Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
The opening scene of Todd Solondz’s Happiness, which deservedly won the International Critics Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is just an indication of what’s to come in this devastatingly brilliant, unsettlingly mordant mix of comedy and tragedy.
In a simple shot that lasts about three minutes, the new-ageish, well-meaning Joy Jordan (a perfectly cast Jane Adams, playing it all glum, wimpish and idealistic) is seated opposite a wannabe boyfriend (the plump and Lebanese-looking Jon Lovitz).
She tells him she really doesn’t think a relationship can happen between them and she wants to break up. He pulls out an engraved reproduction ashtray which he bought her and she says, “It almost makes me want to learn to smoke. I’ll treasure it forever.”
At which point he viciously grabs it back and says, “No you won’t, this is for the girl who loves me for who I am,” and he launches into a string of expletives. Solondz cuts abruptly from the scene to black and the title Happiness comes up on screen. It’s a great moment in a film that is filled like a rash with stunning cynical writing, performances and direction. Make no mistake: this is not for the faint-hearted.
The narrative revolves around three sisters, the aforementioned Joy, who is still waiting for Mr Right and composes maudlin and awful guitar songs; Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a best-selling, sexy author who hates Saturday nights “because I’m so much in demand” (she’s also a name-dropper – “Salman just called.”); and Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), a “happily married”, chirpy housewife with psychiatrist husband Bill (Dylan Baker), who has several scary skeletons in his closet, and a pubescent son who just wants to be a “normal kid”.
As for their parents (Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser), they’re filing for divorce after 40 years of marriage – not because he’s a philanderer; he just wants some space.
Filling out the panorama of characters are the people who touch their lives. There’s the overweight and sexually obsessed Allen (a superb Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom you’ll recall from Boogie Nights and The Big Lebowski) who confesses his pornographic fantasies to analyst Bill, while obsessing on and making obscene phone calls to pretentious writer Helen, who believes her angst can only be relieved by something kinky, so she eagerly returns his heavy breathing phone calls.
Kristina (Camryn Manheim) is the fat girl who lives down the hall from the solitary, heavy- drinking and severely sexually frustrated Allen – she has a crush on him which he ignores.
This impressive array of personalities all have their emotional and psychological baggage unravelled by the end of the picture. Bill, who pretends to be living a healthy, home-spun and successful family life that could’ve come out of a 1950s sitcom, turns out to have sexual desires for his son’s schoolmates, going to the lengths of drugging his family and one of his kid’s friends when he comes over to spend the night and sodomising his child’s buddy.
The nervous Joy takes up a job teaching English to foreigners and is involved with a Russian cab driver, who sings You Light up My Life on their first date, virtually rapes her and ends up ripping her off.
And the two fatties in the apartment building become close friends as she confesses over an ice-cream fudge sundae to Allen that she killed the doorman, cut him up into pieces and put him in garbage bags after he tried to rape her.
You might think I’ve given the plot away – I haven’t. The film has more to do with character than simple plot. This is a dysfunctional comedy filled with people who are constantly denying things and saying they are “fine” when they are clearly not.
The performances are wondrous and Solondz deliberately chose lesser-known actors so that viewers can really immerse themselves in the film’s reality and the performers could bring authenticity to their roles. In addition, there’s some great dialogue. Elizabeth Ashley, who plays a socialite friend says at one point, “I thought I’d fall in love with a man who loved me as much as I hated my mother.”
A lot of the material in the film is provocative, even taboo, but Solondz concentrates on the humanity of the characters and you find yourself alternately repulsed and emotionally engaged and sympathetic to the characters.
Solondz responded to accusations that the film is cruel by saying to the Chicago New City News: “I think it’s about cruelty, or I think it exposes cruelty. There’s all the taboo stuff people talk about, but I think it’s the nature of cruelty itself that is a harder thing for people to acknowledge. No one wants to believe or know that that exists within oneself.
“People have accused me of misanthropy, and I don’t think that’s accurate. To expose and to embrace people in spite of their flaws is in fact quite the opposite of misanthropy. It’s about understanding; it’s not about punishment.”
As for his delicate balancing of tragedy and comedy, he says, “It’s hard to separate what I find funny from what I’m moved by.These are the two currents at work in me. There’s a humour in some things that, at the same time, are disturbing and sadden us.
“These characters are not interesting because they are “dysfunctional”, but because they have real problems, crushing hardships, amoral dilemmas, and so forth, they somehow still manage to get up in the morning.”
Solondz might be described as the new Woody Allen, but his films are far more serious. It’s no wonder that Happiness was chosen by more than 15 United States critics and film groups as the best picture of the year.
So where’s the Oscar statuette? I suppose Solondz is far too risky for the gushy Academy.