HAPPINESS (Good Machine) Starring: Jane Adams, Dylan Baker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lara Flynn Boyle, Cynthia Stevenson, Camryn Manheim, Ben Gazarra, Louise Lasser. Screenplay: Todd Solondz. Producers: Ted Hope and Christine Vachon. Director: Todd Solondz. MPAA Rating: Not Rated (sexual situations, adult themes, profanity). Running Time: 135 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
HAPPINESS is almost too difficult to watch -- not because of its potentially shocking content, but because it's so achingly sad. Lonely men make obscene phone calls which only seem to make them more frustrated. Stabs at romance turn into depressing one-night stands. A few moments of isolated contact quickly vanish in a rage of rejection. The dozen or so principal characters in Todd Solondz's bleakly funny suburban nightmare fumble and fail so consistently in their pursuit of happiness you might suspect it was unattainable.
And, in the sense that some of them define it, it is. HAPPINESS deals with people whose chances for contentment are thwarted by yearnings for things they can't have, or have been led to believe they _should_ have by cultural signals like the shmaltz love ballads that permeate the soundtrack. Joy (Jane Adams), a single aspiring songwriter, feels she should have a man and a stable life like her married older sister Trish (Cynthia Stevenson); Trish, a housewife, feels inferior to sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a successful author; Helen, meanwhile, wants a life of danger to give her writing "authenticity." Helen's lonely, obscene phone-calling neighbor Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) longs for Helen while considering her inaccessible, even as he becomes the object of similar feelings from even lonelier neighbor Kristina (Camryn Manheim). Solondz fills his world with people who want what they haven't got, never realizing how much it could cost them.
Nowhere is that more evident than in HAPPINESS' trickiest character, Trish's husband Bill (Dylan Baker). A successful therapist, Bill also happens to be a pedophile who has unnervingly frank sexual discussions with his 11-year-old son Billy (Rufus Read) and molests Billy's classmates during sleepovers. Baker gives Bill so many layers that he always seems human even through his predatory calculation. His attempt to cajole Billy's young friend into eating a drugged sandwich is as pathetic as it is creepy, his parental concern as genuine as it is tainted. Solondz is never merely interested in the sensationalistic but trite notion that the monsters who turn up in headlines are our neighbors. He wants us to see the misery of a monster who knows that he's causing pain but can't stop himself because causing it at least for a moment eases his own.
It's even more unsettling that Solondz sets Bill at one far end of a continuum of pain selfishly inflicted in the desperate search for fulfillment. Allen humiliates women he calls in an attempt to feel significant; the sisters' father (Ben Gazzara) abandons his wife in search of something even another woman can't provide; Joy dumps a boyfriend (a scathing cameo by Jon Lovitz) who may be a sensitive guy. There are no grand enlightenments in HAPPINESS, which may make it seem that Solondz is simply reveling in the characters' degradation. The fact is they're merely deeply flawed, some making small steps towards defining their own happiness, others too immersed in external definitions to be ready for those small steps.
Solondz's one real mis-step -- aside from the unnecessarily long running time -- involves a murder/rape sub-plot which launches HAPPINESS into an unnecessarily surreal direction. The film doesn't need the cheap laughs from references to cut up body parts in freezer bags, not when it offers edgy humor that's so much more uncomfortably genuine. A key scene in HAPPINESS finds Billy sharing concerns with his father that he's not "normal" because he may not be maturing sexually as fast as his peers. It's brutally ironic that he's asking for advice on normalcy from a man who may be nobody's paradigm of normalcy, but at least he's receiving reassurance that he's not alone in his confusion. The paralyzing pursuit of "normalcy" is what makes so many of the people in HAPPINESS so unhappy. Solondz turns what could have been a freak show into a reassurance that we, too, are not alone in being something other than "normal."
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 happy endings: 9.
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