Happy Endings

—Overview
—Photos
—About this Film

Everyone has secrets. Everyone tells at least a few lies (or omits the truth, at any rate). Sometimes it just seems like the right thing to do. These secrets and lies may even keep others or us from pain.

Happy Endings is an amalgam of somewhat interrelated stories that all revolve around secrets and lies. Like many independent films in the last few years, the ensemble story telling gives us a chance to see the story in a broader context than films with simpler plots. If not done well, it can be confusing and distracting. On the other hand, when done well, it can show us the ways in which what one person does often has effects on a wide range of people. Happy Endings ends up somewhere in the middle of these two poles. It doesn’t quite make it to uniting the stories into a whole. Because of that, it seems a bit unconnected when all the loose ends don’t quite get tied up.

The moral of the film, put simply, is that honesty is the best way to find happiness. Each of the characters has secrets they have hidden for some time. Otis is gay, but doesn’t want his father to know. Mamie gave up a child many years ago and never told her step-brother Charlie who fathered the child that she didn’t have an abortion. Charlie thinks that a lesbian couple stole Charlie’s partner’s, Gil, sperm to have a child. Gil doesn’t want Charlie to know he’s had an affair with someone else. And the list goes on.

As the film progresses, many of these secrets come to light. It is in the unfolding of the secrets that people find their liberation – and a bit of salvation.

Throughout the film, we are shown a statement of the truth in half of the screen. In a sense, we know the truth, even as we are being told the lie. In some ways, that commentary by the film makers seems a bit distracting, but as I look back, it serves as a guide as we watch to know what is and is not real.

The key metaphor about truth and falsehood is the documentary being made. Nicky is blackmailing Mamie with information about the son she gave up long ago. He doesn’t really want money; he wants to make a documentary about their reunion. Instead, Mamie and her lover Javier, a massage therapist, convince him to make a film about Javier as a sex worker. (“Happy ending� refers to the extra “service� that might come with a message.) This documentary is staged. It is truly fiction. So too are the lives of the various people in the film. They think they are living authentically, but in reality they are really just staging their lives.

In the end, most of the people find a happy ending – not the euphemism for the massage, but years of satisfying life. Those who find this satisfaction are the ones who have faced their secrets and let them go. Those who continue to hang on to their lies are doomed to less gratifying futures.

Although the film doesn’t hang together as well as it might, it still serves to give us a look at the importance of the truth in our lives and the destructive nature of that which we try to hide.

—Overview
—Photos
—About this Film