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Happiness
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - April 16, 1999
Rated on a 4-star
scale. USA. Written and directed by Todd Solondz. Starring Dylan Baker, Philip
Seymour Hoffman, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jane Adams, Cynthia
Stevenson.
Todd Solondz's "Happiness" doesn't
feel like a movie, it feels like a collection of notes. The notes are all
ideas for excruciatingly awkward scenes, filmed with little in
between.
The film follows a large group of incredibly miserable
people, who seem to seek happiness with resigned half-heartedness. The screen
time allocated to each one points us in the direction of the main players,
one of whom is Dylan Baker, in a multi-award-winning performance, as suburbanite
psychiatrist Bill Maplewood. Bill wants to be a good family man, but is bored
with the life, and secretly rapes young boys. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Allen,
a slobby computer technician, who makes obscene phone calls to his neighbour,
Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle). Helen professes empty self-confidence to her family,
and is in fact so lonely that she starts to return the stalker's calls. Helen's
sister Joy (Jane Adams), a nervously pleasant women, can't seem to find a
vocation or a man -- and they're the things she craves most.
Writer-director Solondz has fun, at times, satirising
clichés, by applying the form of goofy platitudes to the hard, twisted
particulars of the story ("Don't worry, son... one day you'll cum"). Generally,
however, the atmosphere is static. The awkward scenes are playing out one
after another, and that's the movie. Developments happen in some of these
characters' lives, some of their lives stay the same. Nobody really grows,
and nobody finds happiness.
Unlike such great films about empty lives as "Clerks"
and "Stranger Than Paradise", "Happiness" is not a comedy. It has some terrific
flashes of wit, usually based on sly contrasts within situations, but on
the whole, the bitter milieu is not played for laughs, since it's ruling
peoples' lives with destructive consequences. But what type of movie is
it? It's not very fulfilling as straight drama, because although its
parts are absorbing, their sum is an unnatural, over-the-top grimness, which
had a detrimental effect on my involvement. I can't appreciate it as an
experiment in cinematic mood, either, because I was too
involved!
Some find the film's lack of clear intention appealing
-- not I. Sure, it might be great material for pretentious film scholars
to dissect, but sitting in the cinema, watching it, it seems meaningless.
None of my reactions to the film make it worth recommending. The wonderful
songs in the movie have more insight into the subject matter than the actual
content.
The actors are very convincing, and each one brings
the right level of pathos to their characters. It's Solondz who gets it wrong,
because he parades an interminable cast of supporting characters in front
of us, to suggest that everyone on earth is a pathetic loser. That's not
realistic, and it serves no purpose, except to depress the viewer. I admire
the way "Happiness" looks so unblinkingly at its outcast characters, and
makes them human, but this is set up quickly, and from then on, we're just
leering. There is no conclusion about the sorry state everyone's in, or so
much as a hint at the causes. Solondz's last film, "Welcome to the Dollhouse",
gave its main character some moments of private victory, so her suffering
was more poignant, but "Happiness" has not a single glimmer of hope. Therefore,
what's the point? Its distress doesn't urge the viewer to appreciate his
or her own life -- at times, in fact, I wanted to crawl into a corner and
die.
COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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