A HAPPY LIFE

Synopsis

We open on the still face of Danny Jordan, early morning light washing over him, a lollipop stick dangling from his lips. His ramshackle house slowly comes into focus—a collapsing ecosystem of lost souls and hangers-on: Carmina, a towering trans woman; Brenda and her “wannabe musician” boyfriend Jimmy; Boyd, a defrocked, oversexed former priest; Rollie, a latter-day Kerouac; and Rollie’s drifting son Leo. The power is out, there’s no hot water, the house is barely functioning—and according to Paramedic Jack, Danny is dead.

Twenty years earlier, Danny and his pregnant wife Marnie move into the same house. From the start, Marnie dominates the marriage and barely tolerates Danny—earnest, gentle, autistic, diabetic, and endlessly accommodating. Danny works himself to exhaustion, driven by a singular dream: to someday open an “out-of-this-world” bed and breakfast.

While carrying on an affair, Marnie abandons Danny, taking their daughter Brenda and installing Rollie and Leo in the house. Danny quietly accepts the betrayal, burying his grief in work and nursing an unspoken, lifelong love for Karen Grover Delaney, a woman he’s admired from afar since high school. His practical brother Scott urges him to stand up for himself—but Danny doesn’t know how.

Years later, when Brenda turns eighteen and child support ends, Marnie sends her and Jimmy back to Danny. Jimmy is a hustler of empty promises, always “knowing a guy,” and Danny—incapable of saying no—keeps opening his door. He takes in Carmina after she loses her job, and later Boyd, now stripped of his priesthood and tormented by temptation. The house fills, Danny shrinks, and his dream recedes further out of reach.

Amid the chaos, Danny forms an unexpected bond with Thabisa, a warm, grounded South African immigrant working at the Utilities Commission. For the first time, Danny glimpses what a healthy, reciprocal relationship might feel like—and what he’s been denying himself.

But the cost is mounting. Danny’s diabetes spirals out of control. His mother Claire finally cuts him off, refusing to help until he reclaims his life from the freeloaders draining him dry. Isolated, overwhelmed, and depressed, Danny retreats into his grocery store job, his pelican figurines, and the fragile hope that his dream might still survive.

When everything at home finally collapses, Danny slips into a diabetic coma. In the hospital, he’s confronted by a talking Smiley Face balloon—a surreal, recurring manifestation that delivers uncomfortable truths with cheerful cruelty. It’s time, the balloon insists, for Danny to save himself.

Recovered and newly resolved, Danny devises a radical plan: he will fake his own death, freeing himself at last from the people consuming his life. We return to the opening scene. Danny’s death is an elaborate ruse, using a drug that slows his heartbeat to nearly nothing. But the plan goes horribly wrong. Danny has taken too much—dangerously compounded by his nightly Tylenol. Even Paramedic Jack can’t revive him. The paddles come out. Danny lies still, peaceful at last.

As Jack delivers the news to Scott, Danny receives one final visit from the Smiley Face balloon—this time in a dream. And then, against all odds, Danny wakes up.

The houseguests face their reckoning—some poetic, some painful, some deeply strange. Danny says goodbye to his family and steps into a future he’s finally chosen. He’s going to open his bed and breakfast with Thabisa.

He’d love to put it in space—about sixty-two miles above Earth. But he’s afraid of heights.