Critic Reviews

The story's heart is Kemper’s Helen, of course, and this role is a perfect fit. Helen is less sunny than most of Kemper’s roles, allowing her to show more subtlety, depth, and complexity.

Kemper is good throughout. Her radiant likability gives her the power to sell weak material, which means she will often be offered weak material. But there’s enough in Happiness for Beginners to make me glad that she did it.

With an amusing ensemble cast, a sturdy script, lovely filmmaking, and the power of its leads' chemistry, Happiness For Beginners is a modest delight.

Happiness for Beginners is inoffensive to a fault.

Well-behaved to a fault, Happiness for Beginners is sweet but a little tentative.

This veritable “Eat, Pray, Hike” leaves no trace of originality or dramatic consequence. The advantages it has over the likes of “We Wish You a Married Christmas” and “Royally Ever After” are twofold: A likable cast, and dignified source material.

This movie’s heart is in the right place, and its company is pleasant enough. But by its final half-hour, it starts to feel too much like a rote recitation from a rom-com to-do list.

Throughout it all, Kemper visibly strains to temper her comedic impulses. Sometimes she delivers her lines with a quickness that feels refreshingly out of place, but it’s mostly call-and-response songs along the trails and heart to hearts under the stars.

The woman at its center remains opaque, her romance is listless and her journey to self-discovery becomes an endurance test.

When you’ve wasted a perfectly good Blythe Danner appearance and then weighed down your late second act with “big secrets” that would drown a better comedy than this, you’re not making the case that Netflix should sign you to a lifetime contract, no matter how charmingly Irish you are.