Happy Here and Now

Jan Stuart

December 14, 2005

Mourning and gloom weigh upon most of the characters in Michael Almereyda's convoluted and numbingly pretentious "Happy Here and Now," which revolves around a woman named Amelia (a glum Liane Balaban), who comes down to a pre-Katrina New Orleans to search for her missing sister. She is aided in her search by a poker-faced retired private eye (Clarence Williams III), who finds some clues in the lost sister's on-camera Internet conversations with a mysterious philosophizing cowboy (Karl Geary).

Paralleling Amelia's quest is the fits-and-starts relationship between a fireman's widow named Hannah (Gloria Reuben) and Tom, one of her late husband's firehouse buddies (also played by Geary). The double casting is part of a general strategy of disorientation, ostensibly intended to enhance the film's themes of detachment and deception in the age of cyberspace.

Do we care? It's very hard to with sour-apple characters like Hannah, who sports a patch over one eye from a scratched cornea and, when innocently asked by someone at a bar about what happened to her eye, answers, "Which eye?" Really sorry about your husband, Hannah, but please, when you get a moment, go soak your head. 1:29 (some language, disturbing themes). At IFC Center, Manhattan.