Bleak Houses
Todd Solondz, the skinny guy
with the thick glasses and oddly passionate drone, had an art-house smash in
1996 with Welcome to the Dollhouse , which reinforced the perception that
art-house smashes are pictures that take one bleak, uncommercial idea and
pummel you into a stupor with it. Telling the story of a myopic adolescent girl
who's persecuted by her peers and slighted by her suburban family (which
reveres her pretty little sister, a goody-two-shoes in a tutu), Solondz
prolonged his heroine's humiliations until I wanted to scream, "I GET IT
ALREADY!" He was a maestro, all right, but of the sadistic kind, and the
movie's laughs didn't leaven its punishingly untranscendent misery--they
condensed it. This was the world as seen through glasses so thick they barely
let in light.
Solondz's
new foray into misery, Happiness , lays it on even thicker. This time,
however, he spreads the pain around, and he brings in sundry instruments to
share in the playing of his lone theme. The upshot defies categorization.
Happiness is an aching roundelay, a triumphantly benumbed ensemble farce
that mingles condescension and compassion in a manner that's disarmingly--and
often upsettingly--original.
Before I go any further: You should know that I have
collaborated with the co-producer of Happiness , Christine Vachon, on a
new book called Shooting to Kill , which may be ordered by clicking here.
(Just kidding. Wait a minute, I'm not kidding. Click here before you do anything else.) I was around for
pre-production and made a few casting suggestions (politely ignored), went on a
stupefyingly dull "tech scout" with the director and key crew, watched some
scenes being shot, and got steady gossip from Christine that I can't share with
you although I might if you e-mail me proof that you've bought the book. I
thought about recusing myself, but I have no direct financial ties to the
picture and think it's one of the most interesting of the year. Why should I
deprive myself?
Happiness revolves around three sisters who live some distance from a
large metropolis, but the relationship to Chekhov ends there. The place is
suburban New Jersey. Sweet, tremulous Joy Jordan (Jane Adams), the youngest,
has turned 30 and still lives in the house of her parents, Mona (Louise Lasser)
and Lenny (Ben Gazzara), who have a condo in Florida and are in the throes of a
vexingly tentative separation. Middle sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is the
author of arty, titillating short stories and a magnet for studs and weight
lifters; she resides in a dim high-rise down the corridor from two unrelated
fatties, Kristina (Camryn Manheim) and Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The
latter, a compulsive obscene phone caller who longs for his sleek, chic
neighbor, is the psychiatric patient of Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker), who
happens to be the husband of Helen's older sister, chipper Trish (Cynthia
Stevenson)--and also a pedophile who, in the course of the film, drugs little
boys and has (off camera) sex with them.
Pedophilia, rape, murder, suicide,
dismemberment, obscene talk: Happiness is about the sense of
incompleteness that these seemingly disparate people carry inside them--and,
more important, the ways in which their prodigious longings manifest themselves
in their sexual predilections. And yet these kindred spirits almost never
acknowledge a connection. Their similarities don't mitigate their aloneness,
and talking about their problems doesn't help much, either. It's no accident
that Solondz's pedophile protagonist is a shrink and that the characters who
get things off their chests go ahead and act on them anyway. There's no such
thing as catharsis: Come once, you'll want to come again and again and
again.
The
pre-title sequence sets the drolly excruciating tone. Joy has just told Andy
(Jon Lovitz) that she thinks they should stop seeing each other. Solondz goes
so tight on Lovitz's ample flesh that he could sweat off the screen and onto
your lap. But as his strangled monosyllables give way to lavish verbal abuse
the shots go wider, so that we take in the romantic restaurant awash in fake
plants and frippery--a setting that mocks this unhappy couple the way the
movie's very title hangs over it like a mushroom cloud. Solondz keeps
Happiness right on the border between irony and empathy. The gags are
often easy, but the characters are in an authentic hell. And there isn't a
trace of irony in the skinny, frazzled Adams, who's as raw as a newly birthed
gazelle. Some directors know how to exploit their actors' vulnerabilities, and
Solondz seems to have scraped off layers of his leading lady's skin--it's so
translucent you can almost read her organs.
At the other extreme, Hoffman, as one of the two fat
neighbors, is encased in his flab like a tortured prisoner of war. His doleful
low tones and operatic mouth-breathing give even his vilest lines a dopey
sweetness. In fact, Solondz compels us to collude with even his most unsavory
characters. Baker's pedophile is so furtive that he's almost immobile, but we
register the darting eyes under the bland, Mr. Rodgers-like façade, and as he
waits for a little boy to eat a drugged tuna sandwich, we hold our breaths the
way we did in Psycho when Norman Bates watched the car with the body of
Marian Crane almost not sink into the swamp. The only character whose pain we
don't feel is also the only "normal" one, Stevenson's Trish--a sugary,
passive-aggressive gargoyle who embodies everything that made some of us flee
the suburbs for the urban jungle.
Not all of
Happiness is as consistently inspired. The scenes of Joy at work
(wanting to do good, she crosses a picket line to take a job teaching English
as a second language) are coarsely conceived, and the parents, Mona and Lenny,
don't exist on the same level as the other characters. Boyle's Helen is a thin
dirty joke rescued only by a good punch line (and Boyle, who drops her voice to
a husky whisper, looks wildly out of place in this clearly Jewish family). But
some of the one-joke roles turn out to have more under the surface than is at
first apparent. In one scene, fat Kristina tells Allen about a horrible deed
she has committed and, while her listener attempts to process it, appalled,
tucks into an ice cream sundae. That might have been the cheapest kind of fat
gag, but because of the way it's shot and acted, our responses don't end with a
snicker. We can see that Kristina is living a life of nightmarish deprivation,
and getting the only kind of pleasure that she knows.
John Waters once said that he would like to
make a film that received an X or NC-17 rating with no foul language or
genitalia--"it would just be so offensive to people's values." Happiness
certainly has foul language, as well as a (brief) shot of Joy's uncovered
breasts, but what's truly shocking is its unblinking gaze--hard and clinical
but also nonjudgmental. Scenes in which Maplewood's son (Rufus Read) asks his
dad about masturbation come close to being healthy . But the context is
too spooky, and the conversations creep into the red zone when the father
offers to demonstrate his technique.
Solondz's writing doesn't
cut very deep, but it does swing wide, smashing taboos on all sides--the film
is the dark side of There's Something About Mary . And in some ways, it
couldn't have had a more fitting launch. At the same time that the picture was
winning an international critics' prize at the Cannes Film Festival (where it
was shown outside the main competition), Universal, the studio that financed it
(through its recently acquired "indie" wing, October), unloaded it in a
panic--largely because its new owners, the Bronfmans of Seagram, feared being
associated with a movie that featured a pedophile. That the booze-peddling
Bronfmans wanted nothing to do with a film that functions as the opposite of an
intoxicant is the kind of irony with which Happiness teems.
October did choose to
release The Celebration , a Danish dysfunctional family drama that treats
matters of incest and perversion with a tad more taste. Children, siblings,
nieces, and nephews all gather at a prosperous estate to celebrate the
60 th birthday of its formidable patriarch (Henning Moritzen), who
turns out to have had monstrous designs on two of his own children. You've seen
this sort of picture before: People get drunk and drag skeletons out of
closets, and the tension between the formal dinner party rituals and the truths
that simmer beneath the surface give way to a Walpurgisnacht . The
anti-patriarchal content is fairly routine, but you should see the movie anyway
because the director, Thomas Vinterberg, is a great, hypersensitive filmmaker
whose edgy, grainy, caught-on-the-fly camerawork seems to make the very
celluloid shiver with rage.
