“I’m not shaming you. I just think that the choice you’re making is dumb and you should feel bad about it, and yourself.”

Anthony’s rating: Still better than The Twilight Saga

Anthony’s review: “Actors have to feel a scene is really funny for the audience to feel it’s funny,” once said John Swanbeck. That is the main problem with holiday-themed romcom Happiest Season. All throughout, you’re not always quite sure what it wants to be, but most of the cast does try to be funny. If only someone had told one of its two leads who clearly acts out an entirely different movie than the rest of the cast. Or it may just be that Chaplin was right when he said that to truly laugh you need the ability to take your pain and play with it. In any case, Kristen Stewart did NOT come to play.

Directed and written by actress-turned-filmmaker Clea Duvall and inspired by her own experiences of coming out to her family, the film is close in every beat to any classic Christmas romantic laugher, with the provision that the main love story involves same-sex partners. True, LGBTQ films are not new, but this one feels different than your Brokeback Mountain and your Philadelphia, in that it flawlessly normalizes the leads being lesbians in a movie entirely meant for the whole family. It has no foul language, no nudity, no potty humor, and might as well have included Kevin McCallister. At no point in the movie do you feel like calling it “that lesbians Yuletide comedy.” It doesn’t make the point that gay couples are now mainstream in movies; it makes you realize that the point should not have to be made.

The story follows Abby (Stewart), an introvert whose parents died in her teens so she’s not big on family gatherings. Her girlfriend Harper (Mackenzie Davis) comes from a bigger and very conservative family to whom she hasn’t come out yet for sheer fear of disappointing her parents. After a romantic night where Harper aimed to convince Abby that Christmas can be magical, the spirit of the moment makes her invite her lover to the annual family gathering under the later caveat that they pose as straight roommates only because dad is running for mayor and his favorite daughter cannot “let him down” at such a time. You guess the rest, hijinks ensue.

The film has all the makings of a condescending American comedy that aims to teach us kids a lesson in values and niceness of the heart. Dialogues in many spots feel like an elementary school educational video where exposure is the point. But we don’t mind because it’s Christmas and it’s love and its cute. And it is, cute. And damn funny when Harper’s two sisters get in the picture; Allison Brie goes complete-180 from her Glow persona with an uptight snub who “left” law school to have a family (and now sells handmade gift baskets on Amazon, wish I’d thought of that), while TV stalwart Mary Holland brings the funny so hard her dummy routine showed me what a mash-up of all the main characters from Seinfeld would look like.

Rounding the cast are Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen, the latter who is funnier than I have ever seen her, with red-hot Schitt’s Creeker Dan Levy as Abby’s bestie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Burl Moseley as a husband who likes potpourri too much, Jamie Dorman as Harper’s clueless ex, and Aubrey Plaza as Harper’s other ex. These people know they’re in a cute comedy and none mind bringing-in the funny. In other words, they act out a script, they don’t really walk and talk like real-life people would in such situations. This runs contrary to Ms. Stewart, whose facial integrity I feared for during the only time in the movie she dared crack a smile.

I try, I really do, to forget that she once called her own fans ret**ds, that she somehow managed to help make a horrendously-written series of books into a horrendous billion-dollar movie franchise (okay, I kinda liked the first because my girl Catherine Hardwicke made that one and I like her indie style), and that she fell asleep when she was honored at the French Oscars. None of that was on my mind which I opened to watch this movie. But she has no spark, she barely reacts to anything and anyone, not for a quantum of moment will you believe in her friendship with impossible-not-to-like Levy, and if you wanna see what Mackenzie Davis can do when her scene partner gives her some chemistry then stop reading this right now and go watch The F Word. Right NOW!

I know, comedy is not THAT easy, which is why, in 1936, then-already famous Katherine Hepburn went back to school and got herself coached for comedy before undertaking her first funny role for Bringing Up Baby. Which she nailed with a sledgehammer, mind you. The only thing Kristen Stewart nailed was the coffin of my desire to watch this again. I’m not kidding: It has all the hallmarks of a film to watch and re-watch every year in December, if it wasn’t for she who cheated on Cedric Digory. It’s a surprisingly sweet movie to be Duvall’s second behind cameras after the much more acerbic The Intervention, and even if it didn’t feel original at all, I would have liked to see more of that quirky family. And I won’t. Thanks a LOT, Kristen!