Happiest Season

And The Pardoning Of Hunter Biden

I’ve been outspoken here about being an ally to the LGBTQ community. I’m a boring cisgendered heterosexual male, and it often means I have no idea about the lifestyle of my cultural companions with more colorful sexual identities. Forgive me for my ignorance – we’re all trying to learn more about people different than ourselves.

This means that I’m coming towards “Happiest Season” from a sideways angle. This is a Christmas rom-com about two lesbians, which feels a lot like a Christmas movie in a different language. But that’s okay – I like subtitles! However, this also feels like it’s trying to capitalize on a trend that blew up while I was down – Christmas rom-coms as sort of a universal comfort food. That’s yet another askew avenue to approach this. I’m just all diagonal here.

The premise is, from what I understand, a common one for movies of this ilk: how do you tell the parents about your new romantic companion during the holidays? And what if it’s a theoretically-unconventional relationship, and the girl’s family is fairly conservative? Abby and Harper (Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis) have been seeing each other for a while, despite Harper’s father (Victor Garber) in line for a mayoral nomination. This is the season, Harper figures, to let her family know. But cold feet means that Abby is en route to her parents with “Abby the heterosexual friend” instead. Abby could have just stayed home, of course, but Abby’s parents have passed on, and now we’re talking about a much different and darker movie.

There’s not a lot of time spent illustrating Harper’s personality, which is a comedic loss given that she’s largely contrasted with her sisters. Sloane (Allison Brie) is an obnoxious perfectionist who has always held Harper in contempt. The forgotten one is Jane (Mary Holland, also the co-writer), who busies herself with art projects like paintings and horny medieval fantasy novels. Abby, meanwhile, finds herself growing close to Harper’s ex, Riley – this is a massive conflict because Riley is played by Aubrey Plaza, who makes everyone melt but please God me first what do I have to do okay fine sorry I’m rambling no please Aubrey accept me I mean nevermind.

The jokes are overall pretty schticky business. In a movie with a number of gay characters, Dan Levy is still playing the gay best friend cliche. He’s one of many ringers in this movie. There’s a brief shoplifting gag that allows a scene for the very funny Timothy Simons and Lauren Lapkus to play overzealous mall cops, and for a moment the idea of a movie about these two heading mall security seemed more exciting than watching this cast run through these tropes. The biggest problem is that you’ve made a comedy starring two dramatic actresses. Stewart’s been amusing on “Saturday Night Live” because the sketch show has been able to exploit her low-key intensity for laughs. But if you’re going to pick any actresses to star in a movie with “Happiest” in the title, Stewart would be your last choice. Davis is a little more game, but for plot purposes, she’s more reactive than proactive.

I can’t help but feel this movie is too lazy in portraying these clashing extremes. The gay characters in this film discuss gay lifestyles and gay culture as if trying to remind audiences who have lost track. And the conservative parents who can’t figure out that Kristen Stewart is a lesbian? C’mon now. The storyline involving a mayoral candidate’s prospects being dimmed by his daughter being gay? We live in a world where Dick Cheney, the most conservative man you could imagine (back when conservative policies were dark and evil, and not stupid and cartoonish), had a lesbian daughter who, after some familial discomfort, became a leading voice in the Republican Party. We live in a world now where major conservative voices actually say that heterosexual sex is actually homosexual. I’m certain the gay characters in this movie don’t center their entire lives around Gay (unless it’s actively political, which this movie isn’t). And I’m certain that these conservative characters would not be so fazed by their gay daughter that they’d have to make a career change. Yes, it would be awkward and uncomfortable and maybe dangerous around the home (tell that story), but it’s not something that damages political careers anymore.

Speaking of parents, I was looking for an opportunity to talk about the controversy surrounding Joe Biden’s pardoning of his own son, Hunter. As in, can someone with half a brain tell me why this was a controversy?

I’m guessing many of you reading this haven’t been threatened with jail time. And we’ve all grown up watching all this action-adventure media where someone was concerned a loved one was going to jail, and that someone moved heaven and earth (and committed plenty of crimes) to stop that from happening. A concerned parent helping their child leave the country. A sibling helping stage a daring jailbreak. I watched plenty of shows and movies where someone saw someone close to them in legal peril and risked their lives to save them.

It’s a nice fantasy. It’s also totally ridiculous. Once my family found out what happened to me, they reasoned, well, this is life now. There are grounds to appeal legal decisions, or even ask for a pardon or clemency. Instead, family members wrote hopeless personal letters to the President. I wrote letters to family that went unread. My family cared, moreso than most families of incarcerated people. But there was only so much they were willing to do to ease the pain of my experience. Some never wrote letters or emails at all. And as for friends, I had to beg them to write a letter to my judge just to offer some form of leniency at sentencing. And when that didn’t work, I begged a friend to beg them to do so. I begged. Like a coward.

If you care about a loved one, you owe it to yourself to do everything you can to keep them from prison time. You’re not fighting karma, you’re not defying a sensible system. You’re protecting that person from cruelty. You’re protecting that person from being treated as if they are garbage. You’re saving their life. What kind of father would Joe Biden be if he let Hunter Biden be sentenced to jail time? And more importantly, what kind of man would Joe Biden be to put his son in the crosshairs of the impending clown car that is the Trump Justice Department?

Joe Biden should have pardoned his son every day, and six extra times on Sunday. He should have done everything he could to protect his son from the justice system. And while it pains me to say this, I would say the same thing about Donald Trump if any of his idiot children ended up in legal trouble. If Donald Jr. was busy applying some booger sugar behind the wheel and he ran over an innocent person, then yes, Donald Trump should pardon his son for his awful crime. If he were prosecuted underneath another president, I would expect him to endure some sort of justifiable punishment (particularly because a Trump doesn’t feel remorse, it seems). But if you love someone, you really love them, and you have the legal mechanism to keep them away from the Bureau Of Prisons, you have every obligation to do so.