Rating: R | Runtime: 89 minutes
Release Date: February 24th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Roadside Attractions
Director(s): Tal Granit & Sharon Maymon
Writer(s): Rona Tamir / Anat Gov (play Sof Tov)

You can’t fix stage four cancer, Nancy. You can’t even fix my casting calls.

You’ll have to excuse everyone for not believing that anything Julia Roth (Andie MacDowell) says comes from a place of measured clarity. This is a woman used to getting what she wants whether on a film set, in a hotel lobby, or, apparently, the infusion ward of a remote hospital in England. That her first demand when arriving for her initial chemotherapy session is confirmation she’ll be getting a private room rather than any inquiries into what the procedure entails or what she should expect tells us everything we think we need to know about her.

But that would be too easy. Vain. Entitled. Delusional. Julia can be all those things and still earn our attention when finally confronting what it is that’s happening. Because that reality is coming regardless of who she is or what she has planned. We all absorb impossible news in our own unconventional ways.

That truth is what rises to the top for me during Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon’s My Happy Ending. Adapted by Rona Tamir from Anat Gov’s based-on-her-own-cancer-experience play, it’s easy to assume its story of tragic circumstances will find itself moving towards a clichéd notion of empowerment and hopeful optimism.

It’s why you get a welcome mix of supporting characters like Sally Phillips’ “cancer can be a miracle” Mikey, Miriam Margolyes’ “I’m going to be cancer’s cancer” Judy, and Rakhee Thakrar’s “God saved me by compounding my hardships to tell me I was dying” Imaan. Put their eclectic backstories together and you have a perfectly quirky trio of voices to put Julia on the correct path to recovery via humor and tough love. If only life were so neat and tidy.

The film understands these women aren’t created equal. Their cancers are at different stages and they possess different responsibilities and ways of life to reconcile with the inevitabilities of the disease and treatment. So, now that Julia cannot avoid facing the fate life dealt her, listening to their motivations and dreams and desires aren’t about creating a mirror.

It’s about creating context that she can personally interpret and weigh to come up with a completely opposite result. The obvious question is thus whether that decision is considered or a whim. That’s why her doctor (Tom Cullen) and best friend/manager (Tamsin Greig) are here to help push back and force her to really think about it. That role allows Greig to steal the whole thing with a devastating performance masked beneath a “brave face.”

Stage adaptations are a tough sell for many, but I love them. Especially when the filmmakers use the medium to augment set pieces like these women’s “holidays”—collective imaginary worlds into which they retreat whenever one is overtaken by pain. The entire story occurring in one day makes the dialogue-heavy nature and virtually one-room setting work too, allowing the actors to sell the drama via their instantaneous reactions since there’s nowhere to hide.

The curtains and doors can’t even block the sound of what they’re saying about each other. That’s good, though, since cancer and death are the great equalizers. Once the artifice of life and expectations is torn down, all that remains is the person careening towards oblivion. So, no matter how impulsive (or crazy) their response, honesty won’t be denied.

---

Andie MacDowell and Tamsin Greig in MY HAPPY ENDING; courtesy of Roadside Attractions.