The New Kristen Stewart Lesbian Rom-Com Is Kind Of A Bummer

by 24USATVNov. 25, 2020, 5 p.m. 57
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When it was first announced some 4 billion pre-pandemic years ago that queer cinematic legends Clea DuVall and Kristen Stewart were teaming up for a lesbian Christmas rom-com, I didn’t dare believe our good fortune. DuVall, a cult icon since her turn as Natasha Lyonne’s greasy, androgynous crush in But I’m a Cheerleader 20 years ago, would be cowriting and directing, while Stewart, who’d I’d crushed on long before either of us came out, would star — an almost comical rarity in Hollywood, where the occasionally told lesbian story is much more likely to be a sexy male-directed thriller or a bummer of a historical tragedy. Though we gays love a good Christmas comedy as much as if not even more so than our fellow straight people — my relationship to The Family Stone is practically a sacred one — we’ve never before had one to call our own.



Happiest Season, which drops today on Hulu, is the first-ever studio-backed holiday rom-com to center on a queer couple — a humbling, and frustrating, reminder that for all the progress made in mainstream LGBTQ representation over the last decade, queer characters onscreen still have plenty of uncharted territory left to explore. But even though the sparkly seasonal backdrop is excitingly new, Happiest Season’s queer couple — Kristen Stewart’s Abby and her girlfriend Harper, played by Mackenzie Davis — are dealing with a very old problem: Harper isn’t out to her hypercompetitive Waspy family, which means when she takes Abby home for the holidays, Abby’s forced back into the closet.

Dan Levy, pitch perfect in the familiar role of the gay best friend, John, is aghast to hear that Abby has to pretend to be her partner’s “roommate.” (The trope is elevated to a delightful degree this time around, though, since our GBF isn’t around to help some straight person self-actualize — his friend is gay, too.) Abby tells John that she’s just trying to be there for Harper, but he’s not having it. “Have they ever met a lesbian?” he says.

It’s a funny line, especially when you consider the meta connotations. Stewart, post-Twilight, spent many years in the public eye openly holding hands with her live-in gal pals, all the while dressing and acting (and I say this with utmost respect and pride) like a big old lez. But until she made some grand, official pronouncement, Stewart’s straight audience, including the gossip blogs, would refuse to acknowledge the truth they saw before them. (Though I have to admit, if you’re forced to make some retrograde broadcast about your sexuality, announcing “I’m sooooo gay, dude” on SNL is a pretty good way to go.) For queer people, being “out” isn’t ever a one-and-done thing, but a lifelong series of strange and shifting negotiations.

DuVall has said that Harper’s story of struggling to come out is actually her own. “All I ever wanted was a holiday movie that represented my experience so I decided to make one,” she tweeted earlier this year. And Stewart told Heather Hogan at Autostraddle that she signed on for the project because it was her story too — being happily in love with a woman but not yet ready to share that love with others. Only in Stewart’s case, it wasn’t just a hesitation to share with friends and family; she wasn’t yet ready to be out as gay on the world’s stage.

“I didn’t want to be called a lesbo,” Stewart told the Advocate of that time in her life. “And I didn’t want to be that weird, gross, ‘dykey’ girl. And that sucks. It’s terrible.”

Happiest Season, then, can be read as a love letter to both DuVall and Stewart’s former selves. The film wants us to be frustrated with Harper, who only tells Abby that she isn’t out to her family when they’re mere minutes from arriving at her parents’ place — after having first lied about it — but it does not, ultimately, condemn her. Even when Harper feeds her family some pity story about Abby needing to come home with her because she’s a lonely orphan; when she stays out late, without Abby, and with her straight friends and ex-boyfriend; when we learn a rather horrifying story about what Harper did to her ex-girlfriend Riley (the luminous Aubrey Plaza) when they were still in high school — we are still supposed to sympathize with and, in the end, forgive her.

I wanted so badly to love this movie, which has been warmly reviewed elsewhere: It’s the “lesbian romance [Christmas] deserves,” “a festive treat” that has “gift[ed] us the holiday smile we all deserve.” But I find the widespread insistence that Happiest Season is a charming, bubbly, feel-good romp a little jarring, when so much of it — the heart of it — is really about trauma and gay shame. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this disoriented if the film hadn’t been so aggressively promoted as a fun gay love story, since, Plaza and Levy’s star turns aside, there’s not too much fun to be had here — and the kind of love we’re supposed to root for doesn’t look much like love to me.

There’s always some insidious stuff lurking just beneath the surface in most holiday rom-coms, which reliably transform grumpy outsiders into sudden true believers in the spirit of Christmas and the sanctity of the nuclear family. It’s not a genre where anybody should be expecting adroit political commentary. Truly, I didn’t need nor want some radical queer treatise with this movie — but I did want to swoon, to feel blissfully transported into a holiday wonderland where wacky hijinks ensue but everything is ultimately OK in the end. Instead, I was left reflecting upon how often queer people, traumatized themselves, can end up seriously hurting their partners. How the quest for assimilation into straight families and polite upper-middle-class society can limit and diminish us. (One of the reasons Harper doesn’t want to come out yet is because her dad, an aspiring mayor, is hoping to woo a big donor during the holiday season; his political affiliations are, somewhat bafflingly, kept a mystery.)

Which is all to say: I was bummed out! And that’s not how I want to feel after watching a rom-com, especially from queer makers and performers I love and respect.

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