going off rail
by Douglas
Messerli
Todd Solondz
(screenwriter and director) Happiness / 1998
Todd Solondz’s Happiness, his black-and-bleak
comedy of 1998, comes with a story that is about as outré as one can imagine.
J. Hoberman, writing about it recently in The
New York Times, begins his essay by describing just some of its
perversions.
“Playfully named Happiness, Todd Solondz’s
painful, deadpan, burlesque of bourgeois mores encompasses murder, mutilation,
rape, pedophilia, suicide, obscene phone calls and free-floating masochism, among
syndromes yet to be named.”
Playing
on Chekov, Solondz introduces us to three sisters, Helen Jordon (Lara Flynn Boyle),
Joy (Jane Adams), and Trish Maplewood (Cynthia Stevenson), two of whom, at
first glance may appear to live quite successful and normal lives, while the
third, Joy—whom Hoberman describes as the “most sympathetic”—is seen by family,
friends, and most importantly by herself as an utter failure in life, even
though it is she who has composed the film’s theme song, “Happiness,” a work
she shares with no one except the audience.
The film begins with her on a date with
Andy Kornbluth (Jon Lovitz), a big blubber of a human being who simply isn’t an
appropriate mate for even the insecure Joy. Roger Ebert describes the evening’s
end: “He gives her a present, an engraved reproduction ashtray he got through
mail order, but after she thanks him (‘It almost makes me want to learn to
smoke’) he viciously grabs it back: ‘This is for the girl who loves me for who
I am.’ He proceeds to unload on her, calling her ‘shit’ and other such words.
Andy goes on to kill himself, but even in
death gets revenge by sending a telephone call in which he blames Joy for his
acts.
Joy, who has been working as telephone
receptionist, leaves her job to do good, but, as Ebert describes it, “She gets
hired as a scab worker, teaching at an immigrant-education center. Her students
do not like her, and she begins to feel empty in that job as well. Joy is also
constantly let down in her personal life.”
Sadly, Joy goes on, as she walks down the
street, to be picked up by a taxi-driver member of her class, a Russian named Vlad
(Jared Harris) who is only too happy to drive her home back to New Jersey in
turn for sex, which she totally enjoys, and the robbery of her guitar and sound
system. Later, after being slapped in the face by Vlad’s live-in mate who
refuses to marry him, Joy is forced to buy back her processions for quick cash
($1,000) paid to the desperate refugee from Russia.
The most
unlikeable of the sisters is Helen, who has become famous for her novel A Pornographic Childhood, a work that describes a character who has been raped as a child, even
though nothing of the kind ever occurred to Helen. She is a narcissistic woman
who must prove her superiority even over her married and seemingly happy sister,
Trish.
She
is also loved from afar from an absolutely boring neighbor Allen (Philip
Seymour Hoffman), who through his obscene phone calls, most of them random, becomes
a central figure in Solondz’s fractured fairy-tale. When he actually gets up
the nerve to call Helen, she promptly calls him back for more, actually redialing
him night after night to get her fix. Even Allen turns away from the monstrous
Helen, finally becoming fully drunk before turning to another neighbor, the
overweight, sex-hating Kristina (Camryn Manheim), who later admits that she has
murdered and cut up the body of their doorman Pedro, who raped her. The police
later find a bag of his genitals in her freezer.
In the sequel to this film, Life During Wartime, Joy
has married Allen, who still can’t quite get over his desire to make obscene phone
calls.
Before I proceed on to the last sister, I
might mention that these women’s own mother Mona (Louise Lasser) has just been
told by her husband Lenny (Ben Gazzara) that he wants to leave her just to be
alone. He discovers soon after that he no longer has any feeling for women and life
in general. Terrified by the divorce and
separation,
whatever she might call it, Mona seeks out a new apartment, the agent being
Marla Maples, who in real life had just divorced Donald Trump, proclaiming that
divorce is one of the best things in life.
Trish, the married sister, seems to be
the most normal of the three, herself having the post-war normative three
children, Billy, Timmy, and Chloe. Her husband Bill (Dylan Baker) is a psychoanalyst.
But Bill is also a pedophile, beginning with
kiddie pop magazines and soon actualizing his desires by drugging his entire
family and his eldest boy Jimmy’s overnight friend Johnny Grasso (Evan
Silverberg), whose own father is a coach and is convinced his 11-year-old son
is gay.
When
Bill hears that one of his son’s classmate’s, Ronald Farber, is alone in the
house while his parents are on vacation, he also rapes that boy.
Of
course, these incidents are horrific and despicable. But there is also
something terribly human and painful about these incidents, at least as Solondz
presents them. The majority of the film is presented as one-on-ones. Hoberman
comments: “Often shot in close-up, these suggest acting exercises or skit
comedy gone off the rails.”
One
of the last scenes in this film is an honest and strangely open discussion
between the pedophile Bill, about to be arrested, and his son who is troubled
by his classmates describing his father as a pervert and monster serial-rapist.
“What did you do?”
“I touched them.”
“What do you mean, ‘touched’ them?”
“I fondled them.”
“What for?”
“I couldn’t help myself.”
…
“I unzipped myself.”
“What do you mean, masturbated?”
“No. …I fucked them.”
“What was it like?
“It was, it was great.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Yes”
[now openly crying] “Would you ever
fuck me?”
“No. I’d jerk off instead.”
Surely, numerous moviegoers of the day
and readers of this essay will describe this passage as further evidence of the
film’s moral decadence.
Due
to its adult themes, Happiness received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, which caused the film to be
limited in distribution. Sundance Film Festival refused to screen Solondz’ work,
and the corporate parent of its distributor October Films, Seagram objected to
the pedophilia plotline and refused further distribution. Lynn Hirschberg of The New York Times Magazine reported that Ronald Meyer, then the CEO of Universal Pictures,
personally blocked October Films from releasing the film.
Yet, when presented at Cannes Film
Festival the movie received what one might describe as the second highest
award, the FIPRESCI Prize for "its bold tracking of controversial
contemporary themes, richly-layered subtext, and remarkable fluidity of visual
style," and the cast received the National Board of Review award for best
ensemble performance. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars,
and rated it number five in his top 10 films of 1998. (source: Wikipedia).
Ebert’s summary aligns with a great many
of the film’s positive reviews, including Hoberman’s recent reassessment of the
film.
“Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” is a film that
perplexes its viewers, even those who admire it, because it challenges the ways
we attempt to respond to it. Is it a portrait of desperate human sadness? Then
why are we laughing? Is it an ironic comedy? Then why its tenderness with these
lonely people? Is it about depravity? Yes, but why does it make us suspect,
uneasily, that the depraved are only seeking what we all seek, but with a lack
of ordinary moral vision? In a film that looks into the abyss of human despair,
there is the horrifying suggestion that these characters may not be grotesque
exceptions, but may in fact be part of the mainstream of humanity. Whenever a
serial killer or a sex predator is arrested, we turn to the paper to find his
neighbors saying that the monster “seemed just like anyone else.” Happiness is a movie
about closed doors–apartment doors, bedroom doors and the doors of the
unconscious. It moves back and forth between several stories, which often link
up. It shows us people who want to be loved and who never will be–because of
their emotional incompetence and arrested development. There are lots of people
who do find love and fulfillment, but they are not in this movie.”
You can add my name to admirers of this
sometimes nearly unwatchable film. Despite the horror of observing my fellow
human beings suffering some of the worst of human afflictions, I watched Happiness twice just to share
in the director’s open-heartedness toward his misfit characters and obviously,
in the process, his openness to the sins and suffering of the human race.
Los
Angeles, June 9, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(June 2025).
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