DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Todd Solondz
PRODUCERS
Ted Hope
Christine Vachon
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Maryse Alberti
MUSIC
Robbie Kondor
EDITOR
Alan Oxman
CAST
Jane Adams (Joy)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Allen)
Dylan Baker (Bill)
Lara Flynn Boyle (Helen)
Cynthia Stevenson (Trish)
Jon Lovitz (Andy)
Rufus Read (Billy)
Louise Lasser (Mona)
Ben Gazzara (Lenny)
Camryn Manheim (Kristina)
Elizabeth Ashley (Diane)
Jared Harris (Vlad)
MPAA rating: None
Running
time: 133m
U.S. release: October 16, 1998
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
site
Other Todd
Solondz films
reviewed on this site:
- Fear,
Anxiety and Depression
- Storytelling
- Welcome
to the Dollhouse
|
After
the false starts of The
Truman Show and Saving
Private Ryan, the real movie of the year has arrived.
Happiness, the new film by the independent artist Todd
Solondz (Welcome
to the Dollhouse), is a sobering and devastating comedy
-- yes, comedy -- about such things as loneliness, despair,
murder, and pedophilic rape. Not necessarily in that order. Solondz
doesn't make the ha-ha-funny, sitcom-level comedies most people
are comfortable with. His humor, indeed, arises from intense
discomfort. When a sweaty, flabby loser is spitting sexual
taunts into his phone, or when a pedophile is having a calm,
candid talk with his curious 11-year-old son about erections,
you laugh in disbelief; the laughter is quickly choked off.
The movie is a series of interconnected anecdotes dealing with
a group of mostly well-off New Jersey suburbanites. There are
three sisters: the chic, disdainful writer Helen (Lara Flynn
Boyle), the smug wife and mother Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), and
the rather lost and unambitious Joy (Jane Adams) -- all, of course,
miserable in their own ways. Helen, for instance, feels like
a phony for getting praise she doesn't think she deserves; she
and Trish (whose buried hostility comes out in odd, passive-aggressive
bursts) look at their less successful sister Joy with pity. Joy,
who bounces from job to job and boyfriend to boyfriend, is a
delicate-natured woman -- the type who will always search for
something or someone to cling to.
Trish's husband Bill (Dylan Baker) is a psychiatrist with a placid
and precise demeanor; you feel that everything about him is manicured.
That façade conceals a deep and uncontrollable fixation:
he buys teeny-bopper magazines and whacks off in his car to the
photos of young boys. Soon enough, he's planning to rape one
of his own son's friends. This pedophile storyline, which has
gotten all the attention, is overall one of the most disturbing
things I've seen in a movie -- in no small part because Solondz
doesn't let us stand apart from Bill and judge him. In a sequence
that redefines "horror," Bill puts drugs in a young
boy's tuna-salad sandwich, plotting to rape the boy once he passes
out. Solondz' control, and Dylan Baker's phenomenally detailed
performance, are such that when the boy initially tells Bill
he doesn't want the sandwich, we actually feel a twinge of defeat
along with Bill.
It would be easy to close ourselves off from Bill, and from everyone
else in Happiness, including sad, heavy Allen (Philip
Seymour Hoffman), one of Bill's patients, who makes obscene phone
calls to random women. Or Kristina (Camryn Manheim, from TV's
The Practice), Allen's lonely neighbor, who one-ups Allen's
outrages and then some. But Solondz asks us to do something more
difficult, which most Americans are not prepared to do -- we're
programmed to cluck and finger-point at anything we find morally
reprehensible. It's more instructive, and in the end more fulfilling,
to allow ourselves to understand (if not condone) horrible actions
and the compulsions that drive them.
Solondz' previous film, Welcome to the Dollhouse, was
a deadpan study of the hell that is junior high; Happiness
is heavier and darker and much more daring, a quality reflected
by the independent distributor October Films' frightened decision
to pass on the film (pressured by its parent studio Universal).
Taking a page from Solondz himself, I don't condone this decision,
but I understand it: Happiness is tough stuff -- quietly
confrontational, genuinely haunting, and, most disturbing of
all, unexpectedly moving. When Bill is honest for the last time
with his 11-year-old son, telling him what he did and why, Happiness
gets so deep under your skin that you'll spend a week trying
to work through your feelings about Bill -- and everyone else
in this great and searing movie. |