Life During Wartime (Friday, July 23, 2010) (82)

This film is a follow-up to Todd Solondz's 1998 piece Happiness. I loved Happiness. I think it's fresh, hysterical and biting. This film has none of the power of the first and just feels like more stuff that was not good enough to make it into the earlier work. It is basically totally not funny and most of the jokes just come out as dull lines you'd say to somebody to gross them out.


Trish (Allison Janney), now-ex-wife of pedophile Bill Maplewood (Ciaran Hinds), is raising their three kids in Florida. Trish's loser sister, Joy (Shirley Henderson), is still not having any luck with men. Apparently she married Allan (who was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the last one, but is now Michael K. Williams - Omar from The Wire), though she wishes she married Andy (Jon Lovitz in the last, but Paul Reubens in this). Fancy sister Helen (Ally Sheedy) lives in a world of money, sex and coldness, and doesn't really have her stuff together either. All the characters deal with how to move on from their painful pasts and have happy futures.


In one scene, Trish comes back from a date and talks to her 12-year-old son Timmy about how great she feels and how when the guy touched her arm "it made [her] wet". He then asks, "are you still wet, mommy?" This is totally not funny and overdone. It has has the general cadence of Happiness, with none of the elegance. (I am reminded of the scene when Bill talks to his son Billy about his sick obsessions and his son asks him, "did you ever fuck me in the ass, dad?" and he answers, "No, with you son, I just masturbated.") The dialogue in this film mostly feels like a lines for cheap laughs, but nothing more interesting.


The film is not really a satire - because it doesn't really take aim at anything in particular. So what that everyone has pain and everyone is trying to deal with it? That is not really a jokey thing to laugh at - it's just a state of life. Besides, these people deal with their pain by ignoring it - by forgetting it generally. Undermining the whole point of the film. It's not about people struggling with forgiving or forgetting - it's about people who have forgotten pretending they still have an internal struggle... which they don't have at all.


Every scene seems to take five minutes longer than it should. Sometimes actors talk back and forth with one another and you forget what they're talking about because it's so dull and unimportant. The writing is really bad throughout.


I'm sure it's hard to cast actors in roles that the audience identifies with other actors, but I still feel like the actors here are just not as good - or not as good in their roles - as the actors in Happiness. Dylan Baker is much more sympathetic than Ciaran Hinds as Bill - and that is an interesting element in the first film (that you like Bill even though he's a monster). Jane Adams will always be Joy for me (in basically anything she does), so Shirley Henderson really doesn't have a shot here.


Mostly I feel that this film is just extra stuff that was left out of Happiness, for good reason, and cut together here to try to *say something*. What it says, though, is not really that interesting and doesn't make me really think more about the human condition or anything the way good satire can do well. It's just a bunch of bad jokes with no particular narrative.


Stars: .5 of 4