Mark Reviews Movies: MY HAPPY ENDING

My Happy Ending, Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 23, 2023

For as unapologetically frank and final as My Happy Ending becomes, this is a movie that really wants to avoid reality for as long as possible. It's a story about the certainty of cancer, the uncertainty and pain of treating it, and the difficult choices that people must face amidst the fear, grief, and dread of such a diagnosis. Obviously, this is tough and troubling subject matter, and the great disservice of co-director's Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon's movie is that it seems unwilling to acknowledge that fact for far too long.

It doesn't help that the premise feels so gimmicky from the very beginning. Rona Tamir's screenplay, based on the play by Anat Gov, introduces us to Julia Roth (Andie MacDowell), a formerly famous Hollywood actress who's now relegated to supporting roles or cameos. The setup creates an unfortunate and unnecessary bubble that keeps the character at a distance.

Part of that is the point, of course, because Julia has become accustomed to having things done her way after decades of fame—even being known now as some "has-been" means a level of privilege and ego that only a relative few will ever know. Julia has come to a clinic in a remote part of the United Kingdom, hoping that her cancer diagnosis will remain a secret, but for her first round of chemotherapy, Julia finds herself in a large, shared room with three other women undergoing the same treatment. The only thing shielding her from being seen at the facility is a curtain, but the three women recognize the star before she gets behind it.

The other three women, by the way, are Judy (Miriam Margolyes), Mikey (Sally Phillips), and Imaan (Rakhee Thakrar)—none of them as famous or successful or wealthy as Julia and, hence, shifted into the background as comic relief or for easy sentimentality. The early gag is that Julia's desire for privacy is impossible, leading the other women to hear her as she complains to her manager/sister-in-law Nancy (Tamsin Greig) about the accommodations and to gasp upon hearing that Julia has Stage IV colon cancer.

Julia only becomes aware of the severity of her diagnosis when she hears her fellow patients' shocked responses, which seems unlikely in general but makes some sense with this particular character. In theory, it means that Julia gets to go through a lot of realizations and come to terms with a lot about her situation in a short period of time, since the narrative more or less unfolds in real time. In practice, though, Gov's screenplay delays most of that until the third act, after trying to make us as comfortable as possible in the presence of such desperate and despairing material.

The movie goes overboard in those attempts. Julia starts spending time with the trio of patients, who tell some stories about their lives and their treatment history, but as down-to-earth and more relatable as any of these other women are, it's Julia's troubles—mainly, hoping to attend her daughter's lavish wedding and wondering about a career comeback—that take away focus regularly. It's tough to really connect with Julia's struggles when she compares cancer to being a woman over the age of 50 in Hollywood—landing on the notion that the latter is the more difficult position in which to find oneself.

There is some degree of honesty here once Julia decides, against the advice of her doctor (played by Tom Cullen) and Nancy and the three women, that she wants to stop chemotherapy and accept certain death from the disease. It's a setup for some genuine and thoughtful conversation about illness and mortality, but unfortunately, this is a movie that has offered up comedic fantasies in which the women try to dull the pain of chemo by imagining trips to exotic locations. The filmmakers have little care for or acknowledgment of any sense of reality here, so even when Julia makes her choice, the plot becomes a contrived series of arguments between Julia and the doctor, the actor and her manger, and the patient with her roommates in treatment.

Essentially, it takes much too long for My Happy Ending to address or present anything remotely authentic about its subject matter. By the time it does, the movie has indulged in so much gimmickry and so many insincere ideas that even its last-minute attempts at candor feel dishonest.

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