H Is For Happiness (2020) - Movie Review

Well, this sounds familiar: A precocious red-headed girl with unrelenting optimism and a ‘unique’ perspective on the world sets out to basically fix everything around her. Even as someone with a higher-than-usual tolerance for this brand of family-friendly content (chalk that up to growing up with Mara Wilson as Matilda, I guess), there’s something inherently strained about sitting through a story where children have a greater vocabulary and emotional range than the adults. It’s the kind of thing that normally smacks of wish fulfillment for adults more than anything else, letting the older writer(s) live out their own fantasy of how they wish children acted in the real world. But then there are films like this, which undeniably fit into this niche but also feel wholly singular to themselves.

U is for unexpected. As in everything in here is unexpected. I don’t know whether to attribute this to a general lack of tonal management or just a willingness to show pretty much anything, but this is a difficult film to pin down when taken scene-by-scene. All of its wavelengths are at deafening levels, but it is consistently inconsistent in the specific emotion on display. Opening on a note of brightly-coloured twee, it continually swerves from children being precious to adult being all-too-real, from wanting to bring the family back together to a gift of inflatable breasts, from familial grief and estrangement to a literal steaming pile of horse shit.

As such, it is never not surprising, both in its capacity for cringe and in its quite brutal lack of pulled punches. As it delves further into main character Candice’s home life, and how the death of her sister has affected her mother and father, it is remarkable just how hard-hitting it can get. And in turn, it ends up revealing a rather crucial truth behind these kinds of stories that rarely gets given this bright a spotlight. These situations, where children feel like they are the ones responsible for keeping everything together, is a common result of family-shattering events like this. Ask any kid who grew up in a divorced household.

While it may bite off more than it can chew in its occasional ribbing of mainstream television and film conventions, which always feel like being smacked in the face with a ruler with ‘irony’ printed on it in Comic Sans, the most surprising thing about this is how it manages to reconcile its quirkier multiversal musings (yeah, this is the most high-minded dialogue I’ve ever heard outside of a Grant Morrison book) with its more depressive moments (in a literal sense, given how Candice’s mother is presented).

It basically boils down to the feeling of helplessness that can arise from seeing your own family fall apart in the face of tragedy, and the want to do something, anything, that will make things right again. And in the film’s own terms, a child expecting themselves to fix all of their family’s frictions is like an adult expecting to figure out how to communicate with alternate dimensions: Good luck with that.

Aside from being one of the most consistently bewildering features I’ve ever covered on here, as every scene reveals something new to gawk and be confused at, it also represents a fair amount about why I still stand up for features made for younger audiences. Because it’s only in stories like this, where that childlike sense of forthrightness and determination hasn’t yet touched the hardened brick of adult cynicism, that all these conflicting feelings, reactions and varieties of laughter make any sense.

It’s a fun ride, if not always a coherent one, and at a time when my own view of the world grows colder with each passing day of this lockdown, I find myself full of gratitude that this film exists, let alone that it put a smile on my face.