Happy Christmas

Writer/director Joe Swanberg’s 2013 hipster dramedy Drinking Buddies, starring Olivia Wilde (who also co-produced), Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston, revolves around privileged white thirtysomethings who are too busy navel-gazing to notice the world around them. It’s one of the most irritating and pointless movies I’ve seen in recent years. That being said, I went into Swanberg’s 2014 follow-up with an open mind – even masters like Scorsese take missteps, like The Color of Money, every so often.

The zero-budget Happy Christmas is the story of Jeff (Swanberg) and Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) and their 2-year-old, Jude. Jeff is a filmmaker and Kelly put her dream of making it as a writer on hold so she could be a stay-at-home mom.

Jenny (Kendrick), a potentially chaotic variable who happens to be Jeff’s 27-year-old sister, gets tossed into what appears to be a fairly drama-free environment. Her backstory is non-existent; all we know is that she and her boyfriend recently broke up, for reasons never explained, and she moved to Chicago to be close to friends as she embarks on a new beginning. Jeff and Kelly offer Jenny their Tiki bar-themed basement until she finds her own place. On Jenny’s first night on Chicago, she gets hammered and passes out blackout drunk on the floor at a party. Jeff has to get her in the middle of the night, which leaves Kelly feeling ambivalent about whether she could trust Jenny to take care of Jude. Big brother convinces her that it was an isolated incident. She gets a chance to babysit her nephew a few days later and has an earth-shattering epiphany: “I don’t know if I want a baby, but I’m not grossed out by Jude,” she says.

I kept waiting for Jenny’s character to be developed beyond a fragment, but it never happens. Kelly’s background is a slightly more developed: she’s written a book, which her sister-in-law says went over her head, she has an unknown accent and is perpetually trying to cover up the fact that she’s unhappy as a stay-at-home mom, resents her husband and is jealous of her sister-in-law’s freedom to be an idiot.

Over a beer with Jenny and her friend (a phoned-in performance from Lena Dunham), Kelly defends her choice to stay at home with her son, without any prompting. And adds, “I’m still a feminist.”

The conversation leads to Kelly asking Jeff for a Christmas present: a few kid-free hours a week to work on her writing.

Swanberg tries to make Jeff out to be some kind of hero to feminists, however, ends up making it seem like Kelly’s taken two years to summon the courage to ask Jeff for permission to have some time to herself.

Kelly’s writing sessions end up including Jenny, who thinks she should take E.L. James’ lead and pen an erotic novel and make a boatload of cash.

“Have you read those, like, novels, you know, like the trashy, you know, like, sexy, ones? OK, I have read them, and, like, I look at them and I’m, like, this is, like, you know,” is unfortunately, the line word-for-word.

Every conversation in Happy Christmas is unsure and awkward, and not in a lovably awkward way, like The Office or Napoleon Dynamite. This film is so painfully awkward that it’s awkwardness is all-consuming; this is awkwardcore, not mumblecore. A sentence that has more than five “likes” doesn’t equate to carefully constructed, Linklater-esque dialogue that yields a naturalistic, almost improvisational feel. It sounds more like a panel of folks who had frontal lobotomies.

Happy Christmas doesn’t have a spoiler alert. It just ends when the characters run out of uninteresting dialogue, leaving the viewer with one question: What was the point?

HAPPY CHRISTMAS (1 1/2) Directed by Joe Swanberg • Starring Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, Lena Dunham • Rated R • 88 min. • At Osio Cinemas.