Todd Solondz (2009)

Todd Solondz made this film more than ten years after Happiness – I saw it ten minutes after I’d seen Happiness for the first time.   I normally try to judge a film on its self-sufficient merits but it was hard to do that in the circumstances.  Having just watched and been impressed with Happiness, I couldn’t help comparing the characters and performers with their previous incarnations.  The first picture’s dramatis personae are so taking that, when a new character is introduced in Life During Wartime, he or she seems, at least at first, like an intruder.  Besides, Solondz seems to expect the audience to regard the characters, now played by different actors, as déjà vu – as the opening sequence of Life During Wartime, imitating the first scene of Happiness, illustrates.   The new film has its moments.  All in all, though, it’s a disappointing demonstration of the problems of making a sequel with a life of its own.  Although Wartime is unusual compared with most American films that get released over here, it seems pretty conventional beside its subversive progenitor.  I didn’t even register that the Jordan family in Happiness was Jewish.  Their Jewishness is much more salient here – there’s a bar mitzvah complete with ‘Haga Navila’ and conversations about spending one’s autumn years in Israel – and this made me wonder whether Todd Solondz (who once considered becoming a rabbi, according to Wikipedia) was drawing on autobiography more than before.  Life During Wartime is visually more smooth and accomplished than Happiness – yet that too seems to reflect a diminution of energy and imagination.

One of the great strengths of Happiness was Solondz’s refusal to chicken out of scenes at the point at which (you’d think) they became more difficult to write.  Perhaps the one exception to this was eliding the reaction of Trish, the middle Jordan sister, to the revelation of her husband Bill’s paedophiliac behaviour.  You were all the more conscious of the absence of a scene showing how she received the news because Trish seemed (relatively) the most self-confident and optimistic character in Happiness.  It’s unlikely, given the interval between the two films, that Solondz planned a sequel from the outset – but it may have been that, in writing the screenplay for Life During Wartime, he wanted to rectify the omission from Happiness and to make Trish the central character in the new film.   At any rate, she becomes central, thanks to Allison Janney’s verve and emotional precision and colouring.   Wartime starts at the point at which Trish has found herself a new man, a regular guy named Harvey, and Bill is released from prison.

Among Trish and Bill’s three kids, the main focus in Happiness was on Billy, the eldest, who’s now in his final year of college (majoring in anthropology).  As the older Billy, Chris Marquette has a pasty, blurred quality.  He’s convincing in that he seems indefinitely unhappy, and as if his life is in suspense – but a scene in which his released father visits Billy in his room at college is artificial, and foreshadows the final sequence in which Billy’s younger brother Timmy admits that, ‘I just want a Dad’.   When they meet, Bill and Billy rehearse arguments about forgiving and forgetting which feel schematic, not least because they recur in conversations between other characters, notably Timmy and Harvey.   In Wartime the younger generation spotlight is on Timmy and Dylan Riley Snyder who plays him, although he’s very proficient, is more knowing and less interesting and affecting than Rufus Read, who played Billy in Happiness.   (Solondz also seems to cheat slightly with Timmy’s age.  He’s now coming up for thirteen and bar mitzvah – he surely wasn’t as young as three in Happiness?)   Still, Dylan Riley Snyder does good things:  quite early on in the film, Trish tells Timmy, ‘If anyone ever touches you, scream’ – advice which is too obviously going to come in useful in due course.   The payoff scene works only because Snyder shows us the confusion of Timmy’s feelings – that he wants to get rid of Harvey, the prospective new father figure (who makes the mistake of hugging the boy), but also needs him.

In spite of being the strongest screen personality, Allison Janney also manages to have more connection with her equivalent in Happiness than anyone else.  I can’t describe just how and why Janney is so brilliant when, for example, she and her sister Joy meet for lunch, Trish orders a salad nicoise with dressing on the side, then struggles to reprimand the waiter when she doesn’t get what she asked for.  Shirley Henderson, who plays Joy, is a striking actress; she too connects with her precursor – you can believe that Joy has physically shrunk to this mid-fortyish version of herself.   But Henderson’s fey quality skews the ghostly reappearances of the old flames whom she’s caused to commit suicide – Andy (who topped himself in Happiness) and Allen (the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in the first film, who follows suit here) – and makes them insufficiently disconcerting, even though Allen is very well played by Michael  Kenneth Williams.  The eldest Jordan sister Helen, because of her good looks and professional and sexual success, gets a raw deal from Solondz in Happiness – the same thing happens more crudely here, with Ally Sheedy in the role – as Helen, now a successful television writer, drops name after name (Keanu, Salman, the Emmys).  The worse casting mistake is Ciaran Hinds as Bill:  he’s dully, lugubriously melodramatic, lacking not just the nuances of Dylan Baker’s portrait in Happiness but any sense of what Bill was like before he went to prison or therefore what prison has done to him.   Of the new characters, a woman played by Charlotte Rampling, with whom Bill has a one-night stand on his release from jail, seems to be something out of a much more familiar weltschmertz drama but Harvey (Michael Lerner) and his son Mark (Rich Pecci) win you over.   Although he’s conceived basically as a comedy sketch character, Mark’s paranoid monologue at the dinner table, when he and his father first visit Trish and her children, is one of the highlights of the movie.

25 April 2010