Todd Solondz’s controversial black comedy gets a new lease of life
The general consensus seems to be that you could never make a film like Happiness now but, in truth, you couldn’t really make it back then
Before 1998, Todd Solondz had made just two films. His debut, 1989’s Fear, Anxiety and Depression had a title that neatly summed up the director’s weltanschauung but was a critical and commercial failure with its pale imitation of Woody Allen.
Solondz was infuriated by a lack of creative control and did not make another film until Welcome to the Dollhouse in 1995. In a shock to everyone, not least the filmmaker, that sophomoric effort was a hit. A low budget, independent black comedy about the hell of high school populated almost exclusively with characters it’s impossible to like, Solondz’s second movie nevertheless won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and made $5 million at the box office.
Perhaps sensing his career would not prove to be an unmitigated success, the writer-director decided to strike while the iron was hot and make a film so provocative the funding could only possibly come at the peak of his popularity. Sundance, the scene of Solondz’s greatest triumph, refused to screen Happiness. The film’s original distributor got cold feet and would not release the film after the CEO deemed the material “morally objectionable” and personally intervened. It’s safe to say one wouldn’t want all films to be made by Solondz but it’s good to have a few that are.
Happiness opens with a close-up of Jane Adams’ face as she asks her date if he is OK. We then cut to a close-up on the sweaty visage of Jon Lovitz, a comedy legend very clearly holding back tears. As the exchange goes on, it becomes clear Solondz has opened the encounter after most writers would have ended the scene. The relationship has just ended and there is an almost rubbernecking quality to the experience as a viewer, a sense that we should not be watching this.
More troubling still, the casting of Lovitz is no mistake and this is actually funny. When he asks her if there’s someone else, the lacerating reply is simply: “No. It’s just you.” Alan Bennett’s assessment of Peter Cook could just as easily apply to Solondz: “In him morality is discovered far from its official haunts.”
The next scene involves Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Allen telling his psychiatrist he fears he might be boring while the latter zones out and, in voiceover, recounts his shopping list. It transpires Allen spends his spare time making obscene phone calls to women while the psychiatrist, seemingly living an idyllic suburban life, is a paedophile who daydreams about being an active shooter in a quiet park. And so it goes on.
Throughout the course of almost two and a half hours, we encounter a Dickensian array of grotesques seeking happiness in ways that are beyond merely transgressive. The film provokes laughter and discomfort in equal measure and forces us to confront the kind of pariahs we’d sooner not think about. Unlike a Jimmy Carr joke seemingly intended simply to shock, one gets the horrible feeling that Solondz really means it. As the Hasidic aphorism would have it, “The lowest of the low you can think of is dearer to me than your only son is to you.” Solondz, inevitably, is a Jew.
There are shades of Robert Altman in these interconnected tales of broken individuals and the cast is a murderer’s row of character actors of the day. As well as Hoffman, Lovitz and Adams, there are inspired turns from Jared Harris, Ben Gazzara, Louise Lasser, Molly Shannon and a whole host of others. The film is anchored, though, by the performance of Dylan Baker as the psychiatrist with the darkest urges of them all. The role was turned down by just about every major actor in Hollywood before Baker came in to read but, with hindsight, it could never have been anybody else. The picture was referred to only as “Untitled Todd Solondz film” during filming and it wasn’t until Baker saw a poster at the Toronto film festival that he learned the actual title. The actor was staggered but what else could one call perhaps the blackest comedy in Hollywood history?
Happiness is one of the great films of the 1990s and it is hard to think of anything quite like it before or since in American cinema. It is Solondz’s most ambitious work and it is telling that his movies since have largely been neglected by critics and audiences alike. Indeed, he struggles so much to raise the funds that his last film was Wiener-Dog, released way back in 2016.
The director is a television comedy obsessive and uses the tropes of sitcoms to lure the audience into a false sense of security using the mise en scene and interstitial music to devastating effect. Indeed, few films have funnier sound cues. Solondz has been very open about the fact that he feels he has to love his characters during the writing process and expects his actors to withhold judgement on their actions. He instinctively understands something that has occasionally been obscured since the film’s release at the end of the last century – depicting a thing is not the same as endorsing it. The director’s magnum opus is undoubtedly complicated, provocative and divisive but then so are human beings. Not everyone will be able to stomach it but the rest of us should just be grateful Happiness exists.
Happiness is available now on Criterion Collection 4K UHD
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