Cyan Films
I think everyone knows that child actors are rarely as good as their adult counterparts. This is really no real fault of their own, it takes time and experiences to add the acting repertoire, although some child actors are naturally gifted or theatrical. Sometimes that theatricality is annoying, sometimes it’s charming. Either way, you know it’s something you’ll remember more than just another adult.
H is for Happiness comes from director John Sheedy and writer Lisa Hoppe based on the book ‘My Life as an Alphabet’ by Barry Jonsberg. The movie stars Daisy Axon as the young teen Candice Phee who narrates and leads the tale. Candice is a smart girl, studious, and nerdy in a way that other people in her class find off-putting — she’s often accused of being ‘special needs’. Despite her lack of friends, Candice is always pleasant and even reaches out to her quirky teacher Miss Bamford (Miriam Margoyles).
She even makes a friend of the new boy, Douglas Benson (Wesley Patten), an unusually somber and odd child who claims to be from another dimension. Candice accepts this without questions, always calling ‘Douglas Benson from Another Dimension’, but then again, her backstory is more complicated than you’d think. We discover a truly tragic incident that Candice suffered through that’s effectively left her mother (Emma Booth) catatonic. It also happens that her father (Richard Roxburgh) had a pretty awful business deal with Claire’s uncle (Joel Jackson), which left the uncle in far better financial condition.
Thus Candice uses the nickname ‘Rich Uncle Brian’ for him nearly at all times, and she desperately wants things to return to some normalcy. She wants her mother to be able to be happy, to travel to Nashville like she’d always wanted to, and wants her father and uncle to reconcile. But in the meantime, she faces a new challenge — Douglas claims that the way he arrived in the new dimension was by jumping from a tree.
So now Candice also must try to prevent her new and only friend from hurting himself again.
The movie has a very colorful way about it, something that feels like a less quirky version of Wes Anderson, and Daisy Axon is really phenomenal as a girl who’s way more mature than she ought to be. It can be annoying to watch overwhelming sweetness if done poorly, but thankfully that’s not an issue here. The movie does at times dip too much into melodrama, but overall the tone works well.
The rest of the cast does well enough, and certainly Miriam Margoyles can play an oddball like nobody else, although Wesley Patten as Douglas Benson gets a far more limited characterization to work with, as he’s meant to be a bit unemotional and off. The parents are fine enough too, given that they serve to be the part of Candice’s world that need fixing.
This isn’t exactly a family friendly picture, with the difficult backstory, but it feels like it could be something for kids more in the early teen years. There’s a bit of silliness at times, and a few lost plot threads that could’ve been wrapped up, but overall it’s nice to see a movie that has that ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ comedy-drama feel without any of that unnecessary child pageant creepiness. I think the lead actress here has some very real potential.
H is for Happiness has a run time of 1 hour 38 minutes and is not rated.
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