by James Serpento
Todd Solondz’s film, “Happiness,” has just been released to video stores, complete with a cover that touts it as “the #1 movie in America,” or something. Well, that’s telling, isn’t it.
I’d heard similar reports from several West Coast friends, actually—that it was the best film they’d seen all year. (This was before Kosovo, before the Colombine massacre.)
Yes, it’s a terrific picture. Not for everybody, perhaps, but you won’t soon forget it and that’s one measure of great cinema: that the ghosts captured on celluloid will be often conjured. (I have to say I didn’t like it as well as the one that brought him to the world’s attention, “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” And it has nothing to do with the subject matter, though in the wake of Colombine, Solondz and producer Christine Vachon may want to brace themselves. The film contains a dream sequence in which one of the central characters, an admitted pedophile, guns down a bunch of park-goers.)
“Happiness” is another in Solondz’s canon devoted to piercing the protective veils surrounding the different, the lonely, the disenfranchised. And he should be applauded and encouraged to do so; in a world where people are increasingly cut off, Solondz sounds the cry for communion, even as he acknowledges that it may be too late, that we may have already created a world where that very communion is now only possible in perverted forms. His voice is striking, passionate and highly flammable.
The film occasionally cuts too easy a path for me, though certainly there is clarity of method in Solondz’s madness. This “easy path” (in the form of suburban “targets,” self-absorbed artists, older-than-dust jokes like a therapist’s contrapuntal thoughts in voiceover) is quickly forgiven when compared to the virtues of Dylan Baker’s tortured performance as loving father and quiet madman; of Jane Adams as the darling and compulsively self-destructive Joy; and of Solondz’s persistent rejection of MTV cutting, preferring to give each devil its terrible due. Look at it, says he, and keep looking at it; after all, you created it.
There is no end to human madness and depravity. Even when it lies sleeping in the closet under the stairs, a closet marked “Burgeoning Ecomony” or “Righteous War” or even “A Sincere I Love You,” the beast called Truth will always wake and it will always be hungry. Truth will out.
Solondz’s beast is quiet, but every bit as voracious as those in Colombine or Kosovo.
If he’s right—and who could effectively dispute him?—then Heaven help us.