Review

In this amazing ensemble comedy about the messes of life, Don Roos opens and heals family and romantic wounds with grace, intelligence and wit. Abortion clinic counselor Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) is having an affair with a studly Mexican masseur, Javier (Bobby Cannavale). As a youth she had sex with her stepbrother, Charley (Steve Coogan), became pregnant, and secretly put the baby up for adoption. Years later, an obnoxious aspiring filmmaker, Nicky (Jesse Bradford), shows up claiming to know her son’s whereabouts. This information doesn’t come without a catch: Mamie has to let Nicky make a documentary about their reunion. Charley – now openly gay - and his boyfriend Gil (Testosterone’s David Sutcliffe) have another baby-related mystery to solve: did their lesbian best friends secretly use Gil’s sperm to conceive an infant? Meanwhile, a young singer, Jude (Maggie Gylenhaal), takes up with a rich closeted teenager, Otis (Jason Ritter), and his father (Tom Arnold). Otis, by the way, secretly has the hots for his employer – Charley! These havoc-filled plotlines and characters ingeniously weave together in Roos’ outrageous star-studded comedy, which returns to the scathing and smart territory he mined in The Opposite of Sex. A movie you will surely enjoy again again, Happy Endings is guaranteed to leave you with a smile.

 -- Lawrence Ferber