Happiness (1998)

"Deeply disturbing and shockingly funny, one of the few indelible movies of the year!  David Ansen, Newsweek
"Subtly savage... Evilly funny!  Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"#1 film of the year!  Newsweek Magazine

Editor's Note Building on the darkly comic angst of WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, Todd Solondz's HAPPINESS conveys suburban desperation and frustration on a larger scale than his previous film. The ensemble cast of characters centers around the lives of three sisters: Joy (Jane Adams), an awkward, naive, and unlucky musician; Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a beautiful, self-obsessed writer; and Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), a conservative housewife who is married to Bill (Dylan Baker), a psychiatrist harboring an unhealthy fascination for young boys. Other dysfunctional characters include the sisters' unhappy parents, Lenny and Mona Jordan (Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser), and the lonely, sex-obsessed Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who lives next to Helen and goes to Bill for therapy.| |At once both scathingly funny and shockingly bleak, HAPPINESS addresses subjects that most films are afraid to touch, including pedophilia and masturbation. Unapologetic and unflinching, Solondz's film features bold performances from the entire cast and makes for uneasy but intriguing viewing as it peers behind the fragile facade of the American dream.

	Ben Gazzara
	Camryn Manheim
	Dylan Baker
	Jane Adams
	Jon Lovitz
	Lara Flynn Boyle
	Philip Seymore Hoffman
	Todd Solondz - Director
	Todd Solondz - Screenplay

HAPPINESS fleshes out its grim stories through graphic portraits of aberrant relationships and individual obsessions. The film, centered around three sisters who struggle with the monotony of bourgeois life, leaves the viewer both laughing and gasping, hopelessly reaching for explanations for the behavior of the characters and the cruelty of their uncompromising circumstances. Pedophilia and dark sexual and psychological fantasies are featured as director Todd Solondz (WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE) drags each player in this brightly colored yet depressing party to the brink of their insecurities with marvelous precision and without qualm. The strong cast features Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Baker, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, and Louise Lasser.

"It's good that we had this talk. Before things went too far...you know, got too serious."----Joy Jordan (Jane Adams) to Andy Kornbluth (Jon Lovitz) |"Yeah...(long pause]...are you sure?"----Andy |"Yes."----Joy |"Is it someone else?"----Andy |"No, it's just you."----Joy

"I bore people. People look at me and get bored. People listen to me and they zone out. Bored. 'Who is that boring person,' they think. 'I have never before met anyone so boring.'"----Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to his therapist Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker)

"I'm just so tired of being admired all the time."----Helen Jordan (Lara Flynn Boyle) to her sister Trish Maplewood (Cynthia Stevenson)

"Well, I may 'have it all' [makes quote marks in the air] but, you know, sometimes I wonder what my life might have been like if I'd actually tried to write a novel."----Trish to Helen |"I'm sure it would've been good."----Helen

"Don't feel guilty."----Diane Freed (Elizabeth Ashley) to Lenny Jordan (Ben Gazzara), after they've kissed |"I don't. I don't feel anything."----Lenny

"We all have our pluses and minuses..."----Allen to Kristina (Camryn Manheim), after she's confessed to a heinous crime

"So was Mrs. Paley sick, honey?"----Trish to her son Billy (Rufus Read) |"Well, everyone said she was just too strung out..."----Billy |"Now why do people say things like that?"----Trish|"Because she's a drug addict."----Billy

"I'm not laughing at you...I'm laughing with you."----Helen |"But I'm not laughing..."----Joy

Sight and Sound
"...HAPPINESS stretches its taboo subject matter to the limits..." 03/??/1999 p.44

Rolling Stone
"...Unique and unmissable....HAPPINESS is potently funny and painfully affecting, often at the same time..." 10/29/1998 p.80

Entertainment Weekly
"...Tender, shocking, cathartically honest....Solondz leaves us giddy....Breaks through to haunted levels of erotic compulsion that place it close to the hypnotic artistry of BLUE VELVET..." -- Rating: A 11/06/1998 p.56

Box Office
"...A superb black comedy....HAPPINESS leaves viewers feeling disturbed, amazed, and fascinated..." 07/01/1998 p.126

Premiere
"...[A] marvelous, multifaceted, and endlessly unsettling third feature....[Solondz is] an imaginative, witty, and deeply subversive filmmaker..." 11/01/1998 p.32

Los Angeles Times
"...Solondz has an impeccable ear for current speech patterns....He also has a gift for skewering self-centeredness..." 10/16/1998 p.C1

Total Film
"...Blackly comic, yet touching and sympathetic, it never flinches in its depiction of human darkness..." 07/01/2003 p.137

New York Times 0 of 10
In Happiness, a much bigger film than his first [Welcome To The Dollhouse] and another murderous comedy of manners, Mr. Solondz gets even closer to the bone. His natural tendency to make audiences squirm leads him into material that wouldn't be mentioned in many other films; here, it's linked to the eating of ice cream sundaes. But Mr. Solondz doesn't seem to be straining for shock value when he turns the man in the sunny family portrait on the wall into the man who drugs his family's dessert. (His purpose: an assault on the son's young friend.) He fills Happiness with enough misery to make its most outrageous joke its title -- and with enough true, unexpected tenderness to warrant this view of the world. - Janet Maslin

Dallas Observer 0 of 10
Weaving together myriad interconnected plot lines with more than a dozen lives, this gifted writer-director [Todd Solondz] has fashioned a bleak, brilliant comedy about loneliness, lovelessness, and alienation -- a film that constantly upends our assumptions about what is heartbreaking, what is hilarious, and what is both. Here's a graveyard of shattered self-esteem, a lonely crowd of walking-and-talking wounded that provokes, by turns, laughter and shocked silence. For 135 minutes this moviemaker sends us wildly mixed signals about what it means to be human; about the proximity of tragedy and comedy; and about life in a society where no one in a roomful of office clerks can remember the name, or the face, of a former co-worker who's just committed suicide and where an apartment-house doorman can wind up chopped into little pieces in an upstairs tenant's freezer. Happiness is risky business indeed. Now 38, New Jersey native Solondz chooses not to satanize a pedophile, but rather to turn him this way and that in the light, looking at all of his facets. Solondz neither idealizes nor mocks a seemingly Cleaveresque household in New Jersey; instead, he examines it with pinpoint accuracy, layer by layer. In his disparate characters, he shows us rage inflamed by sadness, isolation governed by impotence. He shows the excitement in the face of a needy woman when a Russian cab driver takes up a guitar and sings to her "You Light Up My Life," of all things, in an accent as thick as borscht. Anything to find happiness. We don't know whether to laugh or cry, but the emotional jolt is powerful. - Bill Gallo