HAPPINESS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Good Machine Director: Todd Solondz Writer: Todd Solondz Cast: Jane Adams, Dylan Baker, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, Jared Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jon Lovitz, Marla Maples, Cynthia Stevenson, Elizabeth Ashley, Louise Laser, Camryn Manheim, Rufus Read, Anne Bobby, Dan Moran
The song that permeates the sound track of this groundbreaking film goes "Gonna find my happiness,/ Gonna find my happiness/ ...Happiness where are you,/ You just can't stay so far away." Ask ten people what they want most in life. Nine out of ten won't say "a million dollars," "a trip around the world," "a Beamer" or even "a great job." "Happiness" is, and always will be, the ultimate reward, a concept that eludes perhaps most people whether rich or poor, with a distinguished career or a menial task to perform. Todd Solondz's innovative film "Welcome to the Doll House" hit the screens in 1996 and dealt with the pain of puberty unflinchingly portrayed by a suburban family. Now the writer- director has taken away the International Critic's Prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival and also the Metro Media Award at the 1998 Toronto Festival with his two-and one-half million dollar production, "Happiness." Inspired by a tabloid story of a Russian serial killer of children who surprisingly enough had a stable marriage and a couple of kids, the story intertwines vignettes from the lives of the members of a New Jersey family as they interact with one another, their friends, and their neighbors. When the parent company of October Films denied the once independent house permission to release the film, the job was taken up by Good Machine, whose superb rendering of a tale that balances humor with pathos is a winner in every respect.
Director Solondz capably ignores the usual code of moviemaking, which mandates that dialogue move unhesitatingly forward lest the audience become distracted by uncomfortable periods of silence. With clever colloquy featuring pauses that would put a big smile on Harold Pinter's face, Solondz cuts his narrative into slices of life often flat-out hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time, skillfully weaving the yarn into a gloriously textured fabric.
The transcendent opening of the film is the short version of what is meant by combining comedy with commiseration as thirty-year-old Joy Jordan is on a date with the nerdy, unattractive, inarticulate Andy Kornbluth (Jon Lovitz). Their conversation is hesitant, more like discharges of energy followed by discomfiting intervals, as Andy presents an expensive ash tray to his date, then abruptly and fiercely takes it back explaining in no uncertain terms why Joy does not deserve either the valuable trinket or him. Joy's almost comic bemusement and Andy sudden, unpredictable savagery will serve as a model for the balance of the film.
Mr. Solondz comes back from time to time to pick up on Joy's love life, highlighting an amusing chance meeting she has with a Russian student at a school for refugees and selects others in the family in haphazard order to hone in on how they deal with their fundamental aloneness. As head of household Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) responds when one member of his family complains of loneliness, "We are all alone." Surprisingly, perhaps, the ways we deal with this existential fact has both comic and pitiful resonance: each person in turn finds occasional moments of joy followed by periods of dismal melancholy in dealing with the malady.
While it would be difficult to choose which pairs of relationships are most moving--that's how together this film really is--those involving Dr. Bill Maplewood and his son, and Allen's (Philip Seymour Hoffman) links to his neighbor Kristina (Camryn Manheim) are most trenchant. Allen is an overweight, unhappy, 30-something fellow who acts hale- fellow on the job but turns into a debauched creature in his time off. He combs the phone book at random for women with whom he can have phone sex. When he inadvertently buzzes his next-door neighbor Helen Jordan (Lara Flynn Boyle), he is surprised to hear her invite him to her place where, of course, he is utterly unable to connect. But he does enjoy a momentary alliance with a homely neighbor, Kristina, who seeks him out and, gaining his trust, relates a bizarre story of rape and murder.
As a performer, Mr. Hoffman stands out as the comic hub of the story, but it is Dylan Baker who, as Dr. Bill Maplewood, proffers the most surprises. Bill is an apparently successful professional man who supplies his wife Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) with a comfortable, bourgeois suburban home with two lovely boys and a dog. His love for eleven-year-old Billy (Rufus Read) is touching. He's the sort of dad we all wish we'd had, one who listens attentively and honestly and matter-of-factly answers the most amusing birds-and-the-bees questions which the lad trusts him to resolve. Billy is envious: every boy in his class is able to "come" so, he asks innocently and wide-eyed, "Why can't I?" "Don't worry, you will," replies the good doctor as though he were counseling his son on how to dribble a ball down the court. The coming shock is foreshadowed as Dr. Maplewood relates a dream to HIS psychiatrist, one in which he marches down a hilly plot with an automatic weapon mowing down every man, women, and child in sight. (Perhaps it's true what they say about shrinks; that they're all crazy...after all, why would someone become interested in the profession in the first place?)
That much can be absorbed by an audience. But what horrifies us is how this gentle, apparently stable and successful professional man becomes attracted to his son's 11-year-old sleepover classmate, drugs him, and brutally rapes the boy while he is sleeping. This boggles the mind and has made the film a cause celebre.
In a press conference following a critics' screening at the NY Film Festival, Todd Solondz fields questions. "Why," asks one member of the audience, "do you make Kristina a killer?" Replies the director, "It's easy to make someone likable. What I wanted to do is to show people whom you'd want to embrace even with all their foibles. You're still able to embrace such a person. This makes a richer character."
"Happiness," a movie whose budget remained low because Solondz refused to compromise and cast bankable actors, is a richer movie. No one could have done a more capable job than Dylan Baker in portraying a father, a professional man, who despite his broad knowledge of how the mind is nonetheless unable to control his depraved passion for young boys. Solondz has splashed the screen with an array of persons, each with a distinct makeup, all feeling alone and organizing his or her life in an effort to dispel the feeling of utter isolation. When Oscar time rolls around, "Happiness" may well be swallowed up by "Saving Private Ryan"--which makes us regret that a separate Academy award is not offered for the best film of each genre. For the oxymoronic category of comedy-tragedy, "Happiness" would walk away with the gold.
Rated R. Running Time: 134 minutes.(C) 1998 Harvey Karten
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