A Happy Accident with Happy Accidents (2000)

by Morgan Stone

*Spoiler Warning for Happy Accidents (2000)*

Sometime around me being in middle-school and high-school (I was maybe 14? 16?), I rented a movie from the public library that had a monumental impact on me. It freaked me out to an extreme. It was to the point that my mom and I (after watching it) agreed that we just had to watch something else to distract ourselves. And for several years of my life, I simply could not remember what it was called or really what about it freaked me out. All I knew was one major thing: It was about time travel.

Now it took me a long time to find this movie. In my memory, it was somewhere between a drama and a psychological mind bender. And yet, it's official genre places it as a romantic comedy. 

After many years of searching, I eventually just looked at every time travel romance ever made and, lo and behold, I found Happy Accidents (2000), starring Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio. This had to be the movie.

It's been sitting in the back of my mind for a few years, but when I was trying to figure out what to write for spring cleaning it came to the surface. I need to scrub this movie from my mind.

The film focuses on Ruby (Tomei) who has seen a string of bad boyfriends. She tells her friends that she has to stop finding guys to "fix." Enter: Sam. They meet at the bus stop and sparks fly as they talk. Sam is nice, and funny, and incredibly eccentric. When he sees a normal terrier, he freaks out, saying that they don't have dogs where he comes from. He also claims to be from Dubuque, Iowa. 

Ruby and Sam's relationship unfolds, and they fall madly in love. But Sam is a lot stranger than Ruby initially assumed. He begins to claim that he is a time traveler from the year 2470. 

He begins revealing more and more information. He contradicts himself, he says things that don't make sense, and he begins to tell people outside of the relationships about being a time traveler. She finds that he wrote the name "Christie Delancey" over and over again, and Ruby is suspicious that he's cheating on her. He falls into these dizzy spells in which he begins to see the world in reverse, and he claims they're from going back in time. Ruby tells her therapist about him and thinks about breaking up with him, but something about their relationship keeps her there. After a talk with her mom it's unclear whether she loves him or loves the excitement he brings to her life. 

You spend the entire movie unsure of whether Sam is truly from the future or not. He doesn't have a scrap of evidence to attest to him being from the future, and the continual contributions to the story make it seem like he is just pulling this out of his ass. It gets to the point that he eventually tells Ruby that he found a picture of her in a curio shop and went back in time to save her from dying the next day. 

It's up until the last few minutes that you think he may just be pulling one over on her. But then you find out that her therapist is from the future. And you find out that Christie Delancey is an intersection in New York (omg is that a Crossing Delancey reference). And that intersection is where she's meant to die. All of his preventative measures to keep her safe are actually what bring her into danger.

He's watching her get hit with the car...but then, everything starts reversing. He goes back in time just a few seconds and chooses not to call out to her, and she narrowly misses a certain death. They meet on the sidewalk, they kiss, and we're shown the moment of the photo taken that Sam claimed to have found in the future.

This movie is definitely weird, it gives you a lot to think about, the ending could be considered a little unsettling (maybe), but I have no idea why this movie freaked me out in the way that it did when I first saw it. 

I suppose it does maintain an ambiguity as to whether Sam was making this all up in his head or if he really did come from the future to save her from dying. And it's a bit of a weird concept, that the people around you could know a lot more than you do, and be continually manipulating the world. In this case, trying to do good only makes the bad more imminent. Or does it? It's really hard to say. 

It's a pretty unsatisfying ending, in that I wanted something more psychologically fucked. The movie had be thinking about what is real and what is taken for granted, and maybe it's just because this is the second time I saw it, but I didn't feel like my world bent out of shape. 

Though, I'm pretty sure why this stuck with me so strongly when I saw it in my early teens was that it had the impact on me that I wish it did now. I vividly remember it making me feel an impending sense of dread, and this sort of discomfort imitating deep from within me. It made me feel that the world wasn't real, but not in any way that I'd ever be able to understand. Fate is real but it's also contrived and everything was out of my control.

However. When I watched it today, I just kinda went "Oh yeah, that's what happens" and then went on with my life.

It's weird how the circumstances that you watch a movie in can completely change it for you. Horror can lose it's fear factor. Comedy isn't funny. Mystery becomes devoid of the intrigue. 

And weird fucked-up genre-defining movies about falling in love and also learning to love the person you're with even if their telling you tales of being from 400 years in the future...they can lose their ability to make me question what world I'm living in. Suddenly it does seem like an offbeat rom-com that isn't very romantic or funny.

Overall, it's a fine movie. It's not the best thing I've seen, but I'll always willingly watch Marisa Tomei. And this being a film directed by Brad Anderson (known for The Machinist) is just a really weird fact. 

I wouldn't really recommend it if you already read my plot synopsis there, but if after that you're still intrigued, then I would say to go right ahead. I think you can find the whole thing on YouTube. 

I am happy though that I remembered this movie. It may not have done for me what it did when I was a young teen full of existential dread, but I was happy to get the chance to watch it again. I may even call it a happy accident.