This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.
Happiness for Beginners isn't a very ambitious film. Helen (Ellie Kemper) has just divorced a husband who was never right for her, someone who her brother, Mason (Esteban Benito) was never very fond of. Mason's best friend, Jake (Luke Grimes), has a thing for Helen, but Helen doesn't really know or remember who he is when we first meet them. It's quite easy from the off to work out where these two might end up. Despite its simple and straightforward narrative, though, it's a film that just loves to reiterate its core plot. Jake has a thing for Helen, just in case you missed it.
The first sequence of Happiness for Beginners takes place at Helen's wedding. This is where we first hear Mason's disapproval first hand. After an artificially written diatribe, he ends his rant with an affirmation that he isn't the only person who thinks this marriage is a bad fit because Jake agrees with him. Helen doesn't even know who Jake is at first, but he sheepishly appears from behind Mason to jog her memory. It's never established why she thinks it's reasonable that her brother's plus one, whose existence she doesn't even recall, is so against the wedding that he's currently attending. It just serves to create a strange dynamic where Jake appears as a forceful stalker type, which presumably isn't what was intended.
We're only about ten minutes in at this point, but Happiness for Beginners just keeps compounding screenplay issues. Helen and Jake meet again later, after her divorce, at a house party that Mason's throwing. She searches the party for her brother unsuccessfully, until Jake intercepts her so they can have a chat about why she's there and why she needs Mason. He's housesitting for her while she's away on a post-divorce hiking trip, and she needs to give him her keys. Jake, ever the gentleman apparently, offers to take her keys and give them to Mason. There are red flags that suggest he shouldn't be trusted with these housekeys, but the film doesn't appear to be aware of them. As such, we have to suppress any ill feelings towards what we're supposed to read as an act of kindness. In the next scene, Mason shows up at Helen's house before she leaves anyway, rendering the whole debacle at his house party redundant anyway.
That's a theme that continues throughout. Things keep happening so we can see that Jake has a thing for Helen, shortly before something else happens which means the previous thing didn't have to happen in the first place. A better film might have convinced us it was all on purpose to sell the idea of fate or something, but Happiness for Beginners continues to suffer from sloppy writing indefinitely. It's clear to see what we're supposed to think, and where we're supposed to feel positive emotions. It just never feels right because one of our lead characters comes across as creepy and the other has to ignore that for the plot to progress.
Once the hiking trip is in full swing, Jake turns up once again. There are a lot of lines that are clearly supposed to be comedic, but none of it lands. Most of the intended comedy revolves around age and feeling and being old before 40, but they're always such artificial interactions. No two characters ever have a conversation that feels in any way natural, and it doesn't seem to be the fault of the actors playing them. The dialogue is just written in such obviously pre-determined speech patterns that it becomes impossible to be invested enough to bother laughing at any of it.
For all intents and purposes, Happiness for Beginners tries to be a comfort film. It may work on a conceptual level – a woman in an unhappy marriage finds her happiness by finding herself in a new environment, with a new partner who was there all along. It's the stuff dreams are made of. But there are so many problems in its execution that it just becomes a frustrating experience instead.
