HAPPINESS **** (out of four) -a review by Bill Chambers (wchamber@netcom.ca)
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starring Dylan Baker, Jane Adams, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Cynthia Stevenson written and directed by Todd Solondz
The best movie of the year is, unfortunately, neither an 'entertaining' nor a mainstream experience. I doubt HAPPINESS will enjoy success as more than just a critical darling, for Solondz paints an even grimmer portrait of suburbia than last year's The Ice Storm, as well as his own Sundance winner, Welcome to the Dollhouse. HAPPINESS is not escapism; it is a film for grown-ups.
Its narrative structure is Altman-esque. We meet three New Jersey sisters: Joy Jordan (Adams), a single woman who fears her passive-aggressive behavior provokes hostility in loved ones; Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a famous poet with a private desire to be dominated; and Trish (Stevenson), mother of three and wife of reputable psychiatrist Bill Maplewood (Baker)-Trish is constantly boasting about her idyllic home-life to her siblings. She is unaware that her shrink husband lusts after young boys-teeny-bop magazines are fodder for his obsessions. Nor is Dr. Maplewood above molesting one of his eleven year old son's friends with the assistance of the date-rape drug. Meanwhile, his patients are carrying out their own psychosexual fantasies: Allen, Helen's anonymous, depraved, overweight neighbour, spends his days as an affable office crony but at night strips down to his underwear, gets drunk, calls women at random and barks orders at them of the sort one hears in porno films. (The movie rather amusingly makes an issue out of *69.) Helen is his fantasy figure, but he is unable to connect with anyone on a sexually mature level, comfortless in his own skin. Which makes his verbal abuse of equally portly other neighbour Kristina (Camryn Manheim) all the more perplexing.
I could go on illustrating the various plot-threads: the Jordan girls' separated parents (played by Ben Gazzarra and Louise Lasser; to my mind, this bickering couple are the least compelling aspect of HAPPINESS) cause perfectionist Trish much consternation, and Joy's difficult relationship with a Russian refugee cabbie (Jared Harris) confuses Joy further. (I've only described the tip of this 134 minute iceberg.) Yet the soul of the film is one story: pedophilic Dr. Maplewood had my sympathies to the very end, even as I was sickened by his actions. (The events leading up to a boy's rape earned laughs from a preview audience of nervous critics, which led a few of them to attack Solondz for trivializing the subject matter-he didn't.) Baker's portrayal is captivating and four-dimensional; Maplewood's scenes with loving son Billy (Rufus Read)-whose own open, innocent desire to experience ejaculation for the first time forces his father to confront his boy's burgeoning adolescene at a time when his own secret nature is getting the best of him-are heartbreaking, to say the least.
If someone were to ask me to summarize HAPPINESS in one awkward sentence, I would probably respond: a group of characters discover that acting upon their impulses, sexual and otherwise, will bring them temporary "happiness"-they seem to have ditched all notions of attaining it beyond superficially. What is happiness, anyway, and who said it could/should/would last? Solondz' film, from the charged opening scene (featuring a cameo by a raging Jon Lovitz!) to the melancholy (yet controversial) finish, is a breathtakingly naturalistic creation. On the cinematic side of things, the images seemed oversaturated at times-lawn greens were so vibrant-looking, it was as if they'd been painted. (And isn't that the point? Suburbia looks shiny on the surface?) I also appreciated the old-fashioned title cards-HAPPINESS incidentally shares its name with a 1924 silent.
Universal's "independent" division (an oxymoron), October, abandoned Solondz' picture after his final cut turned out to be too "edgy" for release under the major's banner. So Good Machine (the production company behind, not ironically, The Ice Storm) is distributing it instead. It's their first time at bat without support from a major financier. Show them they took an important risk and see HAPPINESS, a film for our times.
-October, 1998
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