Happiness

Saw Happiness. Another Todd Solondz film, he who directed Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I found so painful. This one is similarly a full-blown menagerie of all different kinds of pain. The film surrounds a central trio of sisters. There is a lonely, kind of perpetually embarrassed singer who still lives with her parents, a suburban house-wife who seems to effortlessly and obliviously say the exact cruelest thing in every situation, and a self-absorbed and self-admitted phony of a poet whose cruelty, it seems, has been honed by endless catty luncheons. Their parents are getting divorced, the house-wife is married to a serial child-rapist, the poet's neighbor is a fat Philip Seymour Hoffman who mastuba-prank-calls women all over the state (the state of New Jersey specifically. That state just gets no good publicity.)

All of these characters are major ones and all of them suffer sort of continually. Far from angels, they are shown mainly to be cruel, vain, idiots who are the main causes of each others' suffering. However, whereas I found Welcome to the Dollhouse deeply depressing and unnerving, somehow either I or Solondz hit the right wavelength and this one is kind of hilarious. One of the early scenes is of the house-wife comforting the signer after the singer has just broken up with Jon Lovitz (this breakup is also shown and is bizarre and painful and sets the dark-humor tone.) She tells her that there's still "a glimmer" of hope for her and then goes on to say that it sounds ridiculous now of course, but that she always thought that the singer would wind up alone and jobless forever (she says, smilingly, into the face of the sister who is still living at home and is now newly single, whose music career is nonexistent.)

The movie has all these moments that are incredibly grotesque and painful and then someone adds just one little thing extra and it becomes hilarious. Solondz is still an artist of pain (a sort of filmic cenobite) but this time he is being funny with his art, instead of dismal.