Last Thanksgiving weekend, close to 420,000 households across the U.S. gathered around their televisions (or computer screens) to watch Happiest Season, setting a record for the best movie debut in Hulu history.
Directed by Clea DuVall, the holiday film tells the tale of Abby Holland (Kristen Stewart) and Harper Caldwell (Mackenzie Davis), a lesbian couple who’ve been dating for a year and are very much in love. Since Abby’s parents passed away, Harper invites her to spend Christmas with her family in Pittsburgh—and Abby plans to pop the question while she’s there. There’s just one pretty big problem: Harper lied to Abby about coming out to her family and wants her to pose as her straight roommate during their visit so as not to disrupt her blue blood father’s mayoral campaign. Abby reluctantly agrees.
After subjecting Abby to all manner of indignities, from making her sleep in the basement to getting cozy with her male exes in front of her, and the disturbing revelation that Harper was a high school bully who cruelly outed her ex Riley (Aubrey Plaza, divine), who shares far more chemistry with Abby than Harper, the film ends—spoiler alert!—with Abby forgiving the truly terrible Harper and proposing.
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While the film attracted a huge audience and generally positive reviews, and took home a GLAAD Media Award for its status as a trailblazing LGBTQ+ holiday film entry, its ending was so divisive that it became a top trending topic on Twitter, as many viewers complained that Stewart’s character should have ended up with Plaza’s, especially after that heartfelt hang at a drag bar—or at the very least kicked selfish Harper to the curb.
And Plaza, for her part, seemed to agree. “Honestly, I can’t help it that I’m a lesbian meme,” the actress told NBC’s Today. “I was very surprised at the reaction. I think, you know, Kristen and I just had some undeniable chemistry, and it just seeped onto screen. And I think people just were rooting for us. I’m not ashamed to say I was as well, but, you know, it’s not my movie.”
During our interview for her new Princess Diana film Spencer, which may see Stewart win her first Academy Award, I couldn’t help but ask her about the film’s ending—which, frankly, bugged me as well.
“It’s pretty awful. It’s bad. It’s really bad,” she says of Mackenzie Davis’ character Harper. “It’s why we hired Mackenzie to do that, because I don’t know, I love her. Mackenzie seems like somebody who is actually speaking to the last line of conversation being that you’re the sum of your parts, not every part of your life defines you, and you grow with your lifespan. Mackenzie seems like she’s on a longer journey than what maybe one moment will define her as. She just seems like a smart, open, intuitive, curious, nice person. And thank god for that, because any other actress would have been really hateable.”
“If you really unpack and truly consider where that girl is in her life? Ouch! I get it,” she said of the online criticism.
When I mention how her Abby should have ended up with Aubrey Plaza’s Riley, and whether Harper really earned our forgiveness for the way she terrorized Riley in high school, Stewart replied, “There were things about her that definitely sucked… I… don’t have a great answer there.”
Maybe they’ll get together in the sequel.
