Todd Solondz (1998)
There’s something that makes me feel guilty about finding a film as determinedly misanthropic as this one so enjoyable – but the writer-director Todd Solondz manages to sustain horrifying and funny at the same time, and the two things have amazing traction. Besides, the misanthropy isn’t of the condescending, Coen-esque variety; the people in Happiness are mostly propelled by desire inflected with pain or guilt or both. This makes it hard for members of the audience (this one anyway) to be detached from their vices and perversions – and the impeccable cast certainly isn’t. The film’s title is, of course, ironic and so is the name of the character who feels like the central one: Joy, the eldest of the three Jordan sisters. In the opening sequence, Joy (Jane Adams) is having a romantic dinner with a lumpy, unprepossessing admirer called Andy (Jon Lovitz) and her uncomfortable rejection of him is excruciatingly hesitant and protracted. (He later commits suicide.) The youngest sister is Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a writer whose sex life is as relentlessly – and, to her, unsatisfyingly – successful as her literary career. The middle sister Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) is a housewife and mother of three, securely married to a psychiatrist called Bill (Dylan Baker). We first see Bill at work, trying to keep awake as he listens to a man called Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whom we’ve already watched making obscene phone calls in the bedroom of his dingy apartment, explaining how boring he feels he is. It might be assumed from this that Bill is going to have a straight man role but in his next appearance, on his way home, he buys some magazines with pictures of boys in them and promptly wanks off in his parked car.
In the course of the picture, Bill translates his paedophile fantasies into action but this makes him, in the world of Happiness, an exception: the long odds against sexually fulfilling relationships are a persistent theme. Several of the characters are desperate for sex but run a mile whenever it threatens: they seem to be sustained by the certainty of their imaginings getting no further than the inside of their heads. When anyone phones Allen back, he hangs up. He has specific fantasies about Helen, who (implausibly?) lives in the same block. Another neighbour, an obese, fortyish woman called Cristina (Camryn Manheim), longs for a relationship with Allen. They eventually go out together to a late-night diner, where Cristina insists that she’s a passionate woman but explains she can’t stand the thought of a man ‘inside her’– she really wants, as she says, to get under the sheets with ice cream and key lime pie. This conversation is one of the high points of Happiness, as Cristina explains how she murdered the doorman at the apartment block, when he helped her in one evening with her high-calorie shopping then vented his own need for sex by forcing himself upon her. She broke his neck and cut up his body: ‘Parts of him are still in my freezer’ (obviously taking up space that Ben and Jerry might more usefully occupy). At the end of her gruesome story, Cristina, in a vivid example of need trumping rationality, suggests to Allen that, ‘We can still be friends, can’t we?’ ‘I guess’ Allen replies helplessly, hardly in a position to take the moral high ground. These double punchlines genuinely merit the overused phrase painfully funny: the fact is that talking like this to each other is a big step forward in human contact for both Cristina and Allen. (The role of Allen came pretty early in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cinema career and he’s startling in it, even though he’s now so familiar: his combination of wit and a fearless willingness to be physically repulsive is brutally in evidence.)
The lack of fulfilment in Happiness is varied and very well orchestrated by Solondz: it’s extensive too. Relationships are no more satisifying in the older generation: the Jordan girls’ parents have retired to Florida, and their father Lenny (Ben Gazzara) wants to leave their mother Mona (Louise Lasser) – but in order to be solitary rather than for another woman: Lenny has sex with a hopeful neighbour just to make sure he doesn’t want it anymore. What’s most subversive in Solondz’s universe is the nature of the characters who do enjoy the sex they have – Bill and a Russian immigrant called Vlad (Jared Harris – really excellent), who is one of Joy’s students at an English class she teaches in New York City. She has a one night stand with Vlad (she actually enjoys it too), after he’s driven her back – he has a yellow cab – to her place in New Jersey. Vlad then proceeds to treat Joy like shit and it’s clear from the state of his vengeful wife’s face that he hits her. Yet, when he comes back to Joy’s apartment and sings ‘You Light Up My Life’ on her guitar, it’s a great moment: it does give her (and us) hope, which for a short time eclipses the certainty that this relationship is going to end badly. When Billy (Rufus Read), Trish and Bill’s eldest, has a friend Johnny (Evan Silverberg) come to the house for a sleepover, Bill drugs the boy’s supper and sodomises him, a consummation which is exasperatingly delayed as Johnny keeps declining offers of food and drink. In a sequence like this one, Todd Solondz exploits the way that a film audience is primed to engage with a character in a particular set-up, virtually regardless of what the situation entails. Even though you’re appalled by what Bill is planning to do, it’s still possible to understand his frustration that, even after Johnny has accepted a tuna mayo sandwich, he takes forever to start eating it.
Happiness offers a rare presentation of a paedophile character – layered and unbiased – and it’s through Bill especially that Solondz makes us realise that honesty isn’t always the best policy. The family life of Trish and Bill is a bleak, absorbing illustration of the symbiosis of dysfunction and normality. She would like to have sex again with her husband but she’s decent and conventional, an utterly competent and loving wife and mother, and doesn’t complain. Bill too, while nourishing his guilty secret, remains in most respects a conscientious husband and father. After his eventual arrest, he’s home on bail and, in conversation with Billy, admits that he enjoyed the sex he had with boys. When Billy (who looks like someone maladjusted waiting to happen, well before his father’s crimes are disclosed) asks ‘Would you ever fuck me?’ Bill replies, ‘No, I jerk off instead’. This is probably the darkest moment of all: you sense that Billy feels not only shocked but somehow rejected and also relieved – and that all three things make him cry so distressingly. (Happiness begins and nearly ends with some horribly believable weeping – from Andy and Billy respectively.) We share Billy’s relief: son and father have two or three facts-of-life conversations earlier on and the audience, knowing what Billy doesn’t know about his father, realises that each conversation tends towards what the verge of a sexual proposition to the boy. These interactions, like the opening exchange between Joy and Andy and all the relatively extended, real-time passages in Happiness, are grippingly well acted and directed with great skill.
The three sisters are marvellously contrasted. Solondz empathises with the sexual no-hopers in the story and he’s harsher with the beautiful, admired Helen, whose awareness that she’s a phony is self-pityingly immoral. (She’s published a collection of poems about being raped as a child and confides to herself that she wishes she’d really been raped: ‘Then I could be truthful’.) The sarcastic conception of the role makes it relatively thin but Lara Flynn Boyle is physically so perfect for it that she animates Helen. The endless series of setbacks and humiliations experienced by Joy occasionally seems a bit much but Solondz will then turn the moment to dispel that impression. For example, when Joy arrives for her first day at the TEFL class, the assembled refugees, annoyed that they’ve lost their previous teacher who went on strike, start jeering her and calling her a scab – but this paves the way for the introduction of Vlad, who demands silence in class. After he’s stolen her guitar and CD system, Joy makes a stand to get them back – in exchange for the $500 she agrees to give Vlad: it’s the culmination of Joy’s principled helplessness, which Jane Adams captures perfectly. And Cynthia Stevenson gives Trish a sunny indomitability – she’s still cheerful when Bill’s gone to prison – that is both alarming and engaging. Happiness ends with the Jordans – the parents, the daughters and Trish’s kids – having a meal at Lenny’s and Mona’s home (we assume he still wants to leave her). As they’re talking together, Billy is on the balcony looking out at a nearly naked neighbour of his grandparents. Throughout the film, he’s kept trying to ejaculate and now he finally succeeds. The family dog runs along and stops to lick a blob of Billy’s semen from where it’s landed then comes to the table where the adults are gathered. Trish greets the dog and bends to let him wash her face. It’s a mark of how this movie works on you that, as you groan, you’re almost pleased that something’s happened to keep her smiling. Billy meanwhile says quietly to himself ‘I came’ – with a mixture of wonder and unease. The moment is his initiation into the world of adult sexuality. He can hardly be blamed for being unsure whether arriving in that world is a good thing.
25 April 2010
