Playfully named “Happiness,” Todd Solondz’s painful, deadpan burlesque of bourgeois mores encompasses murder, mutilation, rape, pedophilia, suicide, obscene phone calls and free-floating masochism, among syndromes yet to be named. “Happiness” scared off its initial distributor but struck a chord at Cannes. Released unrated, it was hailed as the dark comedy du jour, a runner-up in three categories (film, screenplay and actor) in the 1998 New York Film Critics Circle’s annual awards.
The movie may not be as shocking as it was 27 years ago but, revived for a run at the IFC Center in a new 4K restoration, it has scarcely lost its capacity to discomfit.
A family drama centered on three adult sisters, “Happiness” mocks mid-period Woody Allen as it transposes Chekhov to suburban New Jersey. The eldest, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), is a smug housewife with two kids and a psychoanalyst husband named Bill (Dylan Baker), who is depressed and harboring a desire for small boys. Bill’s patient (Philip Seymour Hoffman) drones through his sessions and makes obscene phone calls to the middle sister, Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle).
Thoroughly unpleasant Helen is a narcissistic writer, author of a best-selling novel titled “A Pornographic Childhood.” By contrast, the youngest, most sympathetic sibling, Joy (Jane Adams), is a hapless failure — a would-be singer-songwriter introduced in the film’s opening sequence, making a bad date worse.
Their parents, Mona (Louise Lasser) and Lenny (Ben Gazzara), are unhappy in Florida, where the local real estate agent is played by a glitzy Marla Maples, then married to the real estate developer Donald Trump. Her character tells Mona that getting a divorce was the best decision of her life. (Solondz is a master caster.)
Everyone is alone. They are largely oblivious to each other’s misery, yet the strongest, funniest scenes are one-on-ones. Often shot in close-up, these suggest acting exercises or skit comedy gone off the rails. The bit in which Bill explains what used to be called “the facts of life” to his 11-year-old son is as excruciating as it is absurd.
What hath Solondz wrought? On the one hand, “Happiness” suggests an amalgam of Philip Roth and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, on the other, Antonioni’s “Red Desert” remade by John Waters. When Helen jokes that she’s “living in a state of irony” she’s speaking for the film.
Employing a clinical term coined during World War II to characterize noncompliant soldiers, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin praised Solondz’s skillful laceration of the normal: “In his hands, passive aggression is a deadly weapon, right there in the arsenal alongside perky suburban décor and easy-listening songs.”
His sequel to “Happiness” was titled “Life in Wartime” (2010), but his existential torment is nothing if not active. Indeed, the angst level communicated by his films rivals that of Ingmar Bergman. Solondz released six features between 1995 and 2011 (but only one since). All, save the last, are exercises in mortification, albeit less for his characters than his audience.
A rueful humanist, Solondz treats his creatures with more compassion than contempt. As for viewers, caveat emptor. “It only hurts when I laugh,” a punchline without a joke, might serve as his motto.
Happiness
Through June 12, IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com.
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