WHAT HAPPENED WAS...
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Karen Sillas, Tom Noonan. Screenplay/Director: Tom Noonan.
Don't be fooled by the marketing campaign into believing that WHAT HAPPENED WAS... is a light-hearted, quirky romantic romp about a date-from-hell. It most decidedly is not. It is a dark, disturbing and almost painfully honest character study which will have many viewers shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. The sensational performances of Karen Sillas and Tom Noonan should have added up to a sensational film, but they don't quite. In adapting his two person stage play, Noonan manages both to under-direct and to over-direct, sacrificing much of the story's potential entertainment value for a more serious tone which simply doesn't ring quite as true.
WHAT HAPPENED WAS... is the story of an evening shared by two co-workers in a New York law firm who at first glance appear to have little in common. Jackie (Sillas) is a plain-spoken "executive assistant" from a working class background; Michael (Noonan) is a Harvard-educated paralegal with a dry and caustic sense of humor. Jackie has invited Michael to dinner at her apartment, and the two proceed to engage in the typical first date small talk. However, each begins to discover that there is more to the other than meets the eye, and as the evening progresses there come a series of revelations which make this first date anything but casual.
The first half of WHAT HAPPENED WAS..., which establishes the characters through the mundane, is by far its most effective. We meet Jackie as she frantically prepares both herself and her apartment for her guest, and her anxiety continues until several glasses of wine loosen her up. Every note in Sillas' performance is dead on: her piecemeal serving of dinner, realizing halfway through that she has forgotten the salad; her oft-repeated question to Michael of "That's a joke, right?" as she fears--justifiably--that he is having fun at her expense; her over-eager mantra of "cool" in response to his achievements. It's a beautiful and sensitive performance, and Jackie's genuineness provides a perfect counterpoint to Michael's intellectual reserve, as he tries to maintain the upper hand through sarcasm without even knowing it. It soon becomes clear that Jackie is far more perceptive than Michael, and as the power dynamic shifts, Michael crumbles. The development of this shift through the dinner is fascinating, if almost too understated.
However, Noonan is not content to deliver a sort of MY DINNER DATE WITH ANDRE, and it is when the script takes an abrupt left turn into psychodrama that the film falters. It begins with Jackie reading to Michael a children's story she has written, a grim fairy tale about incest and matricide, with Michael becoming progressively more distraught by the tale. Noonan simply takes the scene too far; children's voices whisper in the background, the camera shoots through the windows of a dollhouse, and Sillas is lit with flickering candles like a voodoo priestess. The self-conscious arsty-ness of Noonan's direction takes a serious scene and makes it almost a self-parody. Michael's big breakdown is also played far too broadly. There is a falseness to his confession, and WHAT HAPPENED WAS... eventually begins too feel extremely scripted, losing the pinpoint honesty which had been its strength.
Noonan clearly wanted to tell a story of broken people finding each other, of barriers being torn down, and of the secrets that keep people isolated and lonely. The problem with WHAT HAPPENED WAS... is that it is much more interesting when its observations about human interaction are inspiring nervous laughter than when they are supposed to be inspiring serious contemplation. Stories based on big emotional confrontations between characters are tricky to transfer from the stage to the screen. WHAT HAPPENED WAS... Noonan only got it half right.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 dinner dates: 6.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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