Happy, Texas

This American independent directed and co-written by first-timer Mark Illsley has such a skilled, genial cast and is made with such an easy professionalism that Miramax sensibly swooped it up at the 1999 Sundance Festival. But perhaps Miramax also recognized the essential squareness of this seemingly offbeat movie and spotted the potential for a mass Hugh-and-Julia audience.

What starts off as a zany, lunatic farce -- three prisoners stuck together on a chain gang, one of them a mass murderer -- turns slowly into a bland, middle-of-the-road romantic comedy. The best part is the stupid stuff early on, when two of the convicts escape in a van and assume the identities of the van owners: a gay couple who travel through the Deep South putting on children's beauty pageants. There's real comedy-team potential with Jeremy Northam and Steve Zahn as a kind of oily Dean Martin/Anglo Cheech Marin duo who hang out in small-town Texas waiting for a chance to rob the local bank. But both are soon enmeshed in amour (Ally Walker, Illeana Douglas), whereupon the laughs deplete. And only the most straitlaced audience will find much humor in the coming-out of a local cop (William H. Macy) and his unrequited love for Northam. Meanwhile, if you're going to call a place Happy, Texas, then build around it some ha-ha jolly jokes. At the Cable Car.
-- Gerald Peary