| Happiness
Todd Solondz USA
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| The biggest difference between working on his first film, Welcome to
the Dollhouse, and his second, Happiness, says director Todd Solondz is
that the newer film had a "much more experienced production team and the
lack of doubt that the film was going to be finished."
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The milieu of Happiness, however, is in many ways the same as that in Dollhouse. Drawing on his own suburban upbringing, Solondz has returned to that fertile if largely untilled turf of American suburbia, sculpting a placid surface beneath which bubbles a cauldron of bizarre desires. An aging couple is falling apart: she ponders divorce while he longs for death. Daughter Joy says she's getting better every day, though Mr Right has yet to appear. Her married sister, Trish, despairs that Joy will never "have it all," as she does. And sister Helen, a best-selling author, has slipped into an angst that can only be relieved by something new and, preferably, kinky. It's a quirky, powerful drama with some of the most significant figures in American independent cinema involved. Christine Vachon and Ted Hope joined forces to produce. Hope, of course, is now part of the Good Machine setup while Vachon has been the driving force behind such powerful fare as Todd Haynes' Poison and Safe. Fortunately, the middle class skewered in Solondz's films is not the only audience for them. There does seem to be, however, a trace of masochism flowing through the veins of the bourgeois American consumer. Audiences not only tolerate but seem to revel in having the piss taken out of them. Todd Solondz, happily, manages to do it with unequaled flair and pathos. Jeff Sipe |
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