For Kristen Stewart, Happiest Season wasn’t the happiest experience
The Love Lies Bleeding star says the amount of “studio notes about [her] hair and clothes” beat the identity “out of [her] goals"
Aux News Happiest Season
Photo: Thomas Kronsteiner
Kristen Stewart has had a heck of a time getting her projects through the Hollywood machine without them being torn to bits. Before making the jump back to indies, she tried her hand at Charlie’s Angles, which she thought was “a good idea at the time” but “hated making.” Now, she’s saying Happiest Season, the lesbian rom-com touted as the first of its kind, wasn’t the most cheerful set either.
Speaking to Them magazine, Stewart recounts her “fucking annoying” nightmare working on Happiest Season. Apparently, the amount of “studio executive notes” about her hair and wardrobe drove her nuts. “The identity was beaten out of my goals there,” she said. I was like, ‘You did read the script. You did hire me. What are we doing here?’”
Stewart saves her ire for the studio executives who needed to “shroud things for everyone to easily digest.” She’s “down with that” but reserves compliments for director Clea Duvall. “Hats fucking hats off to Clea because I don’t have the patience [for] that.”
Considering the handwriting and criticism Happiest Season faced, Stewart’s comments probably confirm many of its detractors’ criticisms. Still, by the bottom-barrel modern standards of the genre, which was largely ceded to formulaic Hallmark and Lifetime made-for-TV movies, Duvall deserves some credit for making it a mediocre entry—even if that causes some to over-inflate its positives while ignoring its negatives. For the record, The A.V. Club liked Happiest Season just fine.
Stewart’s post-Twilight run has been more fraught than that of her co-star Robert Pattinson, who now plays the Batman and Mickey 17. Like Pattinson, Stewart has begun working with David Cronenberg, which certainly helped move her in the right direction. She even bested Pattinson by snagging an Oscar nomination first.
Her latest, Love Lies Bleeding, is “pretty fucking sick,” in her words. The A.V. Club more or less agreed. In her review, critic Lauren Coates wrote, “Full of striking visuals from cinematographer Ben Fordesman, a healthy dash of horror and sci-fi in the script, and a monumental performance from O’Brian, Loves Lies Bleeding is another surrealist sapphic gem from [director] Rose Glass.”
33 Comments
After a few years to think it over, what I’ve currently settled on is that the movie’s major problem is how we see hardly anything of their relationship before Harper’s family comes into the picture, which means the movie can talk all it wants about how great a person Harper is most of the time, but all we see is her constantly shoving her girlfriend back in the closet and putting her into uncomfortable situations so often that it honestly starts to feel like deliberate abuse.
this has been my takeaway, too. and as an unfortunate side effect, it means dan levy’s speech–great in a vacuum and well-performed–completely falls flat as the “gotcha” it’s clearly intended to be to its audience
Which is funny because with much lesser screen time, Aubrey Plaza makes you root for her character and Kristen Stewart’s to run far away from Harper and her bigoted family.
And that’s another big issue, where her parents act so blatantly homophobic so it’ll make sense why she’d be so terrified of coming out, so it makes no sense when they’re fine with it in the end.
This was my issue, it was resolved way too easily
If the show were just Aubrey and Kristen hanging out at Jinkx and Dela shows, it would have been the most perfect holiday movie ever.
I’m not sure showing more of their relationship would change much – the audience is supposed to struggle along with Stewart’s character to decide when enough is enough. Having the relationship a little more grounded might make the ending less of a swing, but it’s also a Christmas movie. The success of their engagement is like the Grinch’s heart growing three sizes or George Bailey deciding not to kill himself.
My thing was it felt like such a rote rom-com. The kind of film that littered the ground at Park City in the late 90s and early 00s. If it wasn’t for the LGBT angle, it would’ve been a Hallmark movie.
the irony is that this is the terrible mainstream rom-com we needed in the 90s but never could have gotten. so it got made 30 years too late and wasn’t even good enough to deliver some nostalgia.
only certain kinds of cheese get better with age.
Yeah, Mackenzie Davis’s character really treats Stewart’s character like crap the whole time, and never really has to be held accountable for her shitty behavior or gets any kind of real comeuppance.
I totally agree. I was enjoying the movie ( and will likely rewatch next December if it gets re-added to Netflix Canada), but when she accepted Harper back at the end I actually yelled “What?! NO!!!” at my screen.
100%. It excelled in the comedy part but fell flat in the romantic part. You don’t care to root for the central couple at all because Harper comes off as such an asshole, which is why everyone wants Kristen Stewart and Aubrey Plaza to run off together. I watched Saving Face not long after (shoutout to Caroline Siede and the old AVC When Romance Met Comedy column) and felt like it accomplished what Happiest Season tried to do with family drama/acceptance. Not a totally equivalent story, but it succeeded in making the more closeted girlfriend sympathetic by having the movie follow her and seeing her family so you understand better where she’s coming from. And there’s more than two scenes establishing the good parts of their relationship.
saving face is probably the best glbt rom-com made so far, and alice wu is a damn treasure.
She and Aubrey Plaza popped off the screen in Happiest Season though & Mackenzie Davis of course is good
“Considering the handwriting and criticism Happiest Season faced” – OH NO THE HANDWRITING!!!
Also Charlie’s Angles… personally I thought 90degrees was the high point.
This is just a stealth propaganda piece by Big Cursive.
In hindsight, making a geometry-themed reboot of Charlie’s Angels was always going to end poorly.
“Considering the handwriting…”Um, not a real issue with this one…
Too much cursive in the movie, made me feel uncomfortable. Nobody really writes like that.
“Considering the handwriting and criticism Happiest Season faced, Stewart’s comments probably confirm many of its detractors’ criticisms. Still, by the bottom-barrel modern standards of the genre, which was largely ceded to formulaic Hallmark and Lifetime made-for-TV movies, Duvall deserves some credit for making it a mediocre entry—even if that causes some to over-inflate its positives while ignoring its negatives. For the record, The A.V. Club liked Happiest Season just fine.”First, I assume you mean “handwringing.” Second, Jesus Christ, dude—I haven’t seen Happiest Season, but this seems like an unnecessarily snide little jab at an entire genre of films. Remember when the AV Club ran a biweekly column celebrating and critiquing romantic comedies? Good times.
I LOVE romcoms. Even the formulaic Hallmarky ones.I genuinely don’t see anything wrong with that paragraph. Romcoms are mostly pretty bad for the last 15 years with only a few exceptions.
This whole piece is so unnecessarily snide and defensive over an okay romantic comedy from four years ago. As if we need to go to the mattresses against the baying hordes over goddamn Happiest Season of all things. Like, when’s the last time anyone’s even mentioned it?
I had literally never heard of it until today.
The editorial voice of AV Club is snide and defensive by default for some reason. I keep telling myself to find another website to read about movie news but I keep stumbling back to this one for some unknown reason.
Yeah, I hear you buddy.
What “handWRINGING” and criticism” did this even face? The only citation they have is for their mild review?
Yeah I wasn’t sure what he was talking about here. I thought he meant lesbian romance movies, to which I was like…huh? There’s a lot of those on Hallmark? But now reading your comment I guess he meant romantic comedies? To which I respond…huh? There’s a lot of those on Hallmark?Full disclosure, I watch more than a few Hallmark movies (I wouldn’t say a lot, but it’s not a few), and they are not romantic comedies. They’re just romances. Some are a teeny bit funny but most don’t qualify as comedies and don’t seem like they’re trying to be.So…yeah, I agree with you that that doesn’t makes sense as either a “handwriting” or a criticism.
AV Headline in 5 years – “Kristen Stewart was unhappy on Loves Lies Bleeding set”
>“The identity was beaten out of my goals there,” she said. I was like, ‘You did read the script. You did hire me. What are we doing here?’”What you’re doing is being paid to fulfill the character they want you to be, not who you want the character to be. I don’t know how she is still getting work.
Because thankfully casting directors don’t give a fuck about your pathetic opinion
Her story is literally all about how you’re wrong. The casting directors did care about what her character was and made sure she did what they wanted.And I’m not the only one who sees the obvious. https://www.quora.com/Do-people-hate-Kristen-Stewarts-acting
“Considering the handwriting and criticism”Lots of handwriting, huh?
There’s a pretty big gap between “nightmare”, (the author’s word) and “annoying” (Stewart’s word).