Sydney Film Festival III :: Life During Wartime: Forgive, Forget, I'm Still Wet

This was one of the films I was really looking forward to. Todd Solondz’s Happiness is close to a peerless film, and its sequel must be greeted with interest. More of the same? Yes, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing when the source is so good.

It’s 10 or so years on and almost everyone is living in Florida. The film begins with close to its best scene, a repeat of Happiness’s opening of Joy and a boyfriend in a restaurant. She’s married to Allen (Michael K. Williams from The Wire and, lest we forget, R. Kelly’s totally peerless hip-hopera Trapped in the Closet), a reformed criminal she met in her rehab work with prison inmates. Every day it’s a struggle: “The crack. The cocaine. The crack cocaine….” He’s got it all under control except for the dirty phone calls to strangers, as a waitress spitting in his face reveals. That’s right, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has become Michael K. Williams. (I admit, I didn’t click to this immediately – I thought the dirty phone calls were but an awkward remnant of “Hoffman’s character.”)

None of the original actors reprise their roles. And that makes sense: Happiness ends with the revelation that Bill Maplewood, your father, husband, son-in-law, brother-in-law, psychiatrist and all round family guy is a child rapist. That would change you.

Allison Janney, playing the wife of Bill, is a Solondz natural, with her tragicomic face. She’s told her youngest children that their father died. Billy is off to college, and so the probing pubescent is left to Timmy, his younger brother. When Trish reveals maybe a bit too much about her new beau – “He just touched my elbow and I got wet” – Timmy wonders, “Are you still wet?” And we just know it’s going to end badly when this new guy tries to give Timmy a hug.

Paul Reubens (yes, Pee Wee Herman and public wanker) is too much fun to watch as the ghost or hallucination of Jon Lovitz, amorously appearing to Joy. A figment of Joy’s imagination and guilt – he killed himself after Joy broke up with him – here he’s the response to the moans of her sister fucking Keanu Reeves. Why didn’t Keanu put in some face time? It’d would have been so much better for him to say, rather than just have it reported, that he’s sick of being treated as dumb, and to have him at Timmy’s bar mitzvah would have pretty much made my month.

Turning the boyish Dylan Baker into Ciarán Hinds is a good move. While I’m sure the Irish actor is Catholic, he carries over a badass Jewishness from his role in Spielberg’s Munich. Gaol has hardened him. He talks little, stares out the world. He goes to find Billy to see if he’s like him. He memorably interacts with Charlotte “I am a monster” Rampling, parrying, sexing, thieving.

There is a striking image of a saturated Puerto Rican (read Floridan) villa complex garden, in a sharp deep focus, which alights upon a smudged figure. This figure slowly resolves into perceptibility across its repetition. It’s Timmy, the objet petit a of the paedophile’s visage, the Child of the Real, the obdurate stain that binds the world to his perception of it. Bill admits that the therapy and the drugs don’t help. Back in the day he promised Billy he’d jerk off to avoid doing what he’d really want to do to him; he doesn’t know Timmy as his son, it’s been a long time between tuna sandwiches. Solondz doesn’t directly explore this, perhaps accounting for this particular progression of image.

The wartime stuff? Meh: Bush is bad, the terrorists are like us, are paedophiles terrorists? being buried in Israel, can we “forgive and forget”? None of this matters, for as one of the new characters (“I’ve accepted that no-one finds my work interesting and I’m happy to live a subsistence life with low overheads”) says, China will soon rule the world.

Screen memories: paedophile’s objet petit a, Reubens cursing, not seeing Keanu, Rampling looking like an Afghan hound

You have to watch this: