“the guys who were snickering at me weren’t exactly Tom Cruise”
Written: Jun 20 '04 (Updated May 20 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: A character study in light and dark: precise, cold (but not always), and intelligent.
Cons: The plot starts off slow and diffuse, and pushes lots of emotional hot buttons.
The Bottom Line: We know evil exists. It would be a comfier world if all evil was done by evil people, and we could sit around watching action movies for enlightenment. Oh well.
Happiness, like all three of writer / director Todd Solondz’s movies, was very divisive, and I think its fans and haters latched onto a half-truth: the same half-truth. The fans phrased it something like “Todd reveals the darkness and hypocrisy behind normal everyday life”. The haters used words like “Todd will always reveal the worst possible motive in every character, until it’s predictable and boring”. Yes, definitely, he looks at darkness. But to me his films also work the other way: he looks at people who do awful things, and finds the almost normal, almost likeable surfaces that are, after all, also part of who they are. There’s nothing predictable about _that_.
Either way, he does specialize in making us squirm. Happiness (1998) opens with the archtypical Solondz scene: willowy, pretty Joy Jordan is on a date with her squinty-eyed, square-shaped co-worker Andy. Both look very sad, and we quickly know why: Joy is forcing out lines about how “I thought it was best to end it before either of us got too attached”. We all know who that’s supposed to fool, and it’s not Andy: when he breaks into audible tears, and then into some vigorous snorts into his napkin, she’s the one who optimistically asks “Do you feel any better now?”. He nods, and shyly reveals that “I brought you something”. She shouldn’t really open the box, of course, but it’s a lovely box. Her next line should be “Andy, I can’t accept this!”, but it’s a collector’s item artwork, a beautiful antique bowl that he obviously bought after learning her tastes. She _wants_ to accept this, and Andy’s helping her along, pointing out the 40-carat inlay on the bottom. “I will cherish this forever and remember you”, she gushes.
Andy’s voice and face change, harden. “No you won’t”, he says, snatching the bowl back. If you’re female, I don’t know if you realize how glorious this moment is. Joy had already laid bare her utter selfishness, even before the present was brought out: she wants her to get her own way, while Andy’s dreams lie miserably in the dump, and she wants Andy to pretend to “feel better now”, accepting her reasons, so that her victory can be as complete as possible. Then, promising to cherish the bowl – she has earned her humiliation.
But this is a Todd Solondz movie: the scene can’t rest with glory. Andy has to lecture Joy, drive home his feelings of rejection, and they’re ugly too: “You think I’m shiit, but I’m champagne”, proceeding to “You: you’re the one who’s shiit. You will always be shiit”. It’s still possible to sympathize with him, because he’s judged his moment well, and we see his attack is working. But it’s also possible to sympathize with Joy now – because Andy’s judged his moment well, and we see his attack is working.
We can sympathize... but we don’t really enjoy watching. So? We don’t really “enjoy” watching car wrecks or fires, either. And hey, I _don’t_ watch car wrecks or fires. Todd Solondz movies are how I get those kicks: partly because I know his victims are pretend, partly because they feel so much more real.
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His other movies so far, if you don’t know, are Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Storytelling (2001). The first was set in a junior high school, and anyone who thinks junior high school is happy or healthy even on the surface doesn’t remember going there. It was an awkward film in which the most important characters often wanted to do good; but doing good would have left them exposed. It was a film about the only form of defense being attack, and the safest attacks being on the weak and helpless. Storytelling was much more directly dark, but the cruelest, most despicable characters were the writers and filmmakers who prided themselves on documenting the pain of others. Which is the sort of self-examination that I figure will lead to a Nurse Betty-style romantic comedy from Solondz, any month now.
Of the two, Happiness is more like a Welcome to the Dollhouse with its lens redirected at grownups – indeed, the three preteen characters are genuinely nice boys. The grownups, being grownups, are muddles.
Allen, for example, the fat blond glasses-wearing nerd played by the great uber-nerd Philip Seymour Hoffman. We first meet him as a cheesy joke: he’s at the psychiatrist’s office, meandering on in a whiny monotone about how people always think he’s boring. The psychiatrist – you knew this, right? – is checking his watch and planning his grocery list; perhaps he even misses the part where Allen first starts talking about this woman in his building, to whom he needs to come right out and say “I find you very attractive”. (Allen won't, by the way; he'll accidentally find a better plan.)
This lack of interest in his boring patient isn’t the best view of Dr. Bill Maplewood, either, despite the concerned Father Knows Best look Dylan Baker portrays him with. But it’s not the worst view: Dr. Maplewood has his own therapist, and we see the mind’s-eye view of the dream Bill’s recounting, where he strolls through a warm park on a bright summer day, shooting people at random with his machine gun (he takes special pleasure in nailing the jogger who alertly tries to flee into the woods). His therapist asks “And you find it comforting that in this dream you don’t end by killing yourself?”. Maplewood hesitates, ponders: “It seems like it should be some sort of progress, yes”.
But... well, it’s never right to assume only the worst. Joy’s selfishness, in context, is ordinary, and in general she seems more flighty and naive than deliberately hurtful – quitting her job to become a strike-breaking night school teacher, for example. Allen is a creepy guy who makes phone calls where he says hateful and/or sexual things to strangers, and at the same time he’s rejecting of his nice-seeming real neighbor Kristina – still, his fate will be dictated by the times he isn’t mean in person, even when he probably should be.
Bill has a lot of problems, from not being attracted to his wife, to dealing with the advanced sexuality of today’s kids, but he tries earnestly to deal with it all. Asked by his 11-year-old “What is come?”, for example, he explains, then asks good questions to understand why Billy is asking. Then, realizing Billy doesn’t know how to come, he hesitantly asks “Do you want me to show you?”. You can’t say the man doesn’t care.
Even Joy’s father, who seems a little dictatorial and who leaves her mother at the movie’s beginning because “I don’t feel anything for you anymore”, is hardly the monster he seems... unless, of course, you accept “monster” as a tragic description, of mutation rather than cruelty.
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In a way, the meaning of “monster” is Happiness’s subject, although it is never spoken. We humans always have to face the way our desires and fears don’t fit our social reality. Sometimes the world has changed on us, as in the new demanded tolerance of homosexuality, and the scene where Joe Grasso fears that his son is a queer. (Joe lets Bill tell him that “gay” is just a fine way to be; when Joe proposes taking his son to a prostitute, and Bill says “but he’s 11!”, Joe nods: “You're right, it’s too late. He is what he is”.) Sometimes, the rules of conduct don’t work: Happiness is merciless on the tough question of whether you should tell white lies. Sometimes, you care about people who want things from you that they’re not supposed to want. Sometimes, you carve the doorman into little tiny pieces, and dispose of him over months in little Ziploc bags.
There’s no one over the age of 12 in Happiness that I’d want as a friend, yet everyone has nice moments. There’s nothing joyous about Happiness, but I laughed aloud several times, always while squirming. Solondz is honest enough to set romantic scenes to Air Supply’s “Lost in Love” and Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life”, instead of some slacker indie-rock thing; and whatever we expect to happen next, the characters’ feelings in the moment are still real, and to some extent good. I don’t blame anyone who prefers to skip this movie. But I saw it, and I’ll remember it for a long time, and you know what? I'm glad.
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(WARNING: Comment section contains large spoilers.)
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