Happiness

... a nihilistic soap opera

Directed by Todd Solondz

USA, 1998

It is with regret that this week ReidsonFilm subjected ourselves to Happiness, a ‘black comedy’ by writer/director Todd Solondz. Frankly, there was very little to like about this film despite its perplexingly high acclaim from certain corners of the internet. As a rule of thumb, there is little need for most films to exceed a two-hour runtime, least of all a comedy. Get in, do your jokes, then get out. An unfunny comedy, with a runtime of two hours would be tantamount to torture. Lumbering in at no less than two hours and fifteen minutes, Happiness simply was torture.

The film takes a series of narratives connected by a family of two parents and three daughters, all searching for, or lacking in, happiness of some description. The parents are on the verge of divorce but refuse to come to terms with their estrangement.

Joy, the youngest daughter played by Jane Adams, has entered her thirties single and with little to no career prospects. The eldest daughter, Trish, wears a veneer of happiness despite her sexless marriage to paedophile psychiatrist Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker). The middle sister and successful author, Helen, is also miserable because... well it’s unclear why but essentially fame hasn't given her the satisfaction she'd hoped for.

While there is nothing inherently at fault with this as a premise, Solondz’s attempt to straddle serious themes – paedophilia, rape, suicide – with ‘dark humour’ was executed poorly. The jokes were witless, crass, and often simply juvenile. This made Happiness feel as though someone had taken an intricately interwoven drama like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and desecrated it with American Pie-style phone-sex and masturbation gags.

Black comedy is perhaps one of the hardest genres to get right, as it presents the challenge of finding a tonal balance between darkness and humour. In the case of Happiness, the events unfolded in such a contrived, unbelievable way in service of setting up jokes, that it was virtually impossible to take any of the serious parts seriously, or treat the characters as authentic – despite some great performances across the board.

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I don't think it was necessarily a bad film, but I just don't think it went much beyond being a nihilistic soap opera - N

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That being said, there were a handful of jokes that worked, specifically in scenes which also weren’t trying to be taken seriously. The opening scene revolves around a breakup in a restaurant, which culminates in Joy’s would-be suitor Andy shouting at her:

You think I’m shit? Well, you’re wrong, ‘cause I'm champagne, and you’re shit.

One of the few things Solondz’s film does well is pacing these particular scenes for comic effect. They begin with slow and restrained interactions between characters, but culminate in a rug-pull moment. In the case of the restaurant scene, despite being broken up with, Andy presents Joy with a collector’s item (a silver ‘Gansevoort reproduction’ ashtray with her name engraved on it). Only after Joy accepts this gift does Andy snatch it back from her and commence his champagne-shit tirade.

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The first scene was quite slow but engaging - it went downhill from there in my opinion - T

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What made the film particularly disappointing was the promise of its ensemble cast, featuring Phillip Seymour Hoffman (the lead in ReidsonFilm favourite, Synecdoche, New York) and Twin Peaks icon Lara Flynn Boyle who, along with the rest of the cast deliver solid performances (with the exception of Jared Harris’ awful impersonation of a Russian immigrant). Hoffman’s character acting shines as he convincingly portrays a wheezing, sweating, single man who scans through a phone book cold-calling women while masturbating, certainly capturing the bleaker side of the search for happiness.

The relationship between paedophile and psychiatrist Bill and his wife Trish is also central to the drama, with Cynthia Stevenson portraying the empty existence of a brittle housewife living an obvious pretence. Once again, however, this bleak predicament is undermined by ludicrous scenes like the sleepover, where Bill laces a dessert with sedatives in order to rape his son’s friend Johnny. When Johnny reveals he doesn’t like chocolate, Bill is forced to haphazardly lace a tuna sandwich with the same drug and wait patiently for Johnny to pass out while everyone else is already fast asleep.

The scene as written is set up like a farcical comedy but is played straight, without any real moments of humour - perhaps rightly so considering the subject matter. Consequently, we were left feeling confused and even misdirected by it. If the intention was for audiences to seriously engage with, perhaps even empathise with the experience of a paedophile, this was severely inhibited by the mixed messages conveyed in Solondz’s heavy-handed attempts to deliver both darkness and humour, but without really committing to either.

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“It wasn’t entertaining and didn’t really provoke any interesting thought unlike other films that set out to be disturbing - T

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Despite a string of exhausting comedy misses towards the end of the second hour, the film’s final scene where the family convene in a Florida apartment has some redeeming qualities. It’s the first time we see the parents and all three sisters together. Their family dynamic feels authentic and, as the sisters go back and forth discussing their future romantic endeavours, the scene shows some comedic promise. Unfortunately, this is quickly interrupted by the closing gag of the film as Trish’s son, Billy, interrupts the scene to announce that, after a string of awkward pep talks throughout the film from his paedophile father, he has finally learned to ejaculate.

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I thought the cast overall were really very good, but it did feel like a string of vaguely connected sketches - S

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There are many excellent films out there which explore suburban ennui, but Happiness, for ReidsonFilm, does not make that list. It’s need to hit all possible social taboos of rape, paedophilia, murder, suicide, even allusions to incest - like some kind of bingo or box-ticking exercise - make it impossible to take the themes or ideas seriously.

Even when we weren’t supposed to be taking it seriously, Happiness offered very little in the comedy department. It was provocative in the most adolescent of senses, and would likely play very well to a room of school children who had just had their first sex education class. Apart from a couple of half decent sketches, and they really did feel like sketches, the film’s jokes simply didn’t land for us, and that made it a very painful watch.

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Reids’ Results (out of 100)

C - 49

T - 41

N - 58

S - 62

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