Happiness (1998)

Instant Favorite.

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely the worst movie.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

I liked Happiness in some weird way. This movie is really interesting to watch despite all those disturbing scenes it has. You just cant stop watching until it's done, you wanna see what's gonna happen next. For that alone I give it 9, but because of some nasty things in the movie, gotta lower the grade by 1.8+

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Happiness starts very well, in that it sets up its characters solidly, and ends really, really, really bad because it makes no point whatsoever. What's even worse is that it tries to trick you into thinking that it's a movie "to be taken seriously" because everybody's a sex addict and everybody's miserable and everybody throws up. In case you didn't get it: the title "Happiness" is used for its opposite meaning. What saves this pretentious movie from is essentially its great cast, especially that little boy whose father is a pedophile. He essentially played an un- pitchable child role. What an impressive and mature performance!The first forty minutes or so are very interesting in terms of character evolution, but there's no use for you to look at your watch, because these are only forty minutes out of one hundred and forty minutes worth of very, very, very pointless controversy wrapped in very, very, very unaesthetic cinematography. Long story short, this is a movie where very promising satire and sarcasm is dumped for explicit material. As a matter of fact, everything that the characters do seems to be for shock value. The grandfather who pours tons of salt on his plate despite his doctor's recommendations (no need to shoot further scenes to elaborate of course). The neighbour who phone-harrasses women and ends up drunk and pukes everywhere. The little boy who, after six laborious months, finally shoots his cum, has his dog eat it and joyfully tells his entire family that he had an orgasm. Please.Yes, a scene like the one where a father suggests demonstrating masturbation to his son will surprise you, shock you, make you smile, make you laugh, offend you, make you applaud the writer for his unapologetic manners, but once you're past the effect, Happiness will leave no room for you to reflect in any way, for the simple reason that there's nothing to reflect about since everything's done for the sake of spontaneous disgust and/or offence. If you want good sarcasm, taboo topics and impeccable cinematography, check out "Sitcom" by François Ozon, where a mother decides to sleep with her gay son to "cure" him from his homosexuality. It has an irresistibly witty and sarcastic dialogue, an asset that "Happiness" crucially lacks. When you want to be honest with people with topics as delicate as pedophilia, you need something to counter-balance it. Pasolini shot the most shocking sexual scenes in history but he had the most poetic cinematography and sound track to back it up with! It is one thing to push people's buttons to make them reflect on something and a totally different thing to go for shock value. Happiness is not the former.

To call Todd Solondz's "Happiness" a dark comedy is to redefine the words "dark" and "comedy". It hates the world and everyone in it, and takes great pleasure in mocking people stupid enough to try to be happy. In Solondz's world, life is pointless, hope is for suckers, and everybody is basically bad at heart. It says something that the movie's most human, sympathetic character is a child molester.And, yes, it's a comedy - often a very, very funny one. Funny in a morbid, gallows humor, dead baby joke sort of way, but funny nonetheless.The chief characters in "Happiness" are all stunted, narcissistic and hopelessly inadequate. Joy (Jane Adams) is a born loser who drifts through a series of menial jobs and drives her boyfriend to suicide; her sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is so self-absorbed that she thinks her biggest problem is that everyone loves her too much; her neighbor Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) can only connect to people by making obscene phone calls; and Bill (Dylan Baker), his therapist and Joy and Helen's brother-in-law, is a pedophile who rapes two of his 11-year-old son's friends. Somehow, Solondz makes these horrible people really, really funny. Like John Waters and the Farrelly Brothers, Solondz finds humor in ugliness and revels in bad taste. He makes sexual dysfunction and personal failure brutally funny; Allen's obscene phone calls, for example, are almost endearing in their ineptitude and anatomical incorrectness ("I'm gonna f*** you in the... ear"), while Helen's narcissism makes her gloriously clueless ("If only I had been raped as a child - then I would know authenticity!"). Solondz shows his characters in a clear, satiric light, and it despises them.While Solondz may not like his characters, he does not take the easy way out by making them caricatures. Every one of these awful human beings is a three-dimensional character with reasons for being awful.For example, most directors would have made Bill a one-note villain, but Solondz makes him a pitiful monster who is tortured by ghastly sexual urges that he knows are wrong. There's a tough scene near the end where Bill has a frank talk with his son Billy about his pedophilia, admitting: that he enjoyed raping his victims; that he would do it again; and, while he would not rape his own son, he would "jerk off instead". Both father and son are crying - Billy with horror as he realizes just what Bill is, and Bill with shame and despair as he realizes the same thing. It's hard to watch, but it's an acting master class and absolutely fearless film-making.This is a real actor's movie; the cast gives career-best performances. Baker is both horrifying and heartbreaking as Bill; he squirms in his own skin, as if he is being eaten alive by his own sickness. We pity him, whether we want to or not. Hoffman is hilariously pathetic as Allen, sweating and mumbling with lonely self-hatred. Adams is sad and sweet as the luckless Helen, the closest thing the movie has to a moral center, while Boyle is priceless as the contemptible Helen, swanning around as if waiting for the world to thank her for being born."Happiness" is the epitome of "acquired taste" - its humor is bitter, acidic and often cruel, and it takes real joy in offending the audience. Go elsewhere for a feel-good comedy with a happy ending. If nothing else, though, it's a true original, and deserves credit for carving out its own niche in the "dark comedy" genre.