Happiness
(1 People gave this 4.00 out of 5)
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A family film.
The H-Bomb: Well… it’s not a film for the family. Rather, it’s a film about a family… a somewhat dysfunctional family, to put it mildly. Namely the Jordan family, one big, fairly unhappy family. Lenny and Mona Jordan (Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser) are separating after forty years of marriage, despite being comfortably retired in Florida. Their three grown daughters, Joy (Jane Adams), Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), and Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), live in New Jersey (a state of irony), and are all about as discontent as they are different.
Joy, the youngest of the bunch, is goodhearted but naive, and although she’s an aspiring singer-songwriter, she’s living a rather directionless life. When we meet her, she’s in the middle of breaking up with her latest boyfriend, Andy (Jon Lovitz), a dumpy looking dude who doesn’t exactly take the rejection well. The fallout from this causes Joy to quit her job and volunteer as a teacher for newly arrived immigrants in NYC. It’s not long before she becomes too involved with one of her students, a sticky fingered Russian named Vlad (Jared Harris), who voices his love for his motherland by proclaiming, “Fuck the cunt of Russia!” Yeah, he’s a keeper, Joy, he’s a keeper.
Helen, the middle daughter, is an acclaimed writer who seems to be more on the ball than Joy. She writes firsthand about such things as being molested as a child. However, she feels her work lacks authenticity since… well… she never was molested as a child. While she comes across as coolly intellectual on the surface, on the inside she is being eaten away by the knowledge that she’s nothing but a pretentious charlatan. Then an obscene caller comes into her life. Helen is intrigued, even stimulated by this caller, having no idea that it’s actually her next door neighbor Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lonely stiff who enjoys whacking his willy while calling random women and talking dirty to them.
The eldest of the Jordan daughters, Trish, would seem to be the most “normal” of the three. She’s the perfect suburban soccer mom living the perfect suburban life with her three kids and her psychiatrist husband, Bill (Dylan Baker). Uptight and a bit on the judgmental side, she and her husband haven’t consummated in quite some time, and although this bothers her, she is completely oblivious to the fact that Bill’s sexual appetites have changed over time… into something a lot less healthy and a lot more… um… wrong– don’t sleep over at his house, and don’t eat anything he tries to give you… especially if you’re an eleven year old boy.
“Happiness”, released in 1998, covers many of the same themes found in writer/director Todd Solondz’s other films, mainly the many ugly elements that can be found in idyllic suburban America. And while “Welcome to the Dollhouse” and “Storytelling” are certainly good, provocative films, “Happiness” is his one true home run. The one that really comes together in the perfect funny, tragic, and disturbing package. It will make you laugh, it may make you cry, but most of all, it will make your skin crawl and have you yelling, “Eeewwwww yuck!!!” It’s a true rarity of a film, one that is immensely enjoyable yet, at the same time, very uncomfortable to watch.
Solondz takes a number of wince inducing topics, things that even some of the bravest filmmakers out there wouldn’t touch with a fifty foot pole (especially back in ’98), and examines them unflinchingly through the various characters who may appear to be normal, but are actually a broad cross-section of perverts, weirdos, lost souls, and malcontents. In many ways these people seem heightened and exaggerated, but they ultimately come off as being believable and all too human.
Take the most controversial character of the piece, the pedophile. Now, when we all think pedophile, the word that usually springs to mind is freak, or monster, or piece of human garbage. I’m not one to argue against any of those labels, but Solondz does something interesting in that he doesn’t judge this character (nor any of the characters). He makes him as human as anyone else, and (arguably) sympathetic by the end… but still, Solondz never lets us forget what this character is and what he did. Everything regarding any kind of child molestation is handled tastefully (as tastefully as it could ever be, anyway), but still, Solondz more than gets the point across in squirm inducing fashion, and that he would ask us to identify with this character is, to me, the epitome of provocative film-making.
But, Solondz’s ballsiness aside, the film wouldn’t be what it is without the flawless performances of its ensemble cast. I don’t get to say this very often, but everyone, from the main stars to the bittiest of the bit players, carries their weight, and then some. I don’t have time to go into all of them, I’ll just run down the highlights. Adams, with her doe-eyed look and perpetually optimistic attitude, is excellent as Joy, easily the most sympathetic of the lot, and more or less the anchor of the film. As the sad sack Andy, Lovitz only gets one scene, but he manages to leave an impression with his rare dramatic turn. Hoffman makes his pervy, toad-like Allen into a likeable loser, and while he doesn’t get as much to do as some of the others, he still manages to show why he became the Oscar winning star that he is today.
Speaking of Oscar, one should’ve gone to Dylan Baker, for taking on the most challenging of all the roles and just totally nailing it. It’s his utterly normal approach to Bill that makes him so creepy, and his very awkward “birds n’ the bees” discussions that he has with his young son just chill to the bone (particularly when he offers to show his son how to masturbate). Sadly, he didn’t get an Oscar, or even a nod, but, this was the same year the Academy gave the Best Picture statue to fucking “Shakespeare in Love”, so go figure. [Editor's Note - that was also the year Saving Private Ryan was nominated!]
For me, this is a film that should have swept the Oscars, because it is exceptional on every single level. It’s not one that I would recommend to everyone, or most anyone, because it pushes envelopes and buttons in ways that very few films do. It’s a “shock comedy” that hits in the gut and kicks in the nuts, all the way to its very last line of dialogue. Many of the laughs come from discomfort more than genuine amusement. Whether you love or loathe “Happiness” will depend entirely on you. But, there is one thing that the film’s admirers and detractors can agree upon, it is undeniably unforgettable.
October 6th, 2011 at 7:14 pm
[...] “Happiness”, Where are you? – Oh, you are RIGHT HERE!!! [...]