You could call them the inbetweeners. Early on in Whatever Makes You Happy, bassist Alex (Tyler Peck) is invited to a dinner party by an old college friend. “Aren’t you too young for a dinner party?” his neighbor asks.
The characters of Whatever Makes You Happy, a group of friends hitting the end of their 20’s, are all in the same place: stuck between where they started and where they’re going. We join them not at point A or point B, but on a dark, Cambridge street somewhere between. Anna (Rachel Parsons) became a teacher, no doubt with high aspirations to reach students and teach them what she never knew. The reality is far less magical. She’s deep into a relationship but not deeply in love, and she sees the same in everyone around her. Those who are committed to something seem to have settled for it. When she’s introduced to Alex at that dinner party, she realizes that she’s even less sure if what she has is what she wants.
Feelings like this probably spawned the terrible term “quarter-life crisis,” but director and writer A.T. Sayre wisely avoids any labels and pat scenarios. Instead, Whatever Makes You Happy plays out in the cadence of real life in a refreshing way.
When Alex sends a friend request to Anna after the dinner party, he amusingly types and re-types his message several times. Starting out bland, then getting too personal, then just wacky, he finally decides to send it without any message at all. These people know they should be something, but despite having left college years ago they’re still learning what that is. The question that we watch them answer is: what do they have to do to find out?
Ultimately, Whatever Makes You Happy is a thoughtful character study, and the director will be interesting to watch as his career progresses.
No comments:
Post a Comment