My Happy Ending

My Happy Ending, a slightly moving but uneven weepie about a fading actress attempting a career comeback as she discovers she has stage-four cancer and may only have a few months to live, has all the ingredients to be a partially amusing and moving tearjerker, but the result is a very clunky one. With a sincere performance by the great Andie MacDowell as the ill-fated woman and an impressive supporting cast, this Israel-British co production, filmed in London, comes across as very slight and ill-advised in filmmakers Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon’s debut feature that is based on the Israeli play Sof Tov by Anat Gov. While the intent is there in hopes of casting Andie MacDowell to give the film more appeal to Western audiences, the adaptation falls short. Andie Macdowell has always been a great talent. She is an iconic actress who has delivered many memorable roles with such delight before in such films as Short Cuts, Groundhog Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, to name a few. Sadly, the way the film is written by Anat Gov and executed by Granit and Maymon feels patched together. For starters, the humor feels very British as if it was written for a British lead other than an American one, and the writing ends up making MacDowell feel miscast. However, she plows through, and you end up warming up to her uncertainties.

Something must have been mistaken in the adaptation of Gov’s script. The film hits a lot of false moments in the writing. Whether it’s the oddly scripted insider agent dialogue by Julia’s agent Nancy (Tamsin Grieg) or the imprudent chemo jokes, the film deserves some credit for resisting the narrative into reaching the most maudlin elements, turning a story about illness, into a genuine statement on the power of choice in how someone wants to be treated and healed.

Courtesy Roadhouse Attractions 

Macdowell plays 58-year-old Julia Hart, a once famous actress and the mother of a daughter who is soon to be married. She just traveled to London and landed a role in the London theater scene. Julia is diagnosed with colon cancer on the morning of her rehearsal. Unable to get her own private room, she ends up sharing a room with three British women who are also receiving treatment for cancer: Mikey, a former rocker (Sally Phillips), Judy, a retired schoolteacher (Miriam Margolyes), and Imaan (Rakhee Thakrar), a young Muslim mother of two children. Julia wants to keep her presence at the clinic under wraps in the hopes that it doesn’t make it to the press because she is keeping her diagnosis from her daughter. Julia ends up hearing the ladies label her a “washed up has-been,” as they criticize her latest films. Yet, they still admire her and have fond memories of her older films and her distinctive hair. Eventually, it doesn’t take long for Julia to become part of their group.

While it is commanding how the narrative explores different perspectives from various backgrounds and experiences bonding and experiencing the same suffering over a similar illness. The women meditate and retreat off to a fantasy world that often takes place in tropical beaches and forests. Yet, these scenes feel hurried and unfocused due to their displacement. Not fantastical enough to feel like a fantasy, not bittersweet enough to be dramatic, or wry enough to be fully comical, all the genre bending ends up falling flat as the film drifts away from any potential that it sets up for itself. The supporting cast also feels lightly sketched, their arcs are never fully surfaced, especially Imaan’s character, who is diagnosed with breast cancer, and she isn’t given much depth when there is so much to work with.

Courtesy Roadhouse Attractions

While the London backdrops are never seen, the film’s setting is mostly in the clinic, with a few scenes taking place in the fantasy world that rarely feels fantastical. This is certainly due to the film’s budgetary constraints, but the technical shortcomings don’t diminish the sincerity of MacDowell’s performance or the genuine arc of her accepting her journey towards death. Ultimately, My Happy Ending never quite finds the visual flourishes, or the dramatic or comedic flair to translate the material successfully from stage to screen. While MacDowell and the supporting cast try their best to carry the film, the overall outcome becomes very pat, and, while well-intended, one wishes filmmakers Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon brought a more imaginative handling to the material that builds up such a strong core but ends up becoming inert and very slight.

My Happy Ending is now playing in limited theaters.