Katie Holmes wrote, directed, and stars in Happy Hours. It is her first project with Joshua Jackson since Dawson's Creek, and it premiered at Tribeca on June 6. If you are of a certain age, that sentence just hit you somewhere specific.
Holmes plays a freshly divorced Manhattan photographer who crosses paths with her first love. The setup is simple on purpose. This is not a film built on plot twists or narrative fireworks. It is a movie about two people standing in front of each other after a long time apart, trying to figure out what that means. The fact that Holmes and Jackson carry their own real history into those scenes gives the whole thing a layer that no screenplay could manufacture.
Holmes is calling it the first installment in a trilogy, modeled after Linklater's Before series. That is a bold reference point and she clearly knows it. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight are some of the most perfectly constructed romantic films ever made. Comparing your work to them is either confident or reckless, and I think Holmes has earned the right to be confident here. She has been quietly building a career behind the camera, learning the craft, and this feels like the moment she is ready to show what she has been working toward.
Norah Jones did the score and executive produced, which is an unexpected pairing that makes more sense the longer you think about it. Jones has always had a gift for capturing a particular kind of melancholy, something warm but a little lonely. That sensibility fits perfectly with a story about reconnection and the weight of time passing. I am curious to hear what she came up with.
The production itself became a small event in New York. TikTok filled up with fan footage during the shoot, people catching glimpses of Holmes and Jackson walking through the city together, looking like they had never been apart. There is something to be said for a film that generates that kind of organic excitement before a single frame has been officially released.
If you grew up watching Dawson's Creek, this is the reunion you did not know you needed. Holmes and Jackson together again, older, carrying the weight of real lives lived, telling a story about what happens after the credits rolled on the version of love you believed in when you were seventeen. That is a premise with real emotional gravity.
If you did not grow up with the show, watch Before Sunrise instead. You will get the template Holmes is working from, and you will understand why this approach to storytelling, two people talking and walking and figuring it out in real time, can be more powerful than any blockbuster.
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