Happy Christmas (2014)
Directed by Joe Swanberg
Written by Joe Swanberg
Starring Anna Kendrick, Lena Dunham, Melanie Lynskey, Joe Swanberg
Release Date July 24th, 2014
October 17th, 2014
Joe Swanberg broke my brain. One minute I'm flying from idea to idea, forming connections, creating thoughts and preparing those thoughts for inspection. Then, at about the 15 minute mark of Swanberg's insipid film "Happy Christmas" I first heard and then felt a crack somewhere deep in my subconscious. Where once was the snapping and popping of neurons bursting into ideas there was now but a whistle of cold wind between my ears.
Something about the complete nothingness of "Happy Christmas" simply broke me. I was puzzled at the film and to steal an apt phrase from the brilliant comedian Bill Hicks, I was not unlike a dog who'd just been shown a card trick. 'Just what the hell is going on here?' I muttered to the vast emptiness. Is he really just playing with a baby and being cute? Did we need to see people arrive at a party, hang up coats and capture snippets of meaningless stranger introductions?
The emptiness extends as we get an establishing shot of actress Melanie Lynskie, playing the wife to Swanberg's own character in the film, as she shops and then leaves the shop to arrive at her car and then places her groceries behind the front seat on the floor of her vehicle and then she gets in the car? This is a necessary sequence in a supposed feature film? This scene is followed by more baby banality, enlivened only by the attempts at character work by the lovely Lena Dunahm, attempts thwarted by director Swanberg.
"Happy Christmas," I am told, was partly scripted and partly improvised so as to give it a more realistic sensibility. That sensibility extends to the use of natural light and low quality film stock so not only is the filmmaker not bothering to write anything, he's barely decided to frame or shoot anything that might be of interest. I'm also told that there is a nam to this style of filmmaking, "Mumblecore," and that this has become a celebrated low rent art form.
Filmed folk art perhaps? How lovely, lack of style and substance excused by the categorization as an artform. Clever? Okay. Entertaining? Not so much. Anna Kendrick is the supposed star of "Happy Christmas" but she is more window dressing than character. The advantage of having a celebrity in the film helps make the argument that this is indeed a film and not merely the beginning of an idea that somehow made it past gates of the cinema and onto the big screen before it could be properly filled out.
You can see my brain is clearly broken because I get bitter when in pain. I write nasty little things about movies I don't like and act as if they have actually, physically wronged me. That's what happens when my brain gets broken during a movie. Yes, Joe Swanberg, not only do I blame you for breaking my brain with your pseudo-movie, I blame you for making me say mean things about your pseudo-movie.
Great, now I'm in pain and I hate myself.
