Jane Adams

In Happiness (1998), Jane Adams lets us hear how badly Joy Jordan wants affection beneath the things she says to make herself feel better. Todd Solondz writes self-involved speech sharply, and Adams keeps Joy from becoming merely another person caught saying something embarrassing. There is disappointment to reckon with after the laugh. That is the quality we value most in her work: she can play someone who invites ridicule without agreeing that ridicule is all the person deserves.

We felt protective of Joy because Adams gave her unhappiness a seriousness the comedy could easily have denied her. Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing Allen, offers similar resistance to the easy joke, treating sexual frustration as something more than an amusing defect. Their work matters in an ensemble where loneliness supplies so much of the humour. It does not cure the film's slow pace or its repeated humiliations, which can become wearing. Adams keeps Joy worth caring about when we might otherwise tire of watching her suffer.

It was her film breakthrough, followed by work across independent features, mainstream films and television. She played Carrie in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and her television work includes Tanya Skagle in Hung (2009–2011). A change of job came with All the Light in the Sky (2012): Adams starred as Marie and co-wrote the film with its director, Joe Swanberg. That took her beyond interpreting somebody else's writing and into helping decide what would be there to perform.

Adams is frequently cast as sensitive or struggling women, and her work as a co-writer is worth following. We do not need every character she plays to be more forceful; Joy's neediness is precisely what she makes worth taking seriously. We would like the writing to give that sensitivity more to do than endure another humiliation. Start with Happiness if uncomfortable comedy is your sort of evening, and allow for a film that tries the patience as well as the nerves.