Happiness [4K UHD]

Studio: The Criterion Collection

Sep 25, 2024 Web Exclusive By Joey Arnone Photography by The Criterion Collection

An essential gem in the uncomfortable cinema canon, Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998) is the cinematic equivalent of slowly peeling off a Band-Aid. Solondz’s singular blend of discomfort and jet-black humor will leave you both squirming in your seat and feeling bad for laughing. Playing out like a version of American Beauty if it were written and directed by John Waters, the film mercilessly chips away at the veneer of polite middle-class suburban normalcy and exposes the trauma, perversions and repressed desires raging underneath–all with a savage sense of absurdist glee.

A narrative precursor to hyperlink cinema–popularized in the mid-2000s with films such as Crash and Babel–Happiness focuses on several intersecting character arcs, all of which involve a trio of sisters: Joy (Jane Adams), a thirty-something drifting through life who becomes romantically involved with a married man, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), the seemingly picture-perfect housewife whose husband, Bill (Dylan Baker), is a closeted pedophile and Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a successful author who is having a tenuous and sexually-charged phone relationship with Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lonely schmuck with dangerously low self-esteem.

Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, we are privy to the inner lives of these people, all of whom are desperately trying (and failing) to find happiness. The title itself is ironic. Throughout the film, all the viewer can witness is a lack of fulfillment in the lives of the protagonists. The only time in which a divot of happiness is findable is in the film’s very last scene, a crudely triumphant moment that feels like a transcendence from the well of human sadness illustrated throughout the rest of the film’s runtime.

Happiness premiered at Cannes the same year as two other similarly emotionally challenging films: Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration and Lars von Trier’s The Idiots. The former analyzes abuse and the effect it can have on a family, while the latter lets discomfort and humor linger together to create a jarring and multifaceted emotional experience. Happiness encompasses both of these elements while also having its own unique aesthetic. Solondz places incredibly uncomfortable subject matter and situations in between disparately ironic music cues, making the film feel like a f**ked-up sitcom.

A film like this could easily have missed the mark and even be in bad taste in the hands of a lesser director, but with Solondz’s pitch-perfect writing and direction, in addition to an incredibly committed cast, the film transcends its lurid scenarios to provide a heartbreaking, morally ambiguous and emotionally profound portrait of humanity, shining a light on people who don’t fit the social parameters of what is “normal.”

The most difficult role in the film is that of Bill, brilliantly depicted by Dylan Baker, who has to identify with and find the humanity within a pedophile. This is a role that, according to Solondz in the special features for the new Criterion edition of the film, no A-list Hollywood actor wanted to touch with a 10-foot pole. Through Baker’s dedicated performance and Solondz’s humanistic approach to his characters, it is made so that we as an audience can also find the humanity within Bill and perhaps even develop empathy for him by the end of the film.

It is true that the characters in the film are all trying to find happiness, and Solondz posits that perhaps every human being has their own definition of happiness and how to attain it, whether it abides by accepted societal norms or not. Most of the characters go about finding happiness in incredibly poor ways, but it encourages the viewer to reflect on their own life as well as their judgments of other people. At the end of the day, we’re all just people trying to find happiness, but don’t have the context of hindsight or objectivity when looking at our own lives. So, whether or not we are succeeding or failing in our pursuit of happiness might just be in the eye of the beholder.

Long considered an out-of-print DVD release in North America, Happiness has finally gotten the release it deserves. The new Criterion 4K restoration, approved by Todd Solondz, makes the film look like it was made within the past five years. Among the special features is a 40-minute interview of Solondz by Aftersun director Charlotte Wells, who was his student at NYU. Also included in the special features is an interview with Dylan Baker, who describes his process of diving into the darker facets of human nature in his role.

(www.criterion.com/films/30465-happiness)

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