Everyone knows that couple. The perfect couple, the insanely happy couple, the inseparable pair that … you just hate them. Tom (McHale) and Janet (Bishé) are that couple, and they’re so blissfully, ecstatically, infuriatingly in love after 14 years of marriage that they don’t realize that everyone loathes everything about them. Well, not until their supposed best friends, disdainful celebrity chef Val (Scheer) and acerbic wife Karen (Zea), pointedly disinvite them from a couples’ weekend away. Of course, their natural instinct is to write all this off as jealousy – until a peculiar man (Root) turns up at their house and informs them that, not only are they weird, they’re actually breaking the cosmic order. No one is meant to be this contented, he says, and something must be done about it.
For his feature debut, wrirer/director BenDavid Grabinski revels in misdirection and ambiguity. Something is definitely awry, but is it Tom and Janet, or is it the universe? Or is the natural order of things wrong, if their happiness can cause so much misery? And misery it causes, as Happily drifts into the same kind of sci fi-tinged bourgeois relationship drama territory as Elizabeth Moss/Mark Duplass four-hander The One I Love, or the dimension-hopping dinner party of indie fave Coherence. Snide, sleek, and effortlessly biting, Happily is wittier and meaner than either, but also curiously romantic, like an episode of The Twilight Zone with a score by the Mountain Goats.
Speaking of scores, the unnerving, percussive work by Joseph Trapanese sets the tone, but it’s the additional songs that give a twisted insight into these 40-somethings and their jealous, dysfunctional, normal friends. It takes some real guts to even risk using “Tonight is What it Means to be Young” from Streets of Fire, or The Lost Boys‘ sax banger “I Still Believe,” but Grabinski pulls it off.
But best of all, Grabinski finally works out what to do with Joel McHale as a lead in a film. Bar his hilarious turn as a bemused FBI agent in The Informant! and pitch-perfect casting as his old nemesis Chevy Chase in A Futile and Stupid Gesture, cinema has never seemed to mesh with the Community star’s brand of endearing snark. There’s something of early Ryan Reynolds about him, the funny character actor in a leading man’s frame, but no one has given him a Deadpool to break him out of that rut. Happily doesn’t quite get him over the brink, but it’s close to when Reynolds started playing with more obtuse material like The Voices or The Captive. McHale always seems most dangerous when he’s earnest, and he and Bishé (as perfect a pairing as Tom and Janet) play up to the straight-faced farce of Happily, letting its devious and uncomfortable final lessons seep through.
Available now on VOD and via Alamo On Demand.
This article appears in March 26 • 2021.
