Todd Solondz makes suburban unhappiness funny enough to catch us off guard, then difficult to bear. Dylan Baker’s restraint gives the film its force, though the slow pace and repeated humiliations make 140 minutes feel overgenerous.
Happiness is a funny, distressing and overlong comedy, worth the discomfort if black comedy is your taste. Todd Solondz writes and directs an ensemble of lonely people who are capable of making others miserable. Their respectable appearances give us little reason to feel safe in their company. Solondz wants us to recognise these people even when we would rather stop looking at them. His cast makes that possible, though he sometimes keeps their unhappiness going long after we have understood it.
Dylan Baker’s Bill Maplewood, a psychiatrist and father sexually attracted to children, is the most demanding case. Baker keeps his manner bland and respectable, allowing no comforting distance between this man and ordinary family life. We were horrified by how familiar he seemed. The performance makes us attend to a person we would prefer to dismiss immediately, without making his desires seem any less appalling. Baker holds that difficult position with enough restraint to prevent the character becoming merely a provocation.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Allen, gives the loneliness a similar seriousness, even when the writing invites a laugh at it. He helps keep the film from treating sexual frustration as an amusing defect found only in other people. Jane Adams’s Joy Jordan also needs to be more than the object of a joke, and Adams gives her that weight. Solondz’s ear for self-involved speech is sharp. The actors let the need for affection remain audible beneath the things their characters say to make themselves feel better.
Maryse Alberti’s cinematography and Thérèse DePrez’s production design make the drab suburban surroundings oppressive without making them exotic. That plainness is useful: nothing in the way Bill fits into this world offers an easy warning about him. It becomes less useful when the visual sameness begins to flatten distinctions between the other characters. Solondz can seem to have judged everybody before they have spoken, and the performances have to work against that impression.
Alan Oxman’s editing gives the quiet jokes time to turn unpleasant, but too many stretches settle into the same slow pace. At 140 minutes, the film asks for more patience than every part of the ensemble deserves. Robbie Kondor’s music offers little relief from the discomfort, which suits the film. The greater problem is that the repetition makes some cruelties predictable. Once we start waiting for another person to be humiliated, the surprise goes and the scene has less to offer.
As black comedy, the film works because the joke rarely settles what we should feel about the person in front of us. Solondz allows us to feel sorry for people whose behaviour remains intolerable, and rarely supplies a tidy lesson to make that sympathy easier. Yet the film sometimes appears to believe that another humiliation must mean another insight. When a character has no prospect of doing anything except being humiliated again, it becomes harder to care.
Do not choose it merely because it is filed under comedy. Its subject includes sexual harm involving children, and its attention to the adults will be more than some viewers want to bear. If you are prepared for that, watch it with someone who will not expect an easy conversation afterwards.
