REVIEW: Ellen Barkin Snarls to Life in Ruthless, Unpleasant Another Happy Day

As a general rule in the movies, dysfunction is better offered as a side dish rather than a main course, accenting what's really a story of grieving and letting go, or coming of age, or self-acceptance. Screaming, crying, acting out and mistreating others are tougher to take when they're the primary focus instead of symptomatic of something deeper to be excavated and explored.

In this light, Another Happy Day deserves kudos of some sort for boldly putting the dysfunctional nature of its characters and the ways in which they interact up front and center like a two-hour group therapy session to nowhere. It's like Rachel Getting Married if every character were just like Anne Hathaway's damaged, narcissistic Kym. It's unpleasant, shrill and exhausting -- everyone's so busy airing their own grievances no one has time to listen to anyone else's -- but it's a genuine actors' film anchored by some good performances, including a stand-out turn from Ellen Barkin as Lynn, the prodigal daughter who arrives home to her parents' house in Maryland for the wedding of her oldest son Dylan (Michael Nardelli).

Lynn, we learn, has a legitimate beef with her family, though they have some with her as well. It takes time for the connections and histories of the ensemble cast of characters to make themselves clear, not just because of how complicated they are but also because each individual only compulsively picks at his or her chosen emotional scab. Lynn arrives toting her two other sons by her nebbishy second husband, the chain-smoking, black-clad Elliot (Ezra Miller) and young Ben (Daniel Yelsky), who has Asperger's. "The last time you went to rehab, I said you were in Sweden," she tells Elliot shortly before they arrive, the first of many, many suggestions that the title of this film is meant to be ironic. Her hubby and her self-harming college-aged daughter Alice (Kate Bosworth) are due to arrive the next day, but she wanted to get a head start on the familial drama and sure does, leaping into the fray almost upon arrival.

Ellen Burstyn plays Doris, Lynn's emotionally withholding mother, and George Kennedy is Lynn's father Joe, who's ill and not always cognizant. Lynn's cartoonishly catty sisters (Siobhan Fallon, Diana Scarwid) are there too, along with their own spouses and offspring. But the ones Lynn dreads seeing the most are her ex Paul (Thomas Haden Church) and his territorial grotesque of a new wife Patty (Demi Moore). Paul used to beat Lynn back when they were together, and the way everyone reacted to her leaving him and taking only one of their two children, Alice, with her is cause for the major family schism. His behavior was terrible, unforgivable, and yet we develop some understanding of it, if certainly nothing like forgiveness -- thin-skinned and self-pitying, Lynn is a magnet for abuse, seeking it out while longing for someone to leap to her defense. Why else is she there, burrowing right into the packed house full of family she resents but wants approval from? "Why weren't you on my side?" she bleats to her mother like a high school kid who just got dumped.

It's a marvel of a performance from Barkin, who takes a character who should have all easy sympathy on her side and makes her challenging and weighty, a woman who deserves recompense but makes it difficult for anyone to want to give it to her. It's unfortunate that the film nevertheless loads things in her favor by refusing to grace her worst tormentors with the same complexity -- Moore in particular is a monster who may well have self-tanner running through her veins instead of blood.

Another Happy Day is the directorial debut of Sam Levinson, son of Oscar-winner Barry Levinson (which had to help with bringing in the impressive cast). The film, while scattered in terms of look (the addition, for instance, of grubby footage from Ben's own little camera adds nothing), won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance this year, and is well-written the way a sandwich of bacon on bacon bread with bacon-flavored spread is tasty, with no cushioning or variety, skipping straight to the perceived good parts again and again in a numbing fashion. But the verbal sniping that makes up so much of the conversation has a snappy rat-tat-tat to it -- "What don't you understand, you solipsistic fuck?" -- especially everything that comes from Elliot, who's clever, sardonic and has a gift for instantly targeting people's vulnerable spots. Miller, of the aristocratic cheekbones and louche air, has done well for himself playing damaged sophisticated teens, in 2008's Afterschool, here and soon as the titular young sociopath in We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Another Happy Day reveals itself to be a film that pits those who wear their dysfunction on the outside versus those who lock it up deep within or are just stolidly unfeeling -- Dylan, the lone normal child, is bland and nothing to be admired. "Why is it you have never learned to just keep quiet?" Doris asks Lynn in a moment of rare, though unfriendly, openness. The film's heart lies with the former, with Lynn and her psychiatrist's nightmare of a brood, though it's willing to allow that everyone's pretty awful. That commendable even-handedness doesn't make it any easier to spend a whole film with these people, no matter how nuanced the acting. Learn to keep quiet, indeed.

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