Happiness
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Dylan Baker, Jane Adams (II), Jon Lovitz, Lara Flynn Boyle, Philip Seymour HoffmanBrand: Lions Gate
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 134 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-06-03
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Lions Gate
Movie Reviews of Happiness
Movie Review: The Most Awfully Funny Film I Have Ever Seen
Summary: 5 Stars
Some people see the world as an awful place. Some people see the world as a funny place. Todd Solondz, director of Happiness, sees the validity in both points of view. For him, the world is an awfully funny place. And in this bleak comic masterpiece, Solondz shows us how to find hope in the most despairing of circumstances, dignity in the face of shame, and compassion in the face of one's most monstrous acts. In other words, Solondz shows us what humanity really is, and isn't that - at its basest level - what filmmaking is supposed to be?
"Happiness" is also the best movie that Robert Altman never made, in that it is a mosaic of the masses, interspersing a loose narrative thread through the disparate lives of many without seeming disjointed. It essentially follows the lives and disfunctional loves of five characters through a myriad of morbid situations, some stemming from deterministic outside pressures, most a result of the characters' inner turbulence churning to the surface through misguided thought and deed.
At the supposed center of the conflicts is a pedophilic psychiatrist (Dylan Baker) who preys on the peers of his adolescent son. A monstrous act, indeed, but the camera's unflinching objectivity serves to neither condone or condemn the man, so we are left to see the struggle amidst the strife, the human within the monster.
Other characters include an unlucky-in-everything hapless spinstress named Joy (ha ha) who allows the world to treat her like a welcome mat placed in front of a door to better things. Her sanctimonious sister, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), while seeming to have it all, secretly wallows in the emptiness of her hollow life. Lara Flynn Boyle plays still another sadistic sibling, a famous writer who wishes that she were raped, so as to provide a more authentic muse.
And though simple verbal descriptions of these characters make them sound ghastly, in thought and indeed, the magic of the film is the even-handed well-weighted treatment that they receive through Solondz' direction and the actors' depictions, letting the audience decide whether empathy is in order. Too many people in our society have a need to characterize aberrant and abhorrent behavior as coming from an "other" - someone less than human and thus tangibly different from them. The truth, of course, is that we are all people who - good or bad - are capable of some pretty disturbing things. In Solondz' cinematic society, the sinners are just like you and me, whether that scares us or not.
It should also be noted that amidst all this weighty discussion, philosophy and sociological insight are some of the funniest and most demented sight gags, stuff that gives the Farrelly brothers a literal run for their runny money in the Gross Out Olympics (acronym: G.O.O) - body fluid jokes that put the "stick" back into "slapstick". Gags that make you wanna.
And when the characters themselves instill the audience with laughter, Solondz' artistry and control leave us wondering whether we are laughting at them, with them, or in spite of them, when the truth is somewhere in between. All of which makes this the most awfully funny movie I have ever seen.
Summary of Happiness
HAPPINESS - SIGNATURE SERIES - DVD MovieAt times brilliant and insightful, at times repellent and false, Happiness is director Todd Solondz's multistory tale of sex, perversion, and loneliness. Plumbing depths of Crumb-like angst and rejection, Solondz won the Cannes International Critics Prize in 1998 and the film was a staple of nearly every critic's Top Ten list. Admirable, shocking, and hilarious for its sarcastic yet strangely empathetic look at consenting adults' confusion between lust and love, the film stares unflinchingly until the audience blinks. But it doesn't stop there. A word of strong caution to parents: One of the main characters, a suburban super dad (played by Dylan Baker), is really a predatory pedophile and there is more than an attempt to paint him as a sympathetic character. Children are used in this film as running gags or, worse, the means to an end. Whether that end is a humorous scene for Solondz or sexual gratification for the rapist becomes largely irrelevant. Happiness is an intelligent, sad film, revelatory and exact at moments. It's also abuse in the guise of art. That's nothing to celebrate. --Keith Simanton
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