|
Alphabetic Index
|
Ratings Index
|
Web Resources
|
Alphabetic Index
|
Ratings Index
|
Web Resources
The young filmmaker from New Jersey who brought us Welcome to The Dollhouse, Mr. Solondz carries "telling it like it is" to a new and deliriously unsettling level in Happiness. He dares illuminate the dark areas, gleefully gleaning material usually relegated to the recesses of our consciousness. What most folk would be hesitant to explore, this director turns into table conversation. Making casual a telling of the verboten, he is an artist delving in the underground rainbow of taboo and the impermissible.
Yet, despite all the startle effect, which has become his stock in trade, Solondz is remarkably responsible, almost studious in the obsessive way he probes under the rocks of the human psyche. Detailing the gruesome tale of a pederast among the six or seven tarnished lives he dissects in Happiness, the filmmaker manages a chillingly objective insight one wouldn't expect in a work of fiction.
Addressing paedophilia so boldly, Solondz is to film what Lenny Bruce was to stand-up comedy, dealing nonchalantly with masturbation, phone sex, and a whole kaleidoscope of depravities and fetishes that probably haven't even been named yet.
Whereas director David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Lost Highway) has long been fond of investigating the fringe desperadoes who operate up and down the dark alleyways of normal civilisation, it is Mr. Solondz's contention that there is another community festering right under our noses; within the sub-text of our very own society. That all people, in varying degrees, have two lives; the outward, public persona, and the very private, passion-concealing self.
Most of the movie's bizarre characters would agree that the road to happiness is paved with misery and depression. Take Allen, for example, played with discomforting intensity by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. A heavy breather with an uncontrollable penchant for naughty anonymous phone calls to the ladies, the pathetic nowhere man admittedly bores his psychiatrist to death. But Dr. Maplewood, the aforementioned paedophile played with frightening brilliance by Dylan Baker, doesn't much care. His sordid mind is elsewhere, scheming his next conquest.
And then there is Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) and her two sisters. Married to the film's Dr. Jekyl, Trish hasn't a clue that hubby is really Mr. Hyde. She has catapulted self-delusion to a new art form. Bragging to her sister, Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), about "having it all," the psychiatrist's wife is surely her suburban wasteland's poster girl.
Helen Jordan, on the other hand, is an attractive artiste, somehow a poet of note despite her profound vacuity -- an alluring portrait of ice and self-loathing. When the heavy breather calls and tells her that she is nothing, and then proceeds to describe his litany of sexual intentions, she scares him off, for a time, by turning the tables and pursuing him.
Add an obese rape victim/hatchet murderer, Kristina (Camryn Manheim), to this cauldron of lovelorn bliss seekers, and that only leaves the third Jordan sister, Joy (Jane Adams), the just-turned-30 plain Jane who has had little luck in love and even less success with her music career. Feigning interest in Joy's plight while actually high-hatting their unsettled sis, catty Trish and Helen advance sibling rivalry to a terminal illness. So bland she almost doesn't deserve happiness, Joy is the film's innocent, an Alice in DysfunctionalLand, a Candide left to swim in a bath of snakes.
Unable to help themselves, the deviants recall all those old Wolfman movies. The moon is about to be full, and the Wolfman begs to be locked up, so that he won't be able to give way to his inner demon. One wonders, were all those fantastical films mere metaphors for what Mr. Solondz now brings into full daylight?
It is near amazing how, in telling his several tales out of school, Solondz mimics the manic-depressive realities of life itself, alternating between outright hilarity to deeply sombre doings without compromising either emotion. Sitting on the couch at a watershed moment, contemplating his ghastly duality, Dylan Baker's Dr. Bill Maplewood carefully explains his sickness to son Billy (Rufus Read). It is dark in the room, medium light and shadow on the child molester's face. Billy, approaching puberty, has concerns of his own, and in the role of parent, the doctor is aware of the child's need to know. Eyes as hollow as Orphan Annie's, the monster carefully details his heinous pathology.
There is haunting, dead silence in the theatre. Only minutes ago the audience was crowded with laughter, howling at the heavy breather's mind-boggling ineptitude. But there is no sympathy for the telephone pervert, and even less for Dr. Maplewood. Only a question. What to do with all this disturbing information?
|
Alphabetic Index
|
Ratings Index
|
Web Resources