheartedly enjoy. From a scene that finds Stewart literally stuck in a closet to another one that features her best friend, "Schitt's Creek" co-creator and star Dan Levy calling to ask where he could buy a lookalike fish to replace the one that we gather the inexperienced pet sitter has accidentally killed, a majority of the movie's jokes feel as tired as they do uninspired. 

Daring to make Harper a flawed and selfish protagonist whom we discover will lie to anyone to conceal her true sexual identity, "Happiest Season" gets points for working in a startlingly sad backstory surrounding her relationship with Plaza's Riley, although their characters are shortchanged a vital conversation where they can truly clear the air.

Wrapping things up in a neat bow, even if there are a few other scenes and discussions between our main ensemble cast of characters that might've strengthened the film as something more human and true than it is a largely cookie-cutter, small screen style comedy, the actors are all terrific. Unfortunately, DuVall and co-writer/co-star Mary Holland's script, which leaves much to be desired, doesn't know how to use them properly. Nonetheless, a mildly pleasant holiday diversion that you can digest right along with your pumpkin pie, even if it isn't a new repeat-worthy holiday classic, hopefully, Hulu's "Happiest Season" will earn enough viewers that we'll see some stronger, funnier LGBTQ comedies in the years to come.

Less of a holiday-centric offering than it is an offering served up for viewers during the holidays on Amazon Prime, "Uncle Frank" is a heartfelt period drama from writer-director Alan Ball that, in addition to sharing the same theme of coming out to one's family that we saw in "Happiest Season," rivals DuVall's film in terms of its enviable, first-rate cast. 

Led by the versatile, acclaimed "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," "The Da Vinci Code," and "Margin Call" actor Paul Bettany as the titular Uncle Frank, Ball's film is a who's who of scene-stealing character actors, including audience favorites Steve Zahn, Margo Martindale, and Judy Greer.

The apple of the eye of his niece Beth ("It" franchise and "Sharp Objects" star Sophia Lillis), Frank Bledsoe (Bettany) has traded his conservative, small-town South Carolina roots for New York where he works as an English professor at NYU in the late 1960s/early '70s. Following in his footsteps by attending NYU, Beth soon learns that although her uncle puts on a great show with a lesbian friend posing as his live-in girlfriend, he's actually been in a relationship with his sweet, funny Middle Eastern boyfriend Walid aka Wally (played by Peter Macdissi) for the past ten years.

Forced to return home for the funeral of his own disapproving father (Stephen Root), whom we deduce most likely knew the truth about his son's sexual orientation before anyone else, Frank drives Beth down to South Carolina. Determined to be there to support the love of his life because he knows just how much trauma will be waiting for him in the south, Wally trails behind the pair and soon joins them on the road trip, which becomes a journey into Frank's past. 

A film that's as much about Frank's need to finally let the people he loves into that part of himself that he keeps hidden as it is about his need to forgive himself and make peace with a devastating turn of events in his past for which he still feels responsible, while "Happiest Season" addressed past transgressions too, this film is vastly more sincere overall. Though still bursting at the seams with cliches and contrivances that should be far beyond the otherwise amazingly talented Ball (whose explorations into human behavior made "Six Feet Under" one of HBO's best twenty-first-century shows), thanks to the conviction and pathos of its top-notch leads, "Uncle Frank" works much better than it should.

Hindered by a rushed final act that races through an emotional payoff that it doesn't fully earn, as wonderful as it always is to see Bettany in something new that pushes him beyond his work in the Marvel franchise, the real heart of "Uncle Frank" is in Peter Macdissi's performance as Wally. Elevating an otherwise stereotypical role as the tormented Frank's saintly boyfriend, Macdissi's magnetic, cheeky delivery of certain lines – such as when he lectures Beth that niceness is used by her family to hide things – immediately wins us over. Likewise, in just one scene where he calls his mother back in Saudi Arabia from a motel phone booth, which is contrasted by Frank's return back to the motel with Beth after a wake, we realize how much more interesting the film might've been if we'd been following not Frank but Wally all along.

Disappointingly, you can nearly set your watch to certain revelations that seem to hit at precisely the same intervals that most screenwriters well-versed in the Syd Field three-act structure will recognize. However, the film's tenderness and its message about the importance of acceptance and the way that we never fully get over the traumas that inadvertently shape us for better and/or worse still feels timely nearly fifty years after the film is set, as we watch this today in Trump's America. 

Comparing the two films, which I watched back to back, "Uncle Frank" is a much more solid and substantive work than "Happiest Season," even if it isn't nearly as light, airy, and easily digestible as Clea DuVall's comedy. While both films fail to push much past the bar of average overall, they still feel well-timed to their pre-holiday release, especially this year when we especially need entertainment during the pandemic. Perhaps more willing than ever to look past their shortcomings amid 2020's wrath, hopefully, these films will find an audience in viewers who either relate to their characters' struggles to let others see them as they really are or are eager to celebrate their willingness to do as the Christmas carol says and make the yuletide (a bit more) gay. 'Tis the season, after all.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Run (2020)

Imagine you need to look something up, something you're worried might be poison, something that's frightening you, and you don’t have a smartphone. There's one computer in the house. It's on the bottom floor but because you don't want your mother knowing you're worried that she's giving you poison (because how crazy does that sound?), the only time you feel safe venturing downstairs is in the middle of the night when she’s fast asleep. 

Oh, and did I mention that you're also disabled? You're a wheelchair user who can't just flee your home, someone with multiple chronic conditions like atrial fibrillation and asthma that make you out of breath just crossing the street. This means that when you need to go down a flight of stairs to conduct this top-secret search, you must use the loud motorized lift to bring you safely down, and somehow do this without waking up your mother. That's when you discover that somehow, for some unknown reason, when you press search, the internet has suddenly been disconnected. 

Moments like these, accessibility issues that able-bodied individuals take completely for granted – including the ability to run, drive, or sneak down the stairs to use the computer – are what make the ironically named “Run” so utterly terrifying. Yet, while merely intense on one level to an able-bodied viewer, watching this as a disabled woman who's learned how to walk again multiple times after multiple spine surgeries and has been stuck in rooms or on high levels when elevators have broken down, is a harrowing experience I can’t fully describe with words. 

Still, intriguingly, although it’s centered on a bright seventeen-year-old disabled girl who’s suddenly worried that her caretaker mother might be doing her more harm than good, as viscerally, urgently thrilling as "Run" feels to a disabled viewer, it's an oddly inspiring picture as well.

With Kiera Allen cast in the role of our heroine Chloe, at last, we're watching an actress who is actually disabled in real life bring our own fears, dreams, trials, and successes to life. In fact, if you are disabled, you might want to watch this for the first time alone, because, even if, like me, you're lucky to have always had a wonderfully loving caretaker, since we so often fall prey to gaslighting by strangers and authority figures outside our circle of trust, “Run” is a far more emotional movie than I assumed it would be going in.

When we watch Chloe get up each morning and swallow a box full of medications (just for the A.M., mind you), we see ourselves. And this goes double when she uses assistive devices like a grabber to try and carefully reach a bottle on the top shelf of her bathroom medicine cabinet without her mother becoming wise. We inherently relate, understanding – even if our disability differs from hers – how frustrating it is to need to have secrets (as all human beings do) in a situation where unfairly for both our caretakers and us, we often have no choice but to depend upon them for every whim. 

“Run” is the sophomore feature from Aneesh Chaganty, who dazzled viewers in 2018 with the release of “Searching,” another thriller that places not only one scene but the entire thrust of the film around an urgent internet search. In "Run," you can tell that Chaganty did his due diligence to make sure that this film would accurately reflect the capabilities and pursuits of its young heroine. And while, par for the course of the genre, it goes a little too far in the stakes-raising, absurdly twisty third act as Chloe's mental chess match with her secretive mother Diane (the brilliant Sarah Paulson) turns more physically threatening, it's still fun to see a genre-requisite Final Girl that resembles us all.

But is her mother evil? Or is Chloe jumping to conclusions because, now that she's so close to graduating high school, and therefore asserting her own independence in college, she's begun to want it so desperately that she needs it right now? Or is there some other perfectly reasonable explanation why there's suddenly a new pill in her P.M. medicine box, one that doesn't match the name of the drug, the color it should be, and was prescribed to her mother? In the case of “Run,” it's the pill that launches a thousand suspicions and puts Chloe on hyper-alert. Diane's even-handed yet nakedly apparent defensiveness about the mysterious medication only makes her daughter more determined than ever to find out what it is and what's really going on.

Essentially, "Run" is a new version of “Searching,” by way of classic psychological domestic noir like “Gaslight,” “My Name is Julia Ross,” and “Suspicion.” And just like in Chaganty’s freshman feature, in “Run,” the question of the search gets us involved, but then he and his “Searching” co-writer Sev Ohanian pull the switch. For, just like in “The Matrix,” now that we've accepted this unusual pill, we must learn more. However, as it turns out, the pill is only the first thread, and we fear for Chloe as the fabric of the only reality she's ever known begins to unravel, with or without her mother's help. 

To a large extent, "Run" plays like gangbusters. Of course, granted, employing a major, exposition-heavy info dump to bring everything awkwardly to a head just in the nick of time feels like a disappointing cheat, even if I do like the “identity” element they incorporate very much.

But with the commitment of our leads – particularly the mix of love and hate we see in Paulson who is one of our most exciting actresses working today – and the decision to ground the film in the question of safety, which is first and foremost in the mind of a disabled individual, makes me far more prone to forgive "Run" its missteps.

Following “Searching,” which focused on a Korean-American father's desperate quest to find his sixteen-year-old daughter by looking through her online history for clues as to her whereabouts, “Run,” marks the second time that writers Chaganty and Ohanian have crafted a thriller with a minority lead. Yes, this time it's a disability, as opposed to a non-caucasian ethnicity but it's still a very welcome change to traditional suspenseful storytelling that in a perfect world, shouldn't be as revolutionary as it is.

Yet, even without reading that much into Chloe as a new kind of heroine in a genre that, in its purest form, usually focuses on women who can run, scream, and get naked before they're cut down in the night by a bloodthirsty killer, “Run” plays like a sophisticated throwback to the gaslight noirs of the 1940s. With terrific, all-encompassing work by Allen and Paulson, “Run” is a loopy, fast-paced, at times cathartic thriller that's only slightly hindered by an unnecessarily over-the-top, M. Night Shyamalan inspired twist, and one that might make you think twice the next time you take a pill or conduct a search. 

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: The Nest (2020)

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The money is coming, Rory O'Hara (Jude Law) promises. All he needs is ten more days or one more deal, whichever comes first. 

A British commodities broker who, within minutes, we can tell has built his own unique, possibly transparent kingdom on his ability to bullshit, at the start of “Martha Marcy May Marlene” writer-director Sean Durkin's new film “The Nest," Rory uproots his blended family in the states and brings them all back to England. 

Living in the early 1980s but still nursing a hangover from what Tom Wolfe dubbed the "Me Decade," Rory is, we ascertain, an avid acquirer of stuff – perhaps more for what it says about him to have said stuff than the actual stuff itself. This includes his beloved wife Allison (Carrie Coon), a blonde American beauty whose hair color and nationality he proudly announces to others as if he purchased both at a shop like the real estate and designer goods he covets. When Rory tells Allison that he can't wait to show her off, in his case, we know he means it.

Happily back on his native soil, Rory rents a massive centuries-old country estate in Surrey that's as big and empty as the promises he will soon either have to make good on or find his loved ones coming after him to collect. Although he'll be commuting to London each day to turn numbers into dollars and dollars into pounds, he plans to build a stable on the property for his equestrian wife. 

Eager to return to boarding horses and giving riding lessons to others, Allison has concrete, realistic plans that she's excited to get off the ground, if only so that she can run as free as the horses that symbolize her American independence, since, as her husband has told her, he doesn't like the idea of her working for anyone else. 

The wife on his arm who's now merely as decorative as the fur coat he surprises her with after the move, independence is something that Allison's afraid she's left behind in the states. Even before her cherished horse arrives skittish in this foreign land, we see the resignation in her eyes when she sizes up her new home. In fact, it's front and center on Allison's face when, forgetting one of the lies he's told to prop himself up as the returning king who's conquered America, Rory's old mentor/new boss gives an extemporaneous speech that directly contradicts the reason he's given Allison for the family's fourth move in ten years.

A quiet study of behavior and the co-dependent roles we play in our relationships with others whose lies we either choose to confront or support out of love and fear at upsetting the status quo, even though it's set in the 1980s, "The Nest" plays like an Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton marital drama for the twenty-first century. 

More implosive than explosive, at least until the resentment that's been pushed down below the surface as far back as a decade ago rises up to the top, the film works as well as it does because of the sheer conviction of co-leads Coon and Law. A revelation, particularly for Carrie Coon who, as divine as she is with paragraphs of dialogue, can say so much with just one exhausted look, “The Nest” is also further proof that no one plays a handsome, two-faced liar quite like Jude Law, who's cornered the market on the kind of gorgeous, egotistical men your mother warned you about since 1999's “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” 

Cleverly using source music to build an overall mood, the way that hazily romantic '80s New Wave songs waft into the room on a boom box in their teenage daughter's bedroom or blast over speakers at a nightclub helps give these otherwise largely well-behaved and restrained individuals their inner scream. 

In "The Nest," Durkin's characters are overwhelmed by design, utterly trapped by the front that they put on for others – the one that WASPs and yuppies in the Reagan and Bush years turned into a chilly art form of faux success. And although we don't quite know precisely what year this is all taking place, the fact that the stock market crash of '87 is coming seems to fill the film with as much impending dread as the lyrics to a song by The Smiths or The Psychedelic Furs. 

An external crash that will completely alter the world, although it's always out there somewhere off in the distance, the immediate crash that Durkin's impressive film focuses on most is the one in Rory and Allison's lives where so much value has been placed on things that have none compared to the living things that should and do. But that's the thing about a crash. If, for years, you've insulated yourself with excess, you don't know it's coming until you're hit. Only then, however, the first person you need to confront isn't the one you've crashed into, it's yourself. 

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.