Directed by Todd Solondz. Starring Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Michael Lerner, Charlotte Rampling, Paul Reubens, Ally Sheedy 16 cert, limited release, 98 min
WE ARE all older now. It has been 12 years since Todd Solondz confounded viewers with the hugely influential Happiness. The director would deny setting out to shock (they always do), but there was enough casual wretchedness in that film to secure it lasting notoriety.
Most famously, Solondz asked us to feel empathy – if not exactly sympathy – for a predatory child molester. Filmed in his customary drab style, Happinessallowed its large array of characters little escape from the hopelessness of late Clintonian complacency. Good grief. What is life going to be like for these people in the current more miserable, less secure American decade? Happinesscould, in retrospect, end up less ironically titled than we originally thought.
Solondz may have set out to ponder these questions in this engrossing, insidious, consistently well-acted quasi-sequel. We can’t be entirely sure if that is his aim because, with characteristic cheekiness, he has recast all the roles with different actors, some of whom could not be less like the performers who originated the roles.
The troubled Allen, once as red and podgy as Philip Seymour Hoffman, is now played by wiry African-American Michael K Williams (Omar from The Wire). The equally sleazy Andy has also slimmed down: from Jon Lovitz to Paul Reubens. Dylan Baker, so brilliant as Bill, the psychiatrist who lusts after his son's friend, has been released from prison in the charismatic, sombre form of Ciarán Hinds. And on it goes.
Though the characters seem to have retained their various story arcs, enough has changed to suggest we have not just moved forward in time, but also shifted universes. Set among the whitewashed terraces of Florida (but filmed in Puerto Rico), Life During Wartime, like its predecessor, includes too many interlocking characters to allow reasonable synopsis.
A few tales do, however, stand out from the pack. The organised, bourgeois Trish (Allison Janney), Bill's traumatised wife, has started a relationship with a soft-hearted chap – a character from Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse– played by reliable old Michael Lerner.
Her younger son, belatedly hearing the truth about dad, fears he too may grow up to be an abuser, and her older boy is heading off to college. After emerging from prison, Bill, who sees visions, is overcome with loneliness and muddled regret. He has a brief, desperate fling with a formidable middle-aged woman (a terrifying Charlotte Rampling) and eventually makes fumbling contact with his oldest child.
Elsewhere, Andy appears as a morose ghost and Allen tries to reshape his own mucked-up existence.
In truth, Solondz, like so many of his indie contemporaries, sets his films in a world at an acute angle to our own: Solondzland. You will search in vain for any lucid commentary on the emotional damage caused by looming terrorism or financial meltdown. The changes in tone and ambience have more to do, one guesses, with alterations in Solondz’s own mind.
Speaking at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Hinds argued that Life During Wartime(take the title literally at your peril) is a more mature class of picture than its predecessor.
This may be true. There are fewer examples of Solondz’s tendency to rub his viewers face in weeping sores. Though there are still shocking things here, few such incidents look as if they were inserted merely to generate outrage.
Something is gained. It feels less agitated and (marginally) less nihilistic than the earlier film. But more is perhaps lost: the picture is sometimes too studied and measured for its own good. One occasionally yearns for a trademark Solondz outrage.
We are all older now. That is not entirely to be welcomed.
