# Happy, Texas (1999)

### reviewed by
Eugene Novikov

    Happy, Texas (1999)
    Reviewed by Eugene Novikov
    http://www.ultimate-movie.com/
    Member: Online Film Critics Society

I can't remember a single memorable quote from this dud. Sorry.

Starring Steve Zahn, Jeremy Northam, William H. Macy, Illeana Douglas, Ally Walker. Rated PG-13.

Happy, Texas is the worst kind of disappointment, a film that has no idea what to do with its ingenious comic premise. It takes a good idea and then does everything wrong. Nothing works. The performances are way off, the direction misses the point and the laughs are conspicuously absent. Here is a film with nothing -- nothing -- going for it; how it became a big hit at the Sundance Film Festival is completely beyond me.

The film actually shares some plot traits with the infinitely better Three to Tango. Both films are about heterosexual people forced to pretend they're gay; in this case to escape arrest, in the other to get a job. Here our protagonists are two escaped convicts; Wayne Wayne Wayne Jr. (Steve Zahn), who is very volatile and slightly slow and Harry Sawyer (Jeremy Northam), who is the smart one -- and we know he is smart, you see, because the movie tells us that he was convicted for credit card fraud. See? Smart guy! In any event, the two manage to escape when their transport van crashes. They seek refuge in a town called Happy, Texas where they are mistaken for a gay couple who organize kiddie beauty pageants.

Being smart, Harry decides to stay there. He appoints Wayne Wayne Wayne as the pageant master while he himself deals with the more pressing business such as planning a bank robbery and courting a town gal (Ally Walker) without revealing his true sexual orientation (gasp! -- he is straight!). Wayne Wayne Wayne struggles to manage the wee ones while Harry hangs out with townfolk. Told you he was smart.

What smart Harry didn't count on was Chappy (William H. Macy), the town sheriff and a closeted homosexual. All of a sudden Chappy decides that Harry is his kind of guy and wants to go out with him. Not wanting to compromise their position, Harry goes with him to a gay bar and fakes a "relationship". Since he doesn't want to "do anything" with the kindly sheriff, he must convince him that he likes to "move his relationships along slowly".

This movie is a total mess. The premise is handled incorrectly. The jokes just sort of sit there; director Mark Illsley never aspires to take them a step further. Northam's Harry spends most of the running time essentially denying the premise; he refuses to accept his own idea of pretending to be gay. Even in his scenes with Chappy, he is oddly reserved, never bursting into a sort of outrageousness we would expect from a movie like this. Zahn hams it up like nobody's business to the point where he is like one of the three stooges. Not funny. In the part of the would-be pageant coordinator we want someone clever who will think on his feet and give us something creative rather than some moron who will do little but make a fool of himself.

The only performer who emerges out of this ordeal with some dignity left is the great William H. Macy, the one actor here who is successful in his role. Zahn and Northam simply have the wrong idea; their performances are inadequate because of the way they choose to play them. I don't know why someone didn't at least momentarily halt this production half-way through and insist that it wasn't working. The real disaster isn't even the film itself but the fact that reportedly intelligent people let this movie's inadequacies get to the point of no return.

Happy, Texas could've worked. All it needed was a good think-through. Performances should have been altered and the script reworked. That's what the film needed. It didn't get it. This is the result.

    Grade: D

    ©1999 Eugene Novikov

    Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
    Before you buy.

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