Todd Solondz�s Happiness is demonstrative of the dominant trend in American movies through the turn of the century. American cinema is turning scrutiny upon itself, reassessing the values by which it has functioned for so long. In this respect, you can place Happiness alongside other recent movies, Magnolia and American Beauty among these, as being in opposition to traditional Hollywood morality.
Happiness is the meandering story of several loosely connected characters, too many to detail here, each of them confronting and resolving their own versions of happiness. Joy is a single woman in a dead end telephone sales job. She harbours dreams of re-igniting her failed attempts at a music career, and longs for an exotic, enigmatic lover to come along and sweep her off her feet. In a development typical of Solondz�s bleak and comic outlook, Joy�s lover turns up in the form of a dubious Russian cab driver, who beds the na�ve Joy before returning to his wife along with most of Joy�s more valuable possessions.
Joy�s sister Helen is a successful writer, specialising in post-feminist erotica. She longs to be able to submerse herself fully into her work, something she believes can only be achieved through her own degradation at the hands of a perverted male admirer. Up steps Allen, a neighbour of Helen and maker of malicious sex calls. When his heavy-breathed call to Helen is answered with an invitation to fulfil some of it�s contents, the two meet in a wonderfully awkward scene. Helen quickly realises that her urge to become the subject of her writing, pales compared to the revulsion she feels at Allen�s fat sweating body. Equally, Allen realises that the confidence he musters in a frenzied pest phone call is diminished in the face of genuine sexual experience.
Among the other characters is Bill, a paedophile who molests the classmates of his son when their parents are out of town. Bill�s secret is gradually uncovered by his son, culminating in an extraordinary conversation between the two. It highlights the fine balance that Solondz strikes throughout the movie. Every character is tenderly drawn, no matter what their individual faults. The interaction of the characters never strays into melodrama, everything being undercut by Solondz�s desire to privilege reality, and all the humour and profundity which that brings.
Like the comparable Magnolia, it is the redemption of the characters that is at stake. They each learn to separate their fantasised ideas of happiness from real, achievable contentment. Happiness doesn�t lie to us. It doesn�t say that we can all achieve our dreams, those perfect scenarios that we play in our heads with the imperfections ironed out. It eloquently demonstrates that these fetishised versions of happiness are creations of our minds and can�t be realised. It persuades instead that we should immerse ourselves in those things that can genuinely bring us contentment. Subject matter probably scared off Oscar attention, nevertheless Happiness is an important film. |
