Screen: Lucky Coffee Productions

The last scene in Happy Christmas — technically not a scene — is its best, and most frustrating.

Over the credits, flailing twentysomething Jenny (Anna Kendrick), her writer-turned-SAHM-turned-writer-again SIL Kelly (Melanie Lynskey), and Jenny’s friend Carson (Lena Dunham) sit around Kelly’s part-time office and spitball about the romance novel Jenny kind of decided Kelly should write because they don’t take much time and 50 Shades Of Grey made a frillion dollars. They debate which euphemisms to use for genitals; they rough out a dream sequence. I wish we’d seen more of that process, or seen a movie about that, with that at the center, not least because it reminds me of Paul Reiser’s great (and I believe also improvised) scat over the Diner credits.

It’s not really about that, Happy Christmas, and it’s hard to say what it is about. Disappointment, and how we manage it, to an extent: Jenny moves in with her brother Jeff (Joe Swanberg, also the director) and Kelly after a breakup, gets extremely drunk her first night in town, starts an awkward romance with the local babysitter/pot dealer, Kevin (Mark Webber), and edits his making-out skills. Kelly doesn’t engage with hers as much until Jenny and Carson, in an attempt to bond with her, tell her what to think about her life (Dunham is especially hilarious here: “No one thinks you don’t love your baby“). Kevin disappoints Jenny on Christmas Eve, so she goes home, gets operatically ripshit again, and disappoints everyone except the baby (Jude Swanberg as himself) (hee). It’s rare to see this much compassion in a movie or its characters for how moronically people act most of the time, how oblivious and self-defeating we can be; usually, the Jenny is much more of a bitch, or daffier, or so self-destructive that Something Must Be Done. Happy Christmas understands that those things (and other things) can co-exist in one person, and never resolve. A few critics complained about the ending, that the movie just kind of trailed off, and it does — but that’s how life is, mostly. You do something dumb, you say you’re sorry, the people who love you agree not to think that’s who you are, next thing.

I do still want to see another movie about what’s next for the insta-romance novel with three authors. 33 Short Films About This Medieval Bodice-Ripper We Started Writing As A Joke: would totally watch that, may have to write it myself if Swanberg doesn’t oblige me. And I suppose it is true that Happy Christmas doesn’t have high enough stakes, or a third act really at all, or Say Anything New. I don’t really care; I still liked it, in the end, because a slice of life is the best way to take it, sometimes. Dunham is hilarious, Lynskey and Kendrick remind me of people I know (and of myself sometimes), I covet that basement and all the board games — it’s 80 minutes that’s real without being tedious.

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