Note 12/14/01: This review now dates back a
couple of years. I have made some minor changes in the wording and layout, and
moved up the rating to three stars.
Within the past couple of weeks, videos of
recent films by Todd Solondz and Todd Haynes have appeared for
the rental market. However,
I understand that neither Blockbuster nor Hollywood Video are
going to be stocking Solondz' unrated Happiness***, although both chains stock a number of unrated
titles. And the store where I
finally found it to rent, which had announced the video's release
in advance, was not keeping it on the shelf but apparently for
request only at the front counter--just like the old days of
books that were sold under the counter. The film deals with the
interrelated stories of three sisters, Joy Jordan (Jane Adams),
Helen Jordan (Lara Flynn Boyle), and Trish Maplewood, whose
husband Bill (Dylan Baker) is a psychiatrist, also the father of
two boys, and a child molester. Neither Joy nor Helen is happy
with her sexual life--the former rejects an obese suitor who
precipitously commits suicide as a result before being taken
advantage of by an unscrupulous Russian émigré--while Trish
lives in a fool's paradise. If I would hesitate to recommend Happiness
to anyone, it is certainly not because of the somewhat problematic subject matter nor because I consider it exploitative--see
below--but because I think even someone who is not a parent might
well find looking at it an unsettling experience, particularly
the sexually charged discussions between Bill and his precocious
pubescent son.
The best thing I can say
about Happiness is that it's not Your Friends and Neighbors, in spite of dealing with the malheurs
of upper middle-class characters and featuring a confession of
sodomy--by Bill to his son. Kenneth
Turan in his review of the movie in the Los Angeles Times
rightly commented that the laughter which Happiness might
elicit sticks in the viewer's throat, but that is a real
improvement over Your Friends and Neighbors' strategy of
encouraging the audience to sneer at its own mirror image.
Amusingly, Neil LaBute's film used a famous painting by Alex
Katz, The Cocktail Party, in its advertising but Solondz'
movie is visually far closer to pop art than Your Friends and
Neighbors, with its brighly lit and brightly colored
interiors that often resemble ads in fashionable magazines,
photographed by Maryse Alberti and designed by Thérèse DePrez. A
long movie--139 minutes--Happiness, although it takes a
leisurely pace in telling its story, is well edited by Alan Oxman
and never threatens to bog down, employing a very traditional
linear narrative line--in contrast to its rather unconventional
subject matter--that resembles nothing so much as a pièce
bien faite with its tripartite structure. The video, from
Trimark, is generally acceptable but it has been altered from its
original format which must have been flat wide-screen, judging
from the compositions.
The title is, of course, bitterly ironic.
At the end, after the characters--at a family reunion in
Florida--have toasted their collective happiness, Solondz
underscores the point by having Trish's son wander in and
announce that he's just achieved his first ejaculation as one of
the sisters schmoozes with the dog that has previously licked up
his semen. But the
bitterest irony of Happiness may well be unintentional. Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a hopeless nerd and
slob makes obscene calls to women with whom he fantasizes making
violent love, and Solondz counterpoints these sessions with a
beautiful excerpt from Mozart's Così fan tutte that Allen
listens to on a portable tape machine. In a prototypic scene,
Allen finally works up his courage and goes to the apartment of
Joy, the object of his lustful reveries who lives just down the
hall--she has in fact encouraged him to do so after receiving
several of his anonymous calls, little realizing he is her
unappetizing neighbor. As the two sit on a couch, the Mozart
continues to be heard until Allen timidly approaches her, and Joy
snarls "This is not working!"--in effect, silencing the
music which instantaneously vanishes from the soundtrack at the
sound of her voice. But the point here is not only the
juxtaposition of eighteenth century romantic ideals with the
hard-nosed sexuality of urban Americans in the twentieth. It is
far more the confrontation of the idea of happiness with its
realization--a spectacular example of the discrepancy between
theory and practice.
This idea of happiness was still a very new one when the
phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
appeared in the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
According to a famous anecdote repeated by Friedrich Nietzsche in
The Birth of Tragedy which well summarizes the notion of
happiness current in ancient Greece, when King Midas trapped the
satyr Silenus and demanded of him who is happiest, the latter
laughed derisively and replied, "Happiest it is not to have
been born at all and second happiest to die young."
Elsewhere, in the great empires of antiquity, happiness was
simply the prerogative of the powerful. This bleak view was
replaced by the Christian idea of an afterlife in which the
chosen would live in eternal bliss, a conception which had its
literary monument in the last part, the "Paradiso," of
Dante's Divine Comedy. The idea, however, that real
happiness could be achieved in this world was the discovery of
the Enlightenment and it found a powerful embodiment in the
aesthetic paradise of masterpieces like Così fan Tutte.
But for thinkers like Denis
Diderot or Condorcet--no less than for the distinctly
non-eudaemonistic Immanuel Kant--happiness could only reside in
the cultural fulfillment of an individual's potential as a human
being. Since then, it has come to
mean--as it clearly does for the characters in Solondz'
film--material security, social prestige, and consumer goods. On
the one hand, this kind of happiness, as even school children
quickly learn, can only be purchased by a high degree of social
adaptation--so that people more and more pay for it with the loss
of any kind of meaningful individuality. On the other, the only
players who succeed in the competition for such happiness are the
ones who play the most ruthlessly and whose victories are always
at someone else's expense. In this scheme of things, social
relationships reduce to a diabolical parody of the Hegelian für
sich--the an sich having long ago
volatilized altogether from the world of reified appearances--as
Joy, the sister who most brutally pursues this ethos,
inadvertently admits when she laments, "Nobody wants me for
myself!"
The world of Happiness is a bestiary
divided into two major classes: predators and their prey. In
terms of this division, molestation looks less like an aberration
than a metaphor for present day American society as a whole. But
Solondz is perfectly aware how deceptive the triumphs of his
predators are. His characters
are not Roman tyrants, feudal barons, or Renaissance aristocrats
who can flaunt the law, live their lives in luxury without
lifting a finger, and use commoners as their sex objects, but so
many flies inextricably stuck to the flypaper of consumerism,
ultimately doomed to be preyed upon by some bigger, more
successful predator. The final
irony, extrinsic to the film, is that Happiness is a very
moral picture--perhaps too much so. To his credit, Solondz does
not gloat too much over his miserable specimens but the distance
he maintains makes them into abstract figures a good deal of the
time. He shows Bill masturbating in his car--in the somewhat
improbable setting of a shopping plaza parking lot with plenty of
passers-by--after buying a teen magazine, but he never allows
Bill to display the horrifying excitation of Becker (Peter Lorre)
on the track of one of his victims in Fritz Lang's great M
(1931). Even in the midst of deviation, Bill remains a wimp who
only dreams of killing people at random, as much a slave to
fantasy as Allen.
In the long run, an exercise of this kind is
only interesting when carried out with the gleeful malice and
sublime humor with which Luis Buñuel skewered the Mexican haute
bourgeoisie in movies like The Criminal Life Of Archibaldo de
la Cruz (1955) or The Exterminating Angel (1962). But Happiness
is as far removed from the cosmic disdain of Buñuel as it is
from the Rabelaisian, purgative humor of Woody Allen in Mighty
Aphrodite or Deconstructing Harry, films which mine
the same socio-sexual territory to much better effect.
Happiness is available on video and DVD
from Amazon.com. The films by Luis
Buñuel are available on video.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net