Happiness
[3.5/4.0]
The title of this film might be initially misleading. It is not a happy story, but rather, happiness is missing from the lives of most of the characters. The story is based around three sisters, Trish, Helen, and Joy. Also involved are their parents, Mona and Lenny, plus Helen's neighbor Allen.
Trish, the eldest, is married to a successful therapist, Bill. While Bill is a good husband and a caring father, he is a very disturbed individual, and has hidden his destructive problem from everyone. Helen is a successful writer who often feels inadequate, and that perhaps she is a pretentious fraud. Joy is the youngest, and her family always thought she might not amount to anything. It appears they were right because Joy is approaching 30, is lonely and single, has no career, and is sweet but generally unfocused. After many years of marriage, Lenny no longer has feelings for Mona (or anything for that matter) and wants to live alone. Allen is a technical professional with no self-esteem. He is neither attractive physically nor in terms of his personality. He is socially inept, and his only relationship with women is making obscene phone calls.
Director Todd Solondz brilliantly guides the many intertwined stories through difficult material. It would have been very easy to let all the misery bloat the characters into cartoonish caricatures, but this never happens. Instead, each character is carefully crafted and developed with the exception of Helen, who is not well realized. Although it is not really a thriller, an amazing amount of tension is produced by slowly unravelling the layers of each character. The film runs a long 134 minutes because of the amount of screen time given all the characters. However, the length is not tedious because although the characters are often extreme in their depravity, the progression of the story is never predictable. For example, when Joy begins a relationship with a refugee student, it is not clear if he will turn out to be genuine, or a scoundrel as some of the other characters are presented.
Highly Recommended. This is an engaging character drama with frequent episodes of black comedy. However, this is a very difficult film to watch. Many disturbing issues are dealt with in a frank manner, and people who would not be comfortable with the strong (perverse) sexual content should avoid this film.
(c) 1999 Murali Krishnan The Art House Squatter http://pages.hotbot.com/movies/murali24/
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews