This movie is real and it is depressing. When a picture is made to look like anything else, that is to say similar to regular daily life, viewers feel more intimately connected with the events of the characters’ lives. Happy Tears is shot in a real house, with photographs, filthy dishes, old wallpaper, and other household ornaments. The film begins in sunny San Francisco where everything is vibrant and full of life. Almost immediately the action returns to dreary Pittsburgh where nothing is radiant and everything is ordinary and depressing.
The four mainstays are Parker Posey, Demi Moore, Rip Torn and Ellen Barkin. Posey and Moore are sisters whose personalities and lives have gone in opposite directions. Moore is a mother of two and Posey is desperate to have a child with her aloof husband. She also has an eccentric taste for ungodly expensive items. She returns home to Pittsburgh to relieve Moore of having to care for their elderly father, Rip Torn. Torn has advanced dementia and according to physicians between one and two years to live. A grim and horrible prognosis. Ellen Barkin is Torn’s girlfriend who masquerades at first as a nurse and then reveals she is a stripper whose gimmick is of course being a "medical" woman. With her body it is clear any action with her in the picture is medicinal! Most of the actors are Jewish which greatly factors into the comedy and the director and producers’ vision of the story. This is real life. Reality is caring for a loved one. My mother cares for her parents in every way she possible can despite herself nearing sixty. My friend Jerry cares for his brother who is somewhat deflated from several bouts with cancer. Someday I will care for my mother and tend to all of her needs no matter what they may be. This is common. It used to be taught that respecting and caring for one’s elders means everything. I feel that Americans have lost touch with that responsibility in the age of me, but we must pay back and reward our parents for all they have given us. Having said that, Rip Torn is portrayed as hopeless, crude and utterly sad here. He defecates himself and is incapable of remembering most ordinary details. Clearly he did not live the life of a saintly man but he loved his daughters truly and utterly. Their interactions are priceless, painful, but priceless. For me there is nothing joyful about Happy Tears, but it is a movie that makes you think about how things are in the world and in your life. It is not a thriller, barely has any comedy and is not exactly a reel turner, but it is meaningful if that is your cup of tea. Keep dunking for a richer and fuller flavor. Interesting choice Demi, I did not expect this from you.
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