Francisco Román/eOne Films
Todd Solondz rose to prominence during the indie film surge of the 1990s: Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Happiness (1998) established a vision unmistakably his own. Tackling issues that haunt all of Solondz films—boredom, loneliness, mistaken communication, failed connection—his latest offering, Life During Wartime, revisits the Jordan sisters featured in Happiness. And while having seen Happiness might enrich your understanding of the characters’ history and conflicts, Life During Wartime certainly does not rely on Happiness for its own achievements.
Solondz’s films have often been polarizing, viewers finding not just films, but filmmaker, cruel and exploitative or satiric genius. In Life During Wartime, viewers will find a more temperate note, the work of a writer and director now in his 50s. The film is more pared down (a clean 98 minutes compared to the 134 minutes of Happiness), clearer in thematic focus and fuller aesthetically (shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Edward Lachman with a kind of visual flatness and plasticity reflecting characters’ emotional affect). Somewhat more optimistic than his earlier efforts, the film’s elusive optimism is found in the film’s more subtle, more mature treatment of its characters.
Solondz creates a distinct reality in his films, one that might masquerade as our own, but whose agonies are exaggerated, joys muted. It’s a mistake to read these films as realism, better as satire or even melodrama. They are films designed to make viewers uncomfortable, and their failures occur when their exaggeration prompts callous rather than rueful laughter.
Such a failure of empathy happens with less frequency in Life During Wartime. The film opens in perhaps its most explicit evocation of Happiness with Joy on another excruciating date, this time with Allen (played by Michael Kenneth Williams in a sharp but effective contrast from Philip Seymour Hoffman). Shirley Henderson’s performance makes the most of Joy’s aggressive frailty. As is the living weren’t enough of a burden, Joy is haunted by suicide-Andy (Jon Lovitz replaced by spot-on casting of Paul Reubens), weeping and attacking in whiplash succession.
Hauntings are not limited to the dead. Pedophilic father Bill, released from prison, seeks out his family. In search of what, we’re not sure. While the younger children have been told he’s dead, Billy (Chris Marquette) has only played along. Their meeting in his college dorm is the most we’ll hear from Bill, but ends without forgiveness sought or given. Billy, withholding sympathy, nevertheless begs his father to stay. Bill, played now by an affectless Ciarán Hinds, was once the center of family and film, but here remains in shadows, saying little, doing less, eventually fading literally into the background as his younger son, Timmy, weeps for his absence.
Timmy (played by Dylan Riley Snyder) is in the midst of bar mitzvah preparations, repeating frequently, pleadingly that he is “almost a man.” Originally titled “Forgiveness,” the film constantly asks if forgiveness is possible. Timmy asks tough questions, wondering what the unforgivable might be while his mother and her suitor spout platitudes about evil. While growth is hard to come by in any Solondz film, Timmy comes the closest, forgiving his father in absentia and asking for forgiveness for his role in foiling his mother’s blooming love affair. “Forgive and forget” we’re instructed throughout, until finally, the philosophical debate is tossed aside, replaced not by an answer, but by an equally unrealizable desire of son for father, once dead, now absent in perpetuity.
Allison Janney nails mother Trish’s smug, though now well-medicated, certitude. She is forging ahead with recently divorced Harvey Weiner (Michael Lerner as a character viewers might remember from Welcome to the Dollhouse), in Florida to watch over his Asperger-afflicted adult son Mark. Their bond, over shared normalcy and love of Israel, comes unglued when Timmy mistakes Harvey’s innocuous shoulder grasp for inappropriate touching and becomes hysterical, reminding characters what viewers already know: forgetting is as difficult as forgiving.
While its title and some of the dialogue alludes to issues of a post 9/11 world of terrorism, Israel, and wars overseas, the film fails at integrating those themes effectively. Instead, perhaps like the way “war” is waged in perpetuity these days, the war of family life is like the war on terror, impossible to resolve because impossible to locate a stable enemy. In this post-lapserian world, “I’m sorry” means nothing.
Ally Sheedy surely deserves an honorable mention for her turn as Helen, given up poetry for screenwriting, bedding Keanu in the next room while Joy composes her newest ballad and wards off Andy’s attempted ghost-rape. Likewise, Charlotte Rampling’s performance as Jacqueline, seeking one point of contact in a hotel bar, offers another of the film’s memorable scenes. Perhaps, however, the film’s richness of compellingly scripted and acted episodes comes at the expense of sufficient narrative to weave those performances together into a story in any conventional sense. But then, Solondz is hardly a conventional director.
Life During Wartime runs through Thursday at the Landmark Tivoli Theatre, 6350 Delmar, at 4:45, 7:15, and 9:30 p.m.
Patricia Brooke spent her twenties as a student, her thirties as a professor, and now her forties as a writer of various sorts. In addition to academic essays, she has written for the Riverfront Times, Sauce, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reviewing and previewing film, music, and foodstuffs. She chose St. Louis as a home more than a decade ago and still doesn’t understand the various ways of classifying and ranking high schools.
