The local press screening for this film is still a week away, but in the meantime, GetReligion.org links to this NPR interview with Don Roos, director of Happy Endings, a dysfunctional comedy about various characters, one of whom is a pregnant woman who chooses not to abort her child but to put her son up for adoption.
The film, says Roos, was partly inspired by his and his partner’s own recent adoption of a child. I haven’t had time to listen to the whole interview yet, but here’s the sample quote provided by GetReligion.org:
My politics changed a lot, in a way, when I became a father, because I depend upon young women and young men choosing not to abort. All my life I’ve been a right-to-choose kind of guy, but secretly hoping that there were girls who thought it was wrong. . . . We were hoping to find a girl who thought abortion was wrong and yet gay parents were a fabulous idea — so it’s a very narrow group.
FWIW, I remember liking Roos’s directorial debut The Opposite of Sex (1998) — partly because I was on a Christina Ricci kick at the time and partly because I’m a sucker for films about adult brother-sister relationships (a rarity, alas) and this movie had two of them at its core — but I haven’t seen it since it was brand new, and I have no idea what I would make of it on a second viewing. His follow-up, Bounce (2000), made no impression on me at all — or if it did, I have completely forgotten what it was.
Meanwhile, it looks like we can add this film to Palindromes (2004) and, uh, the almost-decade-old Citizen Ruth (1996) on the “abortion comedy” list. Are there any others? And is the arrival of two “comedies” on the subject in recent months indicative of a more sophisticated approach to this subject in our culture?
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