Thursday, July 15, 2010
Life During War Time
Any time that I watch Todd Solondz's Happiness, after sewing up my split sides, I have a knot of anger and contempt for humanity in the back of my mind which I can never easily shake. I like that knot, and I love the movie. The sequel Life During Wartime has left me even angrier than Happiness, but I can't say it's a good anger. It's anger from annoyance.
I have a problem with sequels. The only sequels that I can think of that I really enjoyed and thought were just as good or better than their predecessors are Toy Story 2 & 3, Batman Returns, Terminator 2, and Evil Dead 2. Most sequels tend to take what was good about the first film and run them into the ground. Then there are the ones which take what was terrible about their precursors and make them even worse, like The Dark Knight (there goes my credibility with the people who masturbate to comic books). Life During Wartime falls into the category of turning gold into manure. Maybe manure is too strong of a word, it turned gold into white bread. Nothing happens in it. It is totally inconsequential.
Life During Wartime was filmed and most likely takes place eleven years after Happiness. It follows the three sisters from its precursor as well as the men in their lives. But for some reason, Todd Solondz recast everybody with different actors. I have no idea why. Part of what made Happiness so memorable besides the shocking content and ink black humour was its performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Allen, a pervert who gets off by making obscene phone calls, Dylan Baker as Bill, a pedophile father, Lara Flynn Boyle as Helen, an emotionally stunted author who longs for real suffering (reminds me of somebody), Cynthia Stevenson as Bill's naive housewife Trish, and Jane Adams as Joy, an aimless and hopeless idealist in her early 30s.
Following their lives a decade later, everybody is burnt out. Set mostly in sunny Florida, everything is bleak for the characters. They are all dealing with or asking for forgiveness for the terrible things the men did in the first film. Bill (Ciaran Hinds) has been released from prison, but has nothing to live for. Allen (Michael K. Williams) is married to Joy (Shirley Henderson) and is trying to curb his vice. Trish who was once worry-free and upbeat has become wary and burnt-out, on a countless amount of meds, and is trying to date again. Joy, while dealing with the discovery that Allen hasn't changed, is haunted by Pee Wee Herman who plays her boyfriend who had committed suicide in Happiness. And Helen (Ally Sheedy doing a grating impression of Lara Flynn Boyle's portrayal) does fuck all.
The movie worked in that it was definitely bleak and depressing. Visually it all has a murky tone despite being set in sunny Florida and the conversations are filled with awkwardness and gloomy dialogue. However, the movie is ultimately a failure. I don't know what Solondz's intention was for having an entirely new cast, but it's completely jarring. I'm not against this direction being taken in a movie, it worked in his previous film Palindromes where the main character, a 13 year old girl constantly changed size, age, and race in different scenes. However, that was a standalone movie, and the constant changes helped in telling the story and work in that contained universe. It makes the movie to me seem more like a fantasy sequence than a sequel.
Missing from this movie are the disturbing shocks, the painful humour, and sheer cynicism splattered against a Norman Rockwell backdrop. This has all been supplanted with remorse. And indeed, the way characters in that hack Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins constantly "philosophized" about "fear", characters in Life During Wartime features characters constantly musing over "forgiving and forgetting". Also missing is a story. Nothing seems to happen for an hour and a half. They also injected a lot of Judaism into the film which I don't remember Happiness having at all. I don't remember the sisters being Jewish, but in this one they dwell on it a lot. Trish wears a Hebrew Chai symbol on her necklace, makes a big deal that her boyfriend is Jewish, constantly refers to Israel and her son is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah. I'm not against Judaism anymore than I am against any other Abrahamic religion. To be fair, it's a lot more innocuous than Christianity, and more pleasant than Islam than Islam. My problem is that I don't recall any sign of Judaism in happiness, and this one hits you over the head with it. It's what made A Serious Man so abstruse for me.
A lot of people who see Todd Solondz movies say that they would never want to watch them again because they are so depressing. I can more than handle depressing material, but I don't think I will ever watch Life During Wartime ever again because it was so disappointing.
5/10
