Like a few episodes of a gentle family sitcom bolted together and the joins sanded flat, All Happy Families is an Everybody Loves Raymond-style journey with a couple of issues thrown in to indicate grown-up-ness. It’s well acted, slightly sentimental, a little nostalgic for simpler times and is just the sort of vehicle you might expect Josh Radnor to board after 208 episodes of How I Met Your Mother on TV.
It starts with a shot of what might be an endoscope snaking up someone’s colon but turns out to be a drains guy’s mini-camera in the sluiceways of the family home of the Landrys. They’ve all moved out, and the house is now owned by its golden boy, successful TV actor Will Landry (Rob Huebel). Graham (Radnor), his less successful younger brother, now manages the place, and lives in an apartment there. As we join the action, Graham is trying to get the house’s other apartment shipshape to rent it out again and is largely making a hash of it. Just as he’s making a hash of his life – weed, drink, general slovenliness, failure to get a gig either as an actor or as a writer. Man-boy behaviour in short.
This is the film’s throughline, onto which is bolted several storylines. One concerns Dana, a former acquaintance of Graham who unexpectedly turns up to look at the apartment – a potential romance? Then there’s Will, the star of the soap Winsome Falls, who is facing some sort of allegation at work, though when he arrives unannounced no one knows that. Plus the parents, Sue and Roy – Sue has just retired and at her leaving party her boss, Jerry, has tried to touch her up.
These, Will and Sue, are the issues. There’s also, as if bidding for completeness, Will’s son Noah, who is now going by Evie, wearing skirts and being addressed as “she”.
It would all be a bit too affirmative and icky without Becky Ann Baker – as Sue – and in particular John Ashton as dad Roy, a sour old-school kind of guy, breath of politically incorrect fresh air and source of many a “what!? what!?” expression. The interactions of scene-stealing Ashton and Baker are the best bits of the movie.
I also thought The Wonder Years – the font of the titles and the warm, sunny way it’s shot, plus the gently bickering family dynamic – and in particular the way the burgeoning relationship between Dana and Graham is dealt with.
There is some subtextual grit in the oyster. The way Sue rolls over so easily into Noah’s transition to Evie – girl talk as if with a hormonal assist – coupled to Sue’s recent experience at the hands (literally) of the grimly bumptious Jerry (David Pasquesi) suggests there’s a darker motive to her embrace of her grandchild’s trans-formation.
Radnor is likeable and easy to watch, Huebel does an excellent job as the self-obsessed successful actor hanging on to the last shred of self-knowledge by a fingernail and Chandra Russell plays the role of the pretty and sorted Dana as if it weren’t a largely thankless role.
It’s co-writer Haroula Rose’s second time around as a director and while it’s not as gnarly as her debut, the Winter’s Bone-esque Once Upon a River, it’s not trying to be. This is in the main a well-observed dramedy about the dynamic of family life, with the issues there as passenger rather than driver. Rose delivers the feelgood when necessary. All is well in this world, and the bits that are not can be sorted out with a little honesty and openness.
All Happy Families – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
