Happythankyoumoreplease wants to be the definitive film about hard-working artistic New Yorkers who can’t feel their way through adulthood after college. From the successful short story author who can’t break through as a novelist to the lounge singer who makes her rent by working at a bar, the characters in writer/director Josh Radnor’s film are not defined by their actions but by their identity. Archetypes can work if they grow and change throughout a film in a believable way.
Do you think a film that features a young boy whose foster parents leave him on a subway for an emotionally immature writer to hang onto for a few days accomplishes that?
Malin Ackerman falls for another bad guy in Happythankyoumoreplease.
The big problem with Happythankyoumoreplease is one of scope. Radnor is trying to accomplish too much in one film. There are three parallel stories that barely intersect and the whole thing feels disjointed. The more compelling relationships are ignored to keep pursuing (what else?) love in NYC, the cliche New York story.
The most successful story in the film is the relationship between Annie, a woman who defines herself by the image she creates to distract from her Alopecia, and Sam #2, Annie’s less than attractive co-worker who wants nothing more than to get to know her. Once Radnor stops pushing Sam #2 around in a static loop of rejection, he allows Annie and Sam #2 to actually open up as characters. This, in turn, gives Malin Ackerman and Tony Hale the chance to be the only actors to work with a slightly styled script. They do great work because they put in the work to craft characters far more believable than what Radnor wrote on the page.
Far less successful but at least believable is the relationship between Mary and Charlie, long time friends and lovers caught in a fight over where to live. Charlie has a great opportunity to move out to Los Angeles for work while Mary has spent her entire life in NYC. Mary realizes early on in the film that she might be pregnant, causing unspoken strain between the two. This story alone could have been its own film. Unfortunately, Josh Radnor makes it the C-Plot and uses the two characters mostly as a way to contrast with the main relationships in the film.
Worse than Mary and Charlie’s relationship is the romantic side of the A-Plot. Writer Sam (played by Josh Radnor) falls head over heels in love with singer/bartender Mississippi. When she refuses to sleep with him on their first night out, he drafts out a contract stating that Mississippi will live with him for three days so they get to know each other better. Radnor just doesn’t know what to do with this plot. These characters do not change at all, regardless of what the other characters in the film say about them. Try as they might, Radnor and Kate Mara cannot get any realistic emotions out of the other-thought, too clever for its own good screenplay.
As if three romantic stories weren’t enough, there’s the matter of the foster child found on the subway. Sam, on his way to a meeting with a publisher, sees little Rasheen get left behind by his foster family. Sam tries to get him help from an MTA employee (who refuses, which does not happen in real life; lost children are serious business in NYC transit; there is even a large group of cops who only work on the subways and buses of NYC for this kind of event) and cannot get Rasheen to go to the police station. So Sam does the least logical thing of all: he brings someone else’s child into his home and doesn’t call for help. If that was the worst choice Sam made, it might not have been a terror to sit through the “Rasheen is a gifted abused child and I can’t let him be hurt again” storyline. That not calling for help thing is the least idiotic thing Sam does in the film.
Handled by a more able screenwriter with an ear for dialogue, any of the four stories in Happythankyoumoreplease could have been a good film. The characters would have had more than twenty minutes each to breathe and the screenplay would have been more eventful without the need to establish parallel patterns of inabilities to create and maintain relationships. Instead, Happythankyoumoreplease is a shell of a film, a husk that is pretty to look at but completely empty inside.
Rating: 5/10
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