One of the few indicators of where Amy Nicholson’s documentary Happy Campers takes place is a shot of wooden mile marker signs pointing mostly to cities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. At another point, a woman discusses moving down from the Jersey shore to join her boyfriend at the coastal trailer park at the center of the film. If you guessed that we’re in Virginia, you’d be correct, but where we are is ultimately less important to Happy Campers than celebrating the sense of community that can be fostered off the beaten path.
Throughout the film’s slim runtime, Nicholson’s camera peers into the quiet lives of the working-class individuals who reside at least part time at the scrappy trailer park. Men fish, mow lawns, fix roofs. Women and children swim. As evening sets in, families gather around picnic tables to eat and drink. Inside trailers, friends gather to play cards, sipping white wine that one imagines is as cheap as it comes. After all, as one of the residents says at one point, the trailer that he and his wife finally decided to take a risk on cost them a mere $6,500.
Across Happy Campers’s micro-portrait of this community, nuggets of information are dropped that paint a casually embittered picture of the forces that seek to snuff the life out of the place. The land here has been sold to developers looking to, presumably, gift the stunning waterfront sunset views to all manner of moneyed types. We won’t learn the names of those developers, but we’ll wallow in the pain felt by the residents of the campground who rue the day when they’ll have to leave behind more than just trailers that are too expensive to move.
Happy Campers is defined as much by what it tells you as it is by what it doesn’t, and after a while the former may stick in your craw. A Black woman recalls when her sister told her she was crazy for buying a trailer here, but Nicholson doesn’t make room for any acknowledgement of the discrimination that minorities might have encountered in this community over the years. There are American flags glimpsed throughout, but there’s a sense that Nicholson has elided all political signage. There isn’t a MAGA hat in sight. In fact, we won’t learn a single person’s political affiliations, and as such how that affected their friendships with neighbors.
Still, Nicholson’s empathy for her subjects is undeniable. The dominant sentiment here is that the residents of the trailer park will forever hold on to the memories they cultivated there over many summers. And whenever it seems as if it’s about to give itself over to the kumbaya, Happy Campers disarms you with a moment of rage, such as the words of a woman who vows to burn her trailer to the ground, so no one will seize its contents. You won’t know where she and her friends and neighbors are going, but the poignant sting of her words is enough to patch over the feeling that the film’s sense of evasion is as much a hindrance as it is a badge of honor.
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