Happiest Season (2020)

Happiest Season arrives with a distinction it wears lightly: the first lesbian Christmas romantic comedy from a major Hollywood studio. Clea DuVall directs and co-writes, drawing on her own family history, and the result is a holiday film where the mistletoe hangs over a closet door. Kristen Stewart plays Abby, an orphan with a dim view of December, who accompanies her girlfriend Harper (Mackenzie Davis) home for the Caldwell family festivities, only to learn that Harper has never mentioned she is gay. Abby is introduced as the orphan roommate. The proposal she had planned will have to wait.

The machinery of the season kicks in: the mayoral campaign, the donor dinner, the competitive sister, the stolen necklace that lands in the wrong handbag. Underneath the tinsel is a study of a family that treats appearance as an asset. The Caldwell parents curate their daughters the way a campaign curates a photograph, and DuVall lets the sisters articulate the cost, in arguments and in one very public Christmas Eve meltdown. Dan Levy's John supplies the film's most sober passage, a monologue about being thrown out at seventeen and not spoken to for thirteen years. The sermonizing is present but brief. This is still a rom-com, and it knows when to pour the cocoa.

The film keeps its concerns narrow. Race goes unremarked. The environment, the class system, the body, the mind: none of it draws the camera's attention. The donor subplot is about a father's integrity, not the machinery of money. This is a tightly focused picture, and that focus is its strength. It wants to tell one story well, about fear and forgiveness and a family photograph that finally has room for everyone.