Happiness

English/139 Minutes/1998/Not Rated

In the movie “Happiness” no one is happy. They all see the sunny sides of other lives and wish they were their own. But as Solondz is pleased to remind us the happier we pretend to be the more depressed we really are.

The movie follows three sisters as their lives intertwine in small town New Jersey. Joy (a fragile Jane Adams) is a struggling artist, almost thirty and living at home with her parents. Her opening scene with Jon Lovitz (the finest bit he's ever done) sets the stage for what will be the theme in Joy's joyless life: punishment of hope.

Sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) seems to have it all. She's a successful single writer but is completely facile and vapid at one point saying she wished she'd been raped so her work could be more authentic. She finds a weird connection with an obscene caller, Alan (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who is also her neighbor.

The third sister, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) is “happily” married to Dr. Maplewood (Dylan Baker) and has three children, the oldest of which is their 11 year old son, Billy (Rufus Read). They live a fairly conventional life with the exception of the good doctor's secret. He is a pedophile, masturbating to teen pop magazines and staring longingly at his son's little league teammates. Dr. Maplewood also happens to be a psychiatrist whose patient is none other than Allan.

Each story presents a facet of what might make us happy. Whether it's happiness in success, happiness in others, or happiness in a situation. Solondz seems to say that happiness is an ideal but isn't found in real life, at least not in the ways we expect. Often we look beyond ourselves for happiness and love only to find that the only unconditional love is self love.

This is illustrated literally by the use of masturbation as a narrative tool. In three cases characters masturbate. One character does so to release frustration, the other to hold his demons at bay and the third as a right of passage that proves that there is hope. This is not happiness either.

Another theme is that the things that make us happy aren't always good things. Many times they hurt others or give us pleasure at their expense. At best people realize they are being used and don't mind because they get something out of it too. In many cases things that make us happy (or think will make us happy) are self-destructive. On the other than if we enslave ourselves to what society says are “good things” they don't necessarily lead to happiness. Only when we surrender our chase of happiness and learn to be content in our situation do we find happiness. In this film happy is the enemy of content just as perfect is the enemy of good.

I would be remiss in this interview if I did not single out for comment Dylan Baker for his performance as Dr. Bill Maplewood. Baker plays Bill as a man who has a desire that he knows is inappropriate but he feels helpless to stop. We never see his molestations on screen but they are discussed in the film in rather explicit terms. It is difficult to watch (as it should be) but Solondz refuses to portray Bill in arch or vile terms, instead showing what a real pedophile would be like. It is a performance that cannot be topped by an actor who probably can't get work anymore because of it.
The highlight of the film is a conversation between father and son. Bill is brutally honest with his son and the scene is heartbreaking. He has lost everything and he knows it. Bill does not justify himself, he knows what he has done is evil and inexcusable. Why does he tell his son these things? He is not seeking forgiveness or even understanding. Perhaps it is his way of saying goodbye, of pushing his son away. The scene brought tears to my eyes and that is not an easy task.

Many people misinterpret Solondz's films as misanthropic which is untrue. Rather he refuses to make his characters one dimensional. They all want to be happy, they're all selfish and self-absorbed. On the other hand they are capable of love and sympathy and evoke in us a sense of pity and perhaps self-identification. Every Solondz film challenges us to not identify with these characters. Everyone has some part that we can empathize with and a part we have a knee-jerk negative reaction to. The question is, are we brave enough to identify with these characters.

In “Happiness” the characters are all damaged in their own way and sometimes they find a moment of pleasure or happiness only to find that the consequences outweigh the pleasure. There is no guaranteed happiness for the characters in the film, but as one of them observes in a toast, “Where there's life, there's hope.” Highly Recommended

Not Rated: Mature Audiences, contains Sex/Nudity, Graphic Language, Mature Thematic Elements Involving Child Molestation and a Scene of Violence