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

Welcome To The Dollhouse

English/88 Minutes/1995/Rated R

“Who ever told you to fight back?” - Mrs. Weiner

“Welcome to the Dollhouse” was Todd Solondz first movie and while it is well made and earnest it never achieves the emotionally devastating power of his later works. Having seen some of Solondz's other films (Happiness and Storytelling) I found this one to be his least engaging and most readily digestible. There are themes he would later revisit (hatred of younger siblings, child abuse and kidnapping) but here they are in a much more reserved form.

In “Dollhouse” we find young Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo) who is going through the hell which is junior high. She is neither popular nor attractive and is subject to some pretty far out abuse (a girl demands she take a shit while she watches, a boy threatens to rape her). The tone seems to be mixed, trying to be blackly comic but not always getting the tone right. For the most part though Solndz film is spot on.

The family dynamic shows Dawn stuck between an overachieving older brother, Mark (Matthew Faber), and sickeningly sweet baby sister Missy (played by Daria Kalinina in eternal tutu). Her father is a non-entity in the house wanting only peace and quiet while her mother is manipulative and domineering. She is estranged from her elder daughter, praising instead her brother and doting on her little sister. Dawn is supposed to play the silent middle role, always acquiescing to everyone else's needs.

Dawn is reaching an age where she is beginning to express herself and each time she attempts to carve out a place to stand she finds that she is pushed away. Solndz reminds us of what it was like to be 12 or 13 and through Dawn we can experience it all again, for better and worse. It is to both Matarazzo and Solndz's credit that we feel a bittersweet knowing. For we know what the results of many of Dawn's experiments will be.

We see Dawn in what is probably her first crush on an older man (Eric Mabius) and we share her disappointment when she finds he already has a girlfriend. We see her fumbling romance with a boy who is a different kind of outcast as they find a common ground. We see the moments when she learns, as we all did, the painful truths of life and what it means to know yourself.

I am reminded of one particular scene where Dawn is asked to write an essay on dignity after an embarrassing debacle in detention. Her essay shows she has no understanding of the word means but throughout the film in her little rebellions and assertions of self (even where they are passive-aggressive), we find that she has a stubbornness, a quiet dignity that she does not know she has.

Her life changes when she has a run in with one of the school's bullies, Brandon (Brenden Sexton Jr.). After Dawn makes fun of him one day he tells her that he will rape her after school. She shows up, he has a knife, and we are not sure where this will lead. This is, I think, Solndz only real mistake as the shift in subject matter without a shift in tone makes for a sort of cognitive dissonance. Once we learn more about Brandon it makes sense but it is a jarring way to introduce someone.

The surprising thing is that Brandon is not a beast. In a performance that rival's Matarazzo's, Sexton makes Brandon a frightening aggressor only to have our sympathy once he opens himself to Dawn. As with most bullies, we find that he is just as sad as those he abuses. He comes close to stealing the show with his honesty and vulnerability.

But the story belongs to Dawn and how she deals with the difficulty of being a young girl. By the end we see that she has lost some of her shine, a little tarnish on her tiara. Even as she is the protagonist (in the literal sense) her forays into the world and into identity are spurned and ground down at every turn. In what could have been a turning point scene for Dawn in different film she does not assert herself, merely stands there quietly crying. I so wanted her to stand up and say how she really felt. But this is not that kind of movie.

In the end, Dawn realizes that she will never be first in her family's affection, she has learned a little of what a broken heart will be. The closing shot implies to me that nothing has changed for Dawn except that she has found she can bear more suffering than she thought. For Dawn wants desperately to be loved and praised. She doesn't just want to be popular or “normal (which is the worst word in any language),” she wants to be noticed by boys, by her family, by her peers. She wants to find her place in the world as we all do and like the rest of us she is still looking. Recommended.

Rated R for Language

Burn After Reading

English/96 Minutes/2008/Rated R

"Report back to me when things make sense." - CIA Superior

That line could be a mantra for our own CIA and “Burn After Reading,” the new Coen Brothers film is a darkly comic take on that world.

In the film, two bumbling gym workers, Chad and Linda (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt), in need of money, stumble across the memoirs of failed CIA analyst Ozborne Cox (John Malkovich). Not knowing that what they have is essentially junk they attempt to blackmail Cox. Far in over their heads they set in motion a course of events that lead to violence and hilarity, sometimes in the same scene. Throw into this a philandering Treasury agent (George Clooney) who is sleeping with Cox's wife (Tilda Swinton) and you have a strange blend of musical beds and black comedy as only the Coens can do.

The performances are all great, but most of the characters are unlikeable. Mcdormand's Linda is an incredibly egotistical and shallow person. Her desire for plastic surgery leads her to do things she mightn't otherwise. She is so obsessed with “reinventing herself” that she is unable to see herself as lovable and is therefore unable to see the love of one of her coworkers.

Brad Pitt as Chad, her bumbling assistant, plays braindead (almost to the point of farce). There is not much for Pitt to do here but he makes the most of his screen time. Clooney as Harry is a philandering, pathological liar, but he manages to portray the character as a sort of stunted child who never suspects that what he's doing could have serious consequences. Tilda Swinton is almost wasted in an ice-queen performance that, while memorable, is not something we haven't seen before. Capping the cast is John Malkovich as Cox. He is a man who has been marginalized and abused by people he perceives to be his lessers and we watch as he slowly comes unhinged.

The film is very much about the failure of people to communicate at both the personal and the governmental level. People talk at each other, evasive and sometimes oblivious to the other party. A great example is the scene where Chad calls Cox to offer to return his memoir files. Chad is expecting a reward but Cox thinks he is attempting blackmail. Another example is a great scene where Cox confronts a man in his basement and they discuss what he represents.

At the national level we have Cox's superiors (JK Simmons and David Rasche) who act as a sort of Greek chorus to the goings on. When it is mentioned that someone has been murdered in Cox's house the superiors say “burn the body.” As things escalate the priorities continue to be the reduction of headaches.

Behind all of this is a great dramatic irony in which no one gets what they want or deserve but suffer the consequences of decisions made in haste. This is a recurring theme in many of the Coen's films, from Llewelyn Moss in “No Country for Old Men” to the McDunnoughs in “Raising Arizona” there is the recurring theme of unintended consequences. In “Burn After Reading” we see that governments, like people are always trying to minimize the consequences, even at the risk of doing greater harm. Recommended.

Rated R for Pervasive Language, Some Sexual Content and Violence