by Allan Fish
(USA 1998 140m) DVD1/2
Die, die, die, die!
p Ted Hope, Christine Vachon d/w Todd Solondz ph Maryse Albertz ed Alan Oxman m Robbie Kondor (including “Soave sia il Vento” from “Cosi fan Tutte” and “Requiem” by W.A.Mozart) art Therese Deprez
Jane Adams (Joy Jordan), Dylan Baker (Bill Maplewood), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Allen), Lara Flynn Boyle (Helen Jordan), Ben Gazzara (Lenny Jordan), Jared Harris (Vlad), Cynthia Stevenson (Trish Maplewood), Louise Lasser (Mona Jordan), Jon Lovitz (Andy Kornbluth), Elizabeth Ashley (Diane Freed), Justin Elvin (Timmy Maplewood), Rufus Mead (Billy Maplewood),
It’s a traditional notion that American movies are all about entertainment. By and large, this may be true, and when so-called ‘cinema to make you think’ comes along, it’s so calculated to make you think a certain way, so cynically designed to win Oscars as ‘message films’ as to verge on moral propaganda and make you want to heave. These are then the twin cities of American film, so where does one place Todd Solondz in that? Not an easy question, for Solondz wouldn’t be found dead in either city, places so foreign to his outlook as to need a passport to travel to and from. His cinema is the cinema of discomfort, of squirming in your seat, of inadvertently smiling against your better instincts in embarrassment. Forget Oscars, forget takings, come to wince.
Happiness, which may be the most inappropriate title for a film ever, details the very plain misery of a set of protagonists in one way or another connected around three sisters. One, Joy, is seen by the other two as the failure of the group, having turned 30 but still single and making ends meet teaching adult classes whose students see her as a scab for walking past a picket line. She gets involved with a Russian student who only adds to her misery. One of her sisters, Trish, is the embodiment of conservative, right wing, annoyingly voiced, middle class American suburbia. She thinks everything in her garden is rosy, but her therapist husband Bill holds the dark secret of being a paedophile, spending his time fantasising about massacring people in the park, buggering his 11 year old son’s best friend and jerking off to teen magazines in the back seat of his car. The third sister, Helen, is the most self-absorbed of the trio, a pretentious writer on taboo themes such as child molestation – her opuses including ‘rape at eleven’, ‘rape at twelve’, etc. – and becomes unwittingly involved in the life of loner Andy, who is both one of her brother-in-law Bill’s patients and a pervert who gets his kicks making dirty phone calls to random women in the phone book while Mozart sets his mood.
If the synopsis is unsettling, the individual scenes are even more so. Its opening scene would be the unsettling highlight of many a film, with Joy ending it with her boyfriend over dinner because he’s not attractive enough for her only for him to then show her the gift he was giving her, not give it her and tell her “this is for the girl who loves me, who cares about me for who I am.” In another scene Bill is taken into the confidence of his son’s friend’s father who worries his 11 year old son is gay and tells Bill of his intention to pay a prostitute to straighten him out. Bill tells him that may not be a good idea and the other father replies, “you’re right, it’s too late.” (!!!). Beating all, though, has to be the confession scene where Bill confesses his crimes to his young son, who asks him whether he would have had sex with him. Bill replies that he wouldn’t, but he would have jerked off. Only recently I remember a lecturer repeating this scene in a university seminar and one of the students – all of whom had sat through Palindromes minutes before – asked why Solondz has not been arrested. It’s that level of discomfort Solondz generates, but it only gives such a reaction because it’s so honest in its dealings and some of the credit must go to the cast. Stevenson is perfect (“I blame it on cartoons, they’re so full of violence”), Adams likewise, but it’s Hoffman and Baker who provide the film’s black soul. And where to begin with that final scene…
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