HAPPY HERE AND NOW
Directed & Written by: Michael Almereyda.
Produced by: Callum Greene & Anthony Katagas.
Director of Photography: Jonathan Herron.
Edited by: Kristina Boden.
Music by: David Julyan.
Released by: IFC.
Country of Origin: USA. 89 min. Not Rated.
With: Karl Geary, Shalom Harlow, Clarence Williams III, Ally Sheedy, Gloria Reuben, Liane Balaban & David Arquette.

Perhaps as a warning to the audience, yarn-spinner Eddie (David Arquette) tells a listener, “If there was a point, there wouldn’t be a story.” Dressed in a checkered shirt wearing camouflaged pants, this is the familiar David Arquette in manic mode.

Amelia (Liane Balaban) has landed in New Orleans to find her vanished sister Muriel (Shalom Harlow). The only clue to the disappearance is a recorded Web cast discovered on Muriel’s hard drive of a philosophical conversation between her and a smooth talking, good-looking man calling himself Eddie Mars (Karl Geary). Bill (Clarence Williams III), a former private eye, aids Amelia and with the help of mind monitors and the pressing of a few computer keys, Amelia impersonates her sister on the Web, hoping to lure any information of her whereabouts from Muriel’s online confidant. (It helps that Balaban and Harlow remarkably look like sisters.) It’s this Internet connection that is eventually traced to Arquette’s Eddie. And in an unsatisfying underdeveloped story line, Eddie’s firefighter brother Tom (again, Geary) is pursued by Hannah (Gloria Reuben), the widow of a colleague killed in a fire. Wearing an eye patch, she is often asked what happened to her eye, to which she dryly replies, “Which one?” She and Tom connect, vaguely, in contrast to Amelia’s search in cyberspace.

Happy Here and Now reveals the hipster New Orleans of underground radio stations in living rooms, a disco ball in every home, and abrupt, convoluted conversations. But even the Crescent City with its street parades, Southern Gothic ambience, and vibrant music scene can’t lift this gumbo from its philosophical mire. Save for the high-energy Arquette, most of the cast sullenly underplay their roles. Balaban is reserved, lucid or drugged.

Whether the topic is the mutability of identity or praising inventor Nikola Tesla, the dialogue is much like a bull session in a college dorm room, right before the munchies set in. The film, like Eddie, rambles on with no point in sight, not at all concern in solving the mystery of Muriel. The concluding tacked-on revelation by Amelia that “what really matters is what is close at hand” is an alien sentiment for this set of deadpan, non-ironic characters. Kent Turner
December 14, 2005