Happy? Bah. Not likely, everyone in this Sundance-approved, dysfunctional-family drama is as miserable as it gets, from the harangued, protagonist mom, Lynn (Ellen Barkin), to her quiet, formerly-abusive ex-husband, Paul (Thomas Haden Church), and especially Lynn's smarmy, druggie teenage son (Ezra Miller). The movie, accordingly, is fairly miserable as well, although it's nearly rescued from the bottom of the art-house barrel by the brazen performances of its actors. Barkin, Church, Miller and a whole family's worth of misfits, bottom-feeders, and head-cases are brought together, throughout the course of the movie, for the marriage of Lynn and Paul's son (Michael Nardelli), but matrimony is the last thing on this film's mind when putting such a bickersome crew together in the same room. What Another Happy Family does try to do, with varying degrees of success, is explore the inner workings of a sprawling, dysfunctional family, but it tries to do way too much in a short time span, and as we're bombarded with one horrifying family tale after another, after a while we just start to feel bad. The film feels simultaneously like a more abrasive version of Parenthood, and a less funny version of Modern Family, two network television shows that, it must be said, handle the ins and outs of a crazy family with much more skill and compassion for their characters than is displayed here. Writer/director Sam Levinson isn't so much making a movie as organizing a circus, and he does an admirable job of conveying the family's mutinous, self-destructive nature and the role each member plays in the creation of the whole. is on his deathbed. What he doesn't really do is try to garner sympathy for anyone, except potentially for Alice (Kate Bosworth), Lynn's self-abusing daughter who is more conspicuous by her absence than anything else, until the final act when she makes her entrance. A wisp of a thing with sunken cheeks, scraggly hair and the look of someone who's trying to fold in on herself and poof out of existence, Bosworth gives, far and away, the strongest performance of the movie (a close second, by the way, is Demi Moore, who goes full ham as the garish hoochie-mama that Paul has remarried).Levinson's script won the Waldo Wight Screenwriting Award at Sundance, and it's easy to see why: this is a movie that glorifies strong acting and an overarching message, but for all the working parts in it, Another Happy Day just doesn't operate well as a whole. Instead of plot movement, Levinson opts to repeat increasingly uncomfortable versions of the same set pieces: kid does drugs; grandpa looks like he's dead; aunts gossip over drinks; the granddaughter is nuts, and all of it framed by round after round of five-star waterworks by Barkin. The movie tries to say an awful lot in abstracts, so what we're left with is a kind of vaguely antagonistic notion of everyone involved, including and especially the beaten-down heroine we're supposed to be sympathizing with.None of this is on Barkin, who gives an awfully strong performance, but by the time Ellen Burstyn, who plays Lynn's mother, snaps at her to suck it up and keep her problems to herself, you kind of want to agree despite everything. There's something to be said for shades of grey, but does any of this sound happy to you? Yeesh.
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