Life During Wartime

It's a sorta sequel to director Todd Solondz's 1998 film Happiness and the Jordan sisters. The characters are recast. Joy Jordan (Shirley Henderson) marries Allen Mellencamp (Michael K. Williams) who makes obscene calls and she is haunted by Andy (Paul Reubens). Bill Maplewood (Ciarán Hinds) is let out of prison serving for child molestation. His ex-wife Trish Jordan (Allison Janney) has to deal with her son Timmy finding out about Bill's crime. Bill starts dating Jacqueline (Charlotte Rampling). Trish is set to marry 'normal' Harvey Wiener (Michael Lerner). Helen Jordan (Ally Sheedy) is a successful screenwriter in California.

Recasting everybody has the weird sense of an alternate universe. It makes this a weirdly unreal movie. I can't say that the actors are inferior but they are different. I'm not a big fan of Happiness and this doesn't change that. I can't find any rooting interest in any of these characters. Some are downright kill worthy. The discussion between Trish and Timmy is so pathetic that it's almost funny. At least, it was memorable.

"Happiness" was a funny yet very disturbing film. It's a very good film but one I can't see too often since some scenes are too weird. I wanted to see the follow up to that film, hoping it would be as funny, sad and chilling. "Life during Wartime" is quite weak. Having Charlotte Rampling in a small part did not help. The story took a long time to get going and then it was over too soon without creating any interest in the characters nor the storyline.

All the actors in the new film were much paler than the ones playing the same parts in "Happiness". The only appealing one was Shirley Henderson playing Joy (even if I missed Jane Adams dearly). The one playing Trish was nowhere near as good as the original actress, but the part was not as funny either.

Why make a follow up movie without the original cast? It would have been great to see them having aged like their characters. I suppose the actors from Happiness didn't like the script for "Life during Wartime"!

Todd Solondz is unique and so are his films. He forces you to look through an angle that we systematically ignore. There is an element of tenderness that permeates the darkest of corners and compassion emerges, limpid, clear even rational. This is, if possible, a sequel to his masterful "Happiness" The pain is still palpable but there is a hint of hope, China or not China. "I don't care about freedom or democracy, I care about my dad" Yes, I hear you kid. In the midst of it all, I hear you. Added bonuses: Cieran Hids as a scary, powerful presence. Allison Janney, one of the best American actresses working today. Charlotte Rampling makes an appearance as a sort of escapee from an erotic nightmare and don't you dare ignore or let this film pass you by. Todd Solondz is a great, startling American poet.

11 years after Happiness, his poisonous stab at moral absolutism, Todd Solondz returned with this equally bleak sequel, a continuation of the all-American domestic grotesque. The characters return, except now played by different actors (including a bleary Paul "Pee Wee" Reubens), as does Solondz' ability to challenge expectations with disarming directness and surgical precision.

This is a less consistent film than its predecessor, particularly in terms of tone. Happiness harboured an almost garish John Waters trash aesthetic, whereas Wartime often shifts into something more sombrely lit and handsome, even entering noir territory at times, as when Ciaran Hinds' Bill and Charlotte Rampling's Jacqueline meet in a whisky-coloured bar to do semantic battle before indulging in a bout of loveless sex.

The characters are mostly horror movie monsters masked in the fascia of suburban admissibility - none more so than Trish (Allison Janney), the selfish mad-mom who is delighted by the fallacy of the nuclear ideal, lusting after "normal". Her son, Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder), is the traumatised voice of reason: a humanist on the cusp of corruption. Then there is Joy (Shirley Henderson), a deep-feeling adult alone amidst the animal chaos: frail, fragile and bereft (in mind and body); in search of absent metaphysical guidance; a closed book desperate to do good; desperate to stop pretending any more.

Loneliness, rape, suicide and despair all echo in a bubble of carefully constructed sentimentality. Wartime doesn't quite carry the joke all the way. Certain latter scenes, particularly involving Hinds' recently-released Bill, are played disconcertingly straight. But then this is a film about the pathology of forgiveness (the film's former title), the corrosive nature of trauma, and the final consolation of repression and faith - themes in which perhaps even Mr Solondz couldn't find the humour.

"You die for me and I will know you love me," says Allen (The Wire's Michael Kenneth Williams) from the grave. No one in American cinema is better than Solondz at highlighting fickleness and absurdity of human interaction, and the paradoxes we contrive for ourselves. And although it can be wearying to endure such an indictment, we will always need filmmakers willing to float like faecal matter in Hollywood's homogenous soup.

Todd Solondz comes back one more time resuming stories about joy and sorrows, forgives, forgets and regrets, the same gears that leaded his previous works as Welcome To Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998) and Palindromes (2004), in one way or another.

Here the story surrounds the life of a kid and the members of his family that are trying to discover the meanings of when and how could people achieve the joy or the happiness in their lives just forgiving or forgetting something harmful enough to be forgotten or forgiven.

As always, Solondz plays with dark humor all the time just to relieve the weight of complex dramatic themes, giving the right balance needed to make real hard life discussions into something as ordinary as a breakfast.

The characters are well constructed and it's interesting the way they lead with the relationships between them. All the time 2 characters are discussing in a table or with something between them, using it like a place where they can put and throw - or sometimes hide - all their problems and differences but at the same time blocking and impeding the reaching of each other, like a battlefield.

Words are like guns and watching those characters hurting each other and using each other words like bullets is shocking because that's what we are, and we are responsible for that. Life During Wartime deals with complex themes, sometimes is a difficult movie for the raw, bitter and impacting dialogs, but you can't run away from them forever.

As another one said: "Todd Solondz is unique and so are his films. He forces you to look through an angle that we systematically ignore".

Great work once again.