Review: Happy Hour (2003)

HAPPY HOUR

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Davis Entertainment Filmworks
Grade: B-
Directed by: Mike Vencivenga
Written by: Mike Bencivenga, Richard Levine
Cast: Anthony LaPaglia, Eric Stoltz, Caroleen Feeney, Robert
Vaughn, Sandrine Holt, Thomas Sadoski, Mario Cantone
Screened at: Chelsea, NYC, 10/24/04

Despite a no-budget production that features poor lighting and
impossiblel sound fidelity, "Happy Hour" is an amusing story of a
drunk who is anything but on the mend despite the love of a
schoolteacher, Natalie (Caroleen Feeney); the loyalty of his
best friend, Levine (Eric Stoltz); and the nurturing of his boss in
the ad agency where Tully (Anthony LaPaglia), an alcoholic,
holds court supervising semiliterate copy writers. Tully is the
oldest dude in a business known for throwing away aging
writers, and indeed Tully evokes the contempt of the
bottomfeeder yuppie who is out for his job, Scott (Thomas
Sadowski) and his distant father, a successful author who is
disgusted with his son's drinking and has to bribe him to get his
presence at Tully's sister's wedding.

Like the Nicolas Cage character in Mike Figgis's movie "Leaving
Las Vegas," Tully seems determined to drink himself to death
and, in fact, at one point when he is overcome by serious
illness, he admits to his friend that he'd had one foot in the
grave for quite a while.

There's nothing especially new in the dialogue, no nuggets of
wisdom that we had not previous heard whether from characters
like Ray Milland's in Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend" or Lee
Remick and Jack Lemmon's characters in its modernized
version, "Days of Wine and Roses." Nor can we compare La
Paglia's performance with that of the Oscar-winning Milland.
Nevertheless, "Happy Hour" is a wrenching story, intimate in a
city of eight million and nicely acted with particularly good
chemistry between La Paglia and the caring Feeney. On the
whole, Mike Vencivenga's "Happy Hour" looks more like a
production suitable for the small TV screen, a chamber piece
that features some Oscar Wilde-type wit from the director and
his co-writer, Richard Levine–the best of which is would-be
novelist Tully's repeated, self-deprecating view that he is a
drinker with a writer's problem.

Not Rated. 93 minutes. © 2004 by Harvey Karten
@harveycritic.com

==========
X-RAMR-ID: 38905
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1332658
X-RT-TitleID: 1135946
X-RT-SourceID: 570
X-RT-AuthorID: 1123
X-RT-RatingText: B-