Happiness

Welcome to the Dollhouse, Todd Solondz's bleak comedy about adolescence, opened a lot of doors for the young director. Apparently his next film closed them all. Happiness, winner of the International Critics' Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, comes laden with and almost burdened by an excess baggage of controversy.

Based around the lives of three middle-class New Jersey sisters, Happiness is ostensibly a situation comedy of five interrelated stories of sexual transgression, alienation and romantic hell. But while the sitcom scenario is familiar, Solondz veers away from the urbane by utilising his lacerating and merciless humour and a distinctive ability to shock employing only the power of suggestion.

When Universal, the corporate parent of October Films which was due to distribute Happiness, objected to one of the film's storylines, October was forced to drop the film from its slate (Happiness was later picked up by Good Machine, the film's production company, for a US release.) The offending storyline is the tale of a seemingly straight-laced psychiatrist who just happens to be on the prowl for his son's friends. While there is nothing titillating within the film, what Universal objected to was the compassion with which a paedophile is presented as just an average person. Played with sobre deftness by Dylan Baker, here is a man who could well be your analyst.

Happiness is not freak show. What hits home is the normality of the characters' emotional disconnection and wayward desires. As such, the film is never gratuitously shocking, but it is disturbing and sometimes very funny, although the uneven use of easy gags often spoils the virtuoso scenes they punctuate. But the underlying integrity within Happiness holds the stories together, and makes it something more than merely an exercise in controversy.

Reviewed by Iain Tibbles

Happiness (1998) - IMDB
Welcome to the Dollhouse - kamera.co.uk review

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