Happiness
USA 1998
Reviewed by Xan Brooks
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
The New Jersey suburbs. Thirty-year-old Joy breaks up with her boyfriend Andy at a local restaurant. Overweight loner Allen tells his psychiatrist Bill of his lust for Helen, a successful poet who lives in Allen's apartment block. Unable to approach Helen directly, he plagues her with obscene phone calls. Helen has two sisters: the now-single Joy, and Trish, who is happily married to Bill the psychiatrist. The sisters' parents, Mona and Lenny, have retired to Florida and are separating.
Andy commits suicide and Joy quits her job. She takes a post filling in for striking teachers at a language school. This leads to a one-night stand with Vlad, a Russian cab driver who steals her stereo. Bill becomes obsessed with Johnny Grasso, an 11-year-old friend of his eldest son Billy. When Johnny stays the night, Bill drugs the child then molests him. Later Bill visits another schoolmate of Billy's (whom he knows is at home alone) and molests him too. Helen decides she needs to live more dangerously and invites her mystery caller to visit her home. Allen, in turn, is bothered by his neighbour Kristina who tells him she has killed the apartment block's porter and hidden his body parts in her freezer. Allen eventually calls at Helen's apartment but, disappointed, she sends him away. Bill is caught by the police and confesses his crimes to Billy. Kristina is also arrested. Joy, Trish and Helen visit their reunited parents in Florida. Billy masturbates and runs in to tell his family that he's had an orgasm for the first time.
Review
The first scene in Happiness details a forlorn break-up in a New Jersey restaurant; the second a turgid therapy session where the analyst's mind wanders off to checklist his plans for the afternoon. Suburban life, it is implied, is drab, uniform and quietly despairing. But its semi-formal etiquette and chintz masks real runaway psychosis. We subsequently learn that, having finished his dinner, the dumped boyfriend goes home and kills himself. The man on the psychiatrist's couch makes dirty phone calls. The shrink himself is a child molester. Writer-director Todd Solondz (as with his earlier indie hit Welcome to the Dollhouse) presents suburbia as a type of peripheral hell, a moral darkness on the edge of town where, in the words of Wallace Stevens, "the pure products of America go crazy."
All of which is nothing new. Contemporary film-makers - from Hal Hartley in the US to Alain Berliner (Ma vie en rose) in France and Mike Leigh in the UK - have found suburbia such a fertile creative territory that there's a danger it's become a kind of comic shorthand, a knee-jerk symbol for a certain strain of middle-class pretension and hypocrisy. Happiness certainly doesn't shirk from hitting these buttons, but it hits them with such bravery and abandon as to conjure up a landscape at once blandly familiar and almost surreal. A perpetual, at times unbearable tension - between normalcy and deviance, between comedy and tragedy - is the fuel driving Happiness. Sex (the getting of it, the mastering of it, the getting rid of it) is the currency for all its inhabitants. Its genial caricatures turn abruptly black as pitch.
At the heart of Solondz's intersecting train-wreck of lifelines sits psychiatrist Bill (an astonishing, no-safety-net performance from Dylan Baker), an outwardly upstanding suburban dad who masturbates to pre-teen magazines and romps off in dogged pursuit of his son's classmates. The portrayal of Bill is central to the success or otherwise of Happiness. On the one hand, Solondz has undeniable fun with the character. Bill's interactions with little Billy view like a paedophilic pastiche of the father-son chats in Leave It to Beaver; his attempts to dope the "girlish" Johnny Grasso are played as farce. Moreover, Solondz forces us to identify with this man. The dramatic medium favours his character: for all his faults, Bill is at least an active protagonist, a take-charge contrast to the insipid Joy who is dumped on by others, or the impotent Allen who can only release his desires by phone. Most crucially and problematically of all, the grim consequences of Bill's crimes are either lightly glossed over or omitted entirely.
By rights, such hurdles should be insurmountable. But Happiness conspires to get over them, and ultimately there is more to Solondz's film than shock tactics. It's undeniable that Happiness relies extensively on queasy comedy and the zap of the audience gross-out. Yet these extreme flights of fancy finally take on a quality that hoists it far above the level of the supermarket tabloid. Happiness stretches its taboo subject matter to the limits, using a freak-show explicitness to attain a rarefied altitude that other, supposedly 'brave' pictures (Adrian Lyne's Lolita, Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful) perhaps dream of but are finally too dramatically conservative, too compromised, too burdened by perceived audience reactions to reach. By the time Bill has his last painful conversation with Billy, Happiness has come to rest in a dreamscape where alienation dovetails into shocking recognition, where disgust and delighted laughter exist side by side. We wouldn't want to live in the place where Solondz takes us, but somehow, we suspect, we do.
Credits
- Producers
- Ted Hope
- Christine Vachon
- Screenplay
- Todd Solondz
- Director of Photography
- Maryse Alberti
- Editor
- Alan Oxman
- Production Designer
- Thérèse Deprez
- Music/Score Producer
- Robbie Kondor
- ©October Films, Inc. and Livingston Pictures, Inc.
- Production Companies
- October Films presents
- a Good Machine/Killer Films production
- Executive Producers
- David Linde
- James Schamus
- Line Producer
- Pamela Koffler
- Good Machine Production Executive
- Ross Katz
- Production Office Co-ordinators
- Kimberly N. Fajen
- Florida:
- Emily Samantha Sherman
- Unit Production Managers
- Eva Kolodner
- Florida Unit:
- Elayne Keratsis
- Location Managers
- T. Whelan
- Florida Unit:
- Fabio H. Arber
- Locations Co-ordinator
- Chloe Conroy
- Post-production Supervisor
- Ross Katz
- 2nd Unit Director
- Alan Oxman
- Assistant Directors
- Jude Gorjanc
- Cindy Craig
- Florida:
- John G. Karliss
- Casting
- Ann Goulder
- Additional Photography
- Stephen Kazmierski
- 2nd Unit Photography
- Storn Peterson
- Special Effects
- Drew Jiritano
- Cartoonists
- Ethan Adelman
- Anna Beckman
- Dean Haspiel
- Benjamin Harris
- Matthew Herrick
- Gary Leib
- Phillip Ristaino
- Jonathan Waks
- Jim Ryan
- Post-production Picture Services
- Good Edit
- Tim Streeto
- Costume Designer
- Kathryn Nixon
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Pamela Kezal
- Key Make-up Artist
- Nicki Ledermann
- Additional Hair/Make-up
- Kerrie R. Plant
- Hair Design
- Gianna Sparacino
- Musicians
- Keyboards/Pennywhistle:
- Robbie Kondor
- Guitar:
- Dave Spinozza
- Ira Siegal
- Trombone:
- Sam Burtis
- Sax/Flute:
- Danny Wilensky
- Percussion:
- Roger Squitero
- Violin:
- Sandra Park
- Mary Rowell
- Sharon Yamada
- Cello:
- Richard Locker
- English Horn/Oboe:
- Bob Magnuson
- David Diggs
- Flute:
- Pamela Sklar
- Accordion:
- Dominic Cortese
- 'Happiness' Band
- Guitar/Tiple:
- Larry Saltzman
- Drums:
- Michael Fumento
- Bass:
- Michael Nordberg
- Music Supervisor
- Susan Jacobs
- Music Production Co-ordinator
- Bob Montero
- Music Mixing Engineer
- Matthew 'Boomer' La Monica
- Music Recording Engineer
- Victoria Gross
- Soundtrack
- "Concerto for Guitar in D Major" by Antonio Vivaldi, performed by Kazuhito Yamashita & the Chamber Orchestra Leos Janacek; "Happiness" by Eytan Mirsky, performed by (1) Jane Adams, (2) Michael Stipe with Rain Phoenix; "Requiem" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by St. Clement Concert Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Randall Swanson; "Piano Concerto" by Samuel Barber, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Schenck; "Mandy" by Richard Kerr, Scott English, performed by Barry Manilow; "You Light Up My Life" by Joe Brooks, performed by (1) Anatoly Aleshin, (2) Mantovani; "All Out of Love" by Graham Russell, Clive Davis, performed by Air Supply; "Eternal Lighthouse" by/performed by Vladimir Mozenkov, lyrics by Yevgeny Davidov
- Sound Design
- Damian Volpe
- Jonah Lawrence
- Production Sound Mixer
- Neil Danziger
- Additional Production Mixer
- Dave Powers
- Re-recording Mixer
- Michael Barry
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Tom Efinger
- Foley
- Artist:
- Nicholas Montgomery
- Russian Consultant
- Zhenia Kozlov
- Weather Report
- Kent Ehrhardt
- Helen's Poetry
- Lee Chabowski
- Macrame
- Denise J. Grillo - Off Stage Design
- Dog Handler
- Nakako Yamamoto
- Cast
- Jane Adams
- Joy Jordan
- Elizabeth Ashley
- Diane Freed
- Dylan Baker
- Dr Bill Maplewood
- Lara Flynn Boyle
- Helen Jordan
- Ben Gazzara
- Lenny Jordan
- Jared Harris
- Vlad
- Philip Seymour Hoffman
- Allen
- Louise Lasser
- Mona Jordan
- Jon Lovitz
- Andy Kornbluth
- Camryn Manheim
- Kristina
- Marla Maples
- Ann Chambeau
- Rufus Read
- Billy Maplewood
- Cynthia Stevenson
- Trish Maplewood
- Justin Elvin
- Timmy Maplewood
- Lila Glantzman-Leib
- Chloe Maplewood
- Henry
- Kooki, the Maplewood's dog
- Gerry Becker
- Bill's psychiatrist
- Arthur Nascarella
- Detective Berman
- Molly Shannon
- Nancy
- Ann Harada
- Kay
- Doug McGrath
- Tom
- Dr Eric Marcus
- courteous waiter
- Eytan Mirsky
- angry picketer
- Lisa Louise Langford
- radical picketer
- Anne Bobby
- Rhonda
- Socorro Santiago
- crying teacher
- Allison Furman
- consoling teacher
- Wai Ching Ho
- Bina Sharif
- Tsepo Mokone
- students
- Dan Moran
- Joe Grasso
- Evan Silverberg
- Johnny Grasso
- Hope Pomerance
- hysterical woman
- Matt Malloy
- doctor
- Dan Tedlie
- Don
- Marina Gaizidorskaia
- Zhenia
- Johann Carlo
- Betty Grasso
- Joe Lisi
- police detective
- José Rabelo
- Pedro
- Diane Tyler
- Janet
- Olga Stepanova
- Zhenia's mother
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Entertainment Film Distributors Ltd
- 12,524 feet
- 139 minutes 9 seconds
- Dolby
- Colour by
- DuArt Film and Video