HAPPILY EVER AFTER (Joan Carr-Wiggin). 112 minutes. Opens Friday (March 18). See listing. Rating: NN
In this drama, a young documentarian (Janet Montgomery) returns home to her small town when her father (Peter Firth) falls ill, and gets roped into videotaping the wedding of an old friend (Sara Paxton). As in her previous feature If I Were You, director/co-writer Joan Carr-Wiggin sets a lot of ideas in motion but fails to shape them into a coherent narrative. The slack pace leaves the cast – among them Tom Cullen, Alex Kingston, Naomi Snieckus, Melanie Scrofano and Michael Therriault – flailing to define their haphazardly written characters. (Paxton deserves credit for finding the centre of a character whose story makes no goddamn sense at all.) There’s no reason this should run almost two hours.
