This is the story of a women who is diagnosed with a serious case of cancer, meets other sufferers, and finds that each of them confronts the disease in a different way, contributing (or maybe not) to the attitude that she herself adopts. It should work well, and maybe it does in the play that this movie was based on (I don't know the play), but here the elements don't connect up very gracefully. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that somebody decided to confine the entire plot to a single day. Maybe even to the hour and a half that the movie takes, although I'm not sure we're supposed to take it that literally. Anyway, the supporting characters don't get very well developed (some are virtually stereotypes), attitudes change too abruptly, and the ending is more like a "we've run out of time" ending than like a comprehensive development out of what's come before. That said, the movie deserves credit for portraying a not entirely sympathetic protagonist and Andie MacDowell deserves credit for putting her across. And Miriam Margolyes extracts the maximum from a part that consists largely of wisecracking and mugging.
Review of My Happy Ending
