‘Happiness for Beginners’ Review: Ellie Kemper Leads a Sweet but Slight Rom-Com That’s a Little Light on Laughs

Sitcom star Ellie Kemper (“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “The Office”) gets the chance to subvert her usually chipper screen persona in “Happiness for Beginners,” writer-director Vicky Wright’s third feature and — following 2020’s Leslie Bibb starrer “The Lost Husband” — her second adaptation of a Katherine Center novel. Kemper plays dour divorcee Helen, who as the film opens is about to head off on a group hiking vacation, in the hope that it might snap her out of her post-split blues. Unbeknownst to Helen, her brother’s hunky doctor friend Jake (Luke Grimes) has booked himself onto the same trip, for reasons that are crystal-clear to the audience from the moment an exasperated Helen tells him, “God, you’re so annoying!”

We can tell immediately that we are operating under the jurisdiction of romantic comedy rules from the fact that Helen does not find Jake appearing unannounced on her trip — with only a thinly sketched excuse for this wild coincidence — to be stalker-ish red flag behaviour. Pretty much everything in “Happiness for Beginners” is very polite: A raunchier romance, after all, might have opted for a booze cruise or trip to Las Vegas in place of hiking the Appalachian trail.

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Rom-com rules also mean that the rag-tag ensemble of hikers, brought together by nothing more than their collective impulse to get back to nature, provides an opportunity for Wright’s screenplay to serve
up some comfortably familiar stock characters. There’s the gay best friend, Hugh (Nico Santos, “Crazy Rich Asians”), wispy space cadet Kaylee (Gus Birney), dude-bro Mason (Esteban Benito), type-A nightmare Beckett (Ben Cook), and so on. Away from the hiking trail, there’s also room for a radiant Blythe Danner as Helen’s beloved grandmother Gigi, who dispenses the requisite warmth and wisdom.

The film seems a little torn, however, between being a rom-com and throwing the “com” part of the equation to the winds in favour of a more “Eat Pray Love” approach, where we’re asked to take more seriously the spirituality of healing yourself in nature through the power of love. It’s honestly nice to see a leading man expressing his feelings with poetry — and that gesture not making him the butt of a joke — but such moments don’t always mesh with scenes milking laughs from the very thought of people doing what bears traditionally do in the woods. Plenty of films have managed much wilder slalom tone shifts in the past, but oddly it helps when that gear change is more pointed: This is no “There’s Something About Mary”, which went absolutely all-in on both the sincerity and the gross-out, and worked on both fronts.

Whether romantic comedy or straight romance, whether well-made or not, these films are generally addictive for two reasons: the larger-than-life ludicrousness of their premise, and chemistry between the leads that means we ache to see them get together, no matter how formulaic the plot or how two-dimensional the characters. “Happiness for Beginners” ambles along amiably, taking its time to shade in plenty of backstory, and this quest for nuance is admirable, but the result is that it slightly soft-serves the audience.

The premise is believable and modest. But it’s ultimately too believable and too modest, at least for anyone who looks back with any fondness on the contrivances of romances like “You’ve Got Mail” or a “While You Were Sleeping”. The chemistry between Kemper and Grimes is similar: We can see that they like each other, but you hardly sense they’re dying to rip each other’s clothes off and roll around in the autumn leaves. Well-behaved to a fault, “Happiness for Beginners” is sweet but a little tentative.

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