Happy Ending!

Last night, I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching Happy Endings on a laptop with headphones on in a rolling, desk chair because it was funny and I really hoped it was going to actually have a happy ending. The movie explores a few different life tales and brings almost all of the lives together in the end (sounds trite, but it's not, I promise). The basic idea is that Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) is a slutty teen who screws her step-brother and then secretly gives birth to a baby that she gives up for adoption.

She works at an abortion clinic as a counselor and for some reason has zero interest in her son, until some asshole comes along and tells her that he knows the kid, won't tell her his name until she helps him make a film school movie, blah, blah, blah, and they get into each other while he blackmails her... You get the idea (or maybe not, but rent or Netflix it).
The acting is great. I almost cried when Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tom Arnold were having inappropriate-age sex and he takes her face in his hands and makes her look in his eyes. I didn't even know this guy really acted. I thought he just went on talk shows. I like Maggie Gyllenhaal though she is always a slut on screen. Always playing the slut. And always screwing the older guys.

So the real deal of the movie comes about when the incredibly sexy Bobby Cannavale reveals why he supposedly adds happy endings to the massages he offers middle-class, boring women. He says that they all have a secret and they love their secret because it makes them feel special. Now, the idea that having a secret makes you special, or different, is actually true, otherwise we'd all be the same. However, in the movie, these women are made to seem pathetically common for wanting to still feel special inside. The thing is that in real life, at some point, we all figure out that we're not special. We're all sort of special, but not really that interesting, no matter where we've traveled, what we've learned or how funny we are. I was sort of put off by the fact that the step-brother/gay dad of the secret son, Charley (Steve Coogan), tells his male-similar secret that he got a girl pregnant and had a vasectomy at 21, but the film attitude toward the secret isn't approached in the same way. His feelings aren't belittled. At this point, I started to feel philosophically betrayed by the movie (I'm nuts, I know). Suddenly, I think that men are exempt from this analysis put forth by Bobby, the Latino.

But the reason that this movie is so fabulous is because just when I started to get miffed over the business above, there was another beautiful scene where when Mamie wonders why her son didn't want to meet her, Charley tells her that anyone is better for knowing her. And then I cried. This scene made me realize that us women, secrets and all are special! No matter how lame men may make us out to be, men can also let us know how special we are! Because nothing matters but what they think!!! Men, men, men. I'm just joking, the movie is funny and fuzzy and smart. I want you to see it.

An aside: for some reason, I always pick up the abortion movies. And not just Vera Drake and Palindromes, but others too, I'm too out of it and self-involved to think of any other titles right now. Are "they" just making more movies on the topic, or am I just subconsciously drawn to them? I'm glad they're being made. I don't think that people talk about abortion enough, it's society's secret.

Also: John Ritter's son is in this movie, and he's sort of cute.