‘I want kids that love me as much as I hated my mother...’
It is very difficult to knit together disparate plot lines into a cohesive whole. Tarantino did it with Pulp Fiction, but cinema history is littered with failures in this area, a little like rock bands and the concept album. Happiness is a film that features a number of variable characters that only gently intersect. On top of this, these characters are oddballs. They are perverts, loners and failures with enough sexual hang ups to fill a seminary. Writer/director Todd Solondz weaves these strands together into something that makes some semblance of sense…
Joy Jordan (Jane Adams) is desperate and lonely. She’s a failure as a teacher and suffers from social anxiety. Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is desperate and lonely. He calls up random phone numbers and spits vile sexual abuse down the phone for gratification. Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) is desperate and lonely. He dreams of massacring strangers and uses a therapist in a futile attempt to control his paedophilic urges. This is not a happy film. Despite its title.
I’m unfamiliar with the work of Solondz, and this is as close as he ever came to mainstream success, but he is clearly a talented writer. These characters, while grotesque, never feel cartoonish. All of them feel uncomfortably human. It helps when you have a cast as strong as the one assembled here, with a rare example of Seymour Hoffman being outshined by both of his main co-stars. Adams is all nervous energy and heart-breaking vulnerability as Joy, while Dylan Baker’s Bill is as convincing a monster as will be encountered on screen anywhere. That being said, the sheer strangeness of Happiness precludes it from becoming a true classic. This is David Lynch territory but perhaps more distorted and monstrous than even his darkest work.
This is a film that asks uncomfortable questions and provides ever more excruciating answers. Not an enjoyable film, but one that succeeds in lifting the viewer out of their comfort zone. Now I think I’ll pop a Marvel film on and slide straight back into that comfort zone, thank you very much.