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Title: Happiness; Storytelling |
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Release Date: 1998, 2002 |
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Nationality and Language: |
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Running time: about 95 minutes, 85 Minutes |
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Distributor and Production Company: Good Machine; New Line Cinema/Good Machine/Killer films |
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Director; Writer: Todd Solondz |
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Producer: |
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Cast: (Storytelling): John Goodman, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, Julie Hagerty |
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Technical: |
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Relevance to doaskdotell site: censorship |
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Movie Review: Happiness (1998) A film by Todd Solondz; Good Machine Releasing; Officially unrated, but in practice NC-17 ("X") 7.5/10 Even the major "indies" didn't want to touch this film because of its very candid treatment of aggressive pedophilia. In fact, this film tests whether it is acceptable to present such a disturbing subject matter in major entertainment media as serious work. Let's back up a bit. This film is a kind of black comedy (in the spirit of "The Cook, The Thief…") about the lives of a number of sexually maladjusted suburbanites, all tied in some way to a particular male psychiatrist. The film's title is indeed an exercise or irony. The personal problems range from a somewhat fat boy's concern for his masculinity, to a middle-aged husband's loss of interest in his aging wife, to a chubby man who compulsively places obscene phone calls to women, to the psychiatrist himself who has the problem of uncontrollably wanting pre-pubescent boys. I really didn't find the film "funny" and found the jerky. Robert-Atlman-style of move from one chraracter to the next rather distracting and ineffective. I was never sure of Solondz's real attitude towards his dysfunctional characters. It seems to me that most of them have serious character flaws, and no other insights are really necessary. The scenes where the psychiatrist counsels his own son about the son's coming to maturity, and then later confesses his rather brutal attack upon two young boys, come across as self-indulgent and not really coming to grips with moral failure. (The attack is not shown on camera; to do so, even with an adult simulating a child, could violate child pornography laws.) Frankly, the psychiatrist has forfeited his place in society. Although we do see the emotional reaction of his neighbors, I wanted to see a lot more of the consequences of his behavior. That is, the arrest and handcuffing, the sentencing in court, and a scene behind bars. These were missing. This scenario could have provided an opportunity to develop the subject of community sex offender notification laws. If you're going to do a potentially offensive subject, you need to stay on the mark. So I give the film about a C+. Storytelling (2002)
presents an interesting bifurcation, following the two-movement musical
format of the old standard, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #32 (or Prokofiev;s Second
Symphony). The first story is called
“Fiction,” and really deals with storytelling ability as creative writers
know it. A couple of motley characters
present their efforts in a writing seminar at college, and rather than accolades
get brutal criticism from the professor. A student, appealing actually, with
cerebral palsy (well-acted) reads a story and another student jumps on it as
“trite,” and then the female student gets goaded into writing, in “racist
manner” about a sexual relationship with the black instructor. There is some
interesting technical discussion of writing: the issue of “too man
adjectives” when it’s really “too many adverbs” that get deadly and make
writing wooden. The longer
“Non-Fiction” provides a Swift-life satire of the deteriorating upper middle
class (Jewish) family in suburban Palindromes (2005, Wellspring, dir. Todd Solontz,
prob. NC-17) is an artsy exercise about simple people. The title refers to a
word or sequence that plays back the same as when played forward (as with the
last movement of the Hindemith Horn Concerto, recorded around 1958 by Dennis
Brain on Angel). Two of the major characters, Aviva and Otto (the name that
the fat boy who eventually makes her a mother assumes) have such names. Now
Aviva will be played by eight actresses, two of them black—and yet there is
this continuity anyway. In the very first scene, the black girl tells a white
mother that she wants many babies so she will always have someone to love.
(That line somehow reminds me of all of Maggie Gallagher’s
pro-traditional-marriage essays in conservative magazines.) It is apparent
that she is young – thirteen – and later on the film will have some frank
mention of pedophilia and illegality. A “fat boy,” himself probably underage
and a bit of a self-indulgent nerd, manipulates her (they remain clothed and
the activity is suggested) to give her a baby. There comes a fight over the
abortion that her parents insist on (they show the vitriolic protestors at
the abortion clinic and one line of the script refers to the unborn baby as a
“tumor”), then a road trip through New Jersey that leads her to the Sunshine
House, where a folksy couple is taking care of a lot of disabled kids. One of
them is an albino girl with a well known genetic near blindness; another has Life During Wartime (2010, IFC, dir. Todd Solondz) is a kind of “Happiness II”, The sex offender comes back, as a kind of Bubber Reeves. Blogger. These films provide me a good context to mention
another, bigger film, the Warner Brothers/Polygram 1996 effort Sleepers,
starring Robert Di Niro, Brad Pitt, Dustin Hoffman,
and Kevin Bacon, written and directed by Barry Levinson, based on the novel
by Lorenzo Carcaterra. The film is in three
distinct parts: (1) the misadventures (involving robbing a hotdog vendor and
pushing the cart down the subways steps, critically injuring someone) of four
teenage boys in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood of New York City’s west side
during the 1960’s, leading (2) to their incarceration in a boys’ home where
they are stared and ogled at, then undergo outright sexual abuse,
particularly at the hands of one guard played by Kevin Bacon, and (3) their
“execution” of the Bacon character in a West Side straight bar and the
ensuing trial. What was interesting to me was that the film does deal
directly with pedophilia (in one scene a boy undresses to his briefs while
the guard stares on) but was nevertheless shown by ABC during prime time on .
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Related reviews: Vera Drake; Swing Vote Lolita and similar films |
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