Life During Wartime

Todd Solondz has created a sequel, of sorts, to his 1998 film Happiness. This film could have been called Forgiveness, because that's the condition he has on his mind, and it is repeated throughout like the pealing of a bell. Would you forgive a terrorist? Would you forgive your husband if he were addicted to crack, and to making obscene phone calls? Would you forgive your father if he were imprisoned for molesting little boys? Would you forgive your mother if instead of telling you the truth about your father, she told you he was dead?

The first word of the film is "Joy," and that is the pivotal character, played by Shirley Henderson (the character are repeated from Happiness, but played by other actors). She says she is happy, to her obsequious husband, Michael Kenneth Williams. They are out to dinner, and a seemingly pleasant dinner turns very ugly. It reminded me of the scene in Happiness in which Joy (then played by Jane Addams) has a dinner go horribly wrong with Jon Lovitz. In Life During Wartime, Lovitz' character is played by Paul Reubens, even though Lovitz committed suicide in Happiness.

In order to clear her head, Henderson travels to visit family in Miami, where Solondz makes the pastels of Florida as bleak as the grays of a Soviet gulag. Her older sister, Allison Janney, who was married to the child molester, is finally dating again, and falls in love with Michael Lerner. Her young son (Dylan Riley Snider, in a terrific juvenile performance) learns that his father is not dead, and that he raped boys. This man, played here by Ciaran Hinds, has just been released from prison and attempts to make contact with his children.

A third sister, Ally Sheedy, is a fragile screenwriter who lives in L.A. in a kind of luxurious prison. Henderson visits her, but this sequence of the film is the weakest. It's as if Solondz wanted three sisters for some Chekhovian balance, but it seems forced. It does allow Henderson to threaten to club Reubens on the head with an Emmy Award, though.

As with Solondz's other films, these characters are tremendously flawed but also incredibly endearing, inspiring loads of empathy. They have cringe-worthy conversations: Janney tells her twelve-year-old son about how Lerner "makes her wet," and a scene in which Hinds is picked up by a ravenous older woman (Charlotte Rampling) is as horrifying as it is riveting. She tells Hinds that her children have grown up to be a "pack of wolves, hungry for blood." The topic of forgiveness comes up, and she says she is not going to be a fool. Hinds wonders if she means that it's foolish to ask for forgiveness, but Rampling corrects him--it's foolish to expect forgiveness to be given.

In many ways I was reminded of the Coen Brothers' films, especially A Serious Man, as this one also climaxes with a bar mitzvah. They both share the blackest of senses of humor--as tragic as Solondz's characters are, they are also funny. Consider when Henderson is visited by a man who has killed himself (not Reubens) and he tells her she should put a bullet in her temple. "The mouth works, too," he adds generously. There's also the character of Lerner's son (Rich Pecci), a systems analyst, who politely tells Janney he doesn't expect anyone to find what he does interesting, not even specialists. He just does a job that allows him to live a low-overhead subsistence.

Though the characters finally seem to come down on the side of forgive and forget (except for the 9/11 terrorists--Snider says you can't forgive them, they're dead) the characters come down on different sides of whether one should go through life pretending. Henderson tells Reubens that wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a world where no one could pretend. But Hinds, when he meets his older, college-age son, responds positively when his son tells him that he has gone along with the lie about him being dead. "Yes, pretend, that's good," he says, walking out the door.

This film will surely be on my best of the year list. It is exquisitely written and acted. And I don't mean to use the occasion to take another shot at Inception, but I had to quote Stuart Klawans from his review in The Nation: "Wouldn't the world be wonderful if Inception were the film left to struggle through a two-week run in the art houses, and Life During Wartime got to be the blockbuster?" I concur.