I’m sure many critics don’t really know what to do right now. We’re in a little bit of a daze. It’s certainly an unfamiliar place. Had I known that this would be what it was, I would have tried to get an advanced screener so I could get my thoughts out on this film earlier. But instead, I watched it with the normies on Netflix. And color me surprised that Happy Madison produced a coming-of-age drama starring Sunny Sandler, which is both extremely on brand for them, given the actress, and extremely off brand for them, given the fact that this film isn’t actually trying to make you laugh. It’s a little bit of an emotional roller coaster that, while incredibly obvious, still manages to completely and utterly devastate you. I cried in a Happy Madison movie, and I’m not ashamed, but I’m very confused. I didn’t think that would ever be a thing. The closest I think I’ve ever come to feeling something remotely near this was Big Daddy. But Don’t Say Good Luck is the real deal.

A lot of that can be attributed to Sunny Sandler actually delivering a performance worth talking about instead of continuing to harp on the fact that she is a legacy actress, or more crudely, a nepo baby. Yes, this film is still produced under her father’s Happy Madison label, but this film and her performance in it are good enough that hopefully she won’t have to rely on Dad anymore for casting. This role indicates that she’s ready for bigger and better things and to break away from the Happy Madison label. Instead of filling the cast with Adam Sandler regulars, they also played it smart by inviting people you wouldn’t necessarily find in an Adam Sandler movie. Most notably, Melanie Lynskey plays Elizabeth, Sophie’s mother, and delivers a knockout performance. It’s one of my favorite Best Supporting Actress performances of the year. Also surprisingly strong and moderately unrecognizable to me was Bebe Neuwirth as Linda, Elizabeth’s mother, who comes in in a more supporting capacity. I felt like I was listening to some classic British actress coming in and trying to do an American accent while bringing this esteemed, high British level of acting to the role, but no, this is Bebe Neuwirth, who has proven herself such a reliable actress over the years. Her scene partner for a lot of it is Steve Buscemi as Dale, one of the few Sandler regulars to pop up, and even he is doing an actual dramatic performance here. He’s not trying to play anything for laughs. He doesn’t have to trip and fall over anything. This film is surprisingly emotionally grounded, and it’s a Happy Madison production.

I can attribute a lot of that to director Julia Hart, who brought us Stargirl and its sequel and clearly understands the coming-of-age process. She’s also one of the credited writers on the screenplay, alongside Laura Hankin and Jordan Horowitz, and I think it’s really that understanding of what it means to be a girl coming of age, especially a girl obsessed with singing and musical theater, that solidifies the project. Sunny Sandler does her own singing here, playing 16-year-old Sophie Birenbaum, a teenager who is really into music. She’s able to at least functionally play the piano, but her real passion is musical theater, and she gets cast in her school’s production of Waitress as Jenna, the lead character. So a lot of her time spent at school revolves around play rehearsal, learning her scenes, blocking, dialogue and working on kissing her love interest within the play, Jack, played by Jack Champion, who recently impressed me in Avatar: Fire and Ash. I fully welcomed the relationship between Sophie and Jack as being platonic musical-theater nerds, or at least budding actors, instead of throwing the butterflies-in-the-stomach teenage romance thing into the mix and taking away from what the main plot actually is. Jack remains a scene partner for Sophie and a friend, but not her potential new boyfriend.

The film has enough heavy lifting it needs to do because, as it’s not really shy about hiding, Elizabeth is very sick, and she does not want her children to know. Her husband, Ted, played by Max Greenfield, is aware after an incident lands her in the hospital and she finds out her situation is worse than she thought it would be. She’s hoping she can hold off telling the kids until they take their yearly summer vacation, and especially until after Sophie’s musical. But life doesn’t always go as planned. I know I’m being emotionally manipulated. I know exactly what this movie is trying to do. It says it right up front. Mom is dying. Daughter’s gonna find out. There’s this bond between mother and daughter, which is further highlighted by the wonderful selection of Waitress the Musical.

One of the things Sophie has to work out pretty consistently is trying to figure out who Jenna is, and for those familiar with either the plot of Waitress, the movie starring Keri Russell, or the musical, you’ll know that one of the things Jenna struggles with is an unexpected pregnancy. In the musical, she has the song She Used to Be Mine, written by the wonderful Sara Bareilles, which has turned into one of the biggest musical-theater sensations to come out of Waitress. The song is incredibly reflective of Jenna’s thoughts about impending motherhood, what it means for her, how everything is changing, how she feels about the mother she might become, and the person she was before she was pregnant. It’s not necessarily a song against pregnancy, but one trying to wrap up all of those complicated thoughts like they’ve been baked into one beautiful pie. Sophie is even given the task of asking her own mother what it was like to be pregnant with her. There’s a really lovely scene where Elizabeth, knowing what her daughter has ahead of her, offers Sophie a maternity dress she kept that she wore when she was pregnant.

That’s also why the juxtaposition between Jenna and Elizabeth works so well. Sophie is going to Elizabeth to learn what it is to be a mother and what it is to be pregnant at the exact time when this mother-daughter relationship is nearing its end. At the same time, Waitress becomes this fitting tribute to her mother because Elizabeth runs a deli. It’s not quite the same thing as Jenna and her pies, and I’m sure making Elizabeth an actual pie baker would have put the whole thing a little too on the nose. But making Sophie’s family own a deli keeps them within that same world. Her mom isn’t an accountant or a lawyer or something completely disconnected. The film finds as many parallels as it reasonably can without overshooting, allowing Sophie’s attempt to understand Jenna to become inseparable from her attempt to understand her own mother.

This film feels like a slow walk into a box of Kleenex. Every moment has been expertly placed in your path like a minefield, except you’re really bad at avoiding the mines. Somehow, they just keep hitting you over and over and over. I found myself to be an emotional wreck even though I was never a teenage girl and my mother wasn’t dying of cancer when I was in high school. I cannot personally relate to this character. However, I did have a friend who went through this exact same experience, just in college, when she was in the middle of a production and her father, who had been sick for some time, passed away and did not get to see her performance. It also reminded me a little of the real-life experience Vanessa Hudgens had when she was doing Grease: Live and playing Rizzo. Her father passed away just before the broadcast, and then she had to go perform Grease: Live anyway, adding an entirely different emotional context to everything she had to sing and say. Sophie similarly wants to be good not just for the audience, but for her mother, especially once she realizes what’s happening.

From there, things start to go like dominoes in Sophie’s life. She had previously gotten into a fight with her best friend Carolyn, played by Scarlett Estevez, but they make up almost immediately because Sophie needs her best friend back in her life, and what they were fighting over was stupid anyway. Sophie also has two younger brothers who I would say are underutilized because they don’t really do anything except be kind of adorable for their age range and get into a little bit of trouble. They don’t offer a lot of meaningful content to the film because this is much more focused on the mother-daughter relationship. We don’t get that same kind of scene with Elizabeth and her two little boys, and perhaps that would have just brought out another box of Kleenex. Might as well. We’re already creating Happy Madison’s first tearjerker. Go all the way.

But yeah, this film got me, and I think it’ll get a lot of people. It’s not hiding what it is. It’s very out in the open. Even though I could predict exactly where it was headed and wasn’t terribly surprised by any of the choices it was making, it was kind of amazing how emotionally invested I remained in a film that wasn’t surprising me in any creatively new way. It’s following a pretty obvious, tried-and-true formula and somehow just nailing it. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that Melanie Lynskey has always been incredibly underrated, criminally so, within the acting community. But also to the fact that Sunny Sandler has never been given anything remotely near this deep in terms of dramatic material, and she proved herself absolutely worthy. She also has a great voice, and I’m absolutely here for whatever she does next.

I do think Waitress had a few more songs the film could have leaned into. There are a few more lyrics and ideas that would have been fun to pull out, especially even little sections from songs like I Didn’t Plan It, which, in a weird way, kind of highlights where Elizabeth is in her life. Even though the song and Elizabeth’s circumstances are about two different things, being able to repurpose more of the music from Waitress could have continued strengthening the connection between the two stories. But what the film does use works remarkably well because Waitress isn’t just there to prove Sophie is a theater kid. It becomes part of the emotional language of the movie.

The audio description is from Descriptive Video Works and narrated by Nigel Mahika, and they did an absolutely lovely job with it. I remember at some point there was something that I felt could have been described and wasn’t, but it didn’t matter enough for me to remember it by the end of the movie, probably because I was crying and had been emotionally manipulated into a puddle, so everything else just kind of went the other way. There definitely was something I felt like the track could have hit, but that doesn’t stop Nigel from being an excellent human, non-synthetic audio description performer.

I definitely recommend Don’t Say Good Luck, and considering how few films we ever have that are actually quality submissions for Outstanding Television Movie at the Emmys anymore, I mean, this year we nominated Heads of State, for crying out loud, if we can actually remember this film existed by the time Emmy voting rolls around, I think it’s guaranteed a nomination. It’s fantastic, and it’s the best thing Happy Madison has made in a long time. So keep it up. Whoever had the idea to make this film deserves a raise, and Sunny Sandler can finally graduate to projects where she’s not at all connected to her father or her father’s production company. She’s ready.

Fresh: 8.2/10