Movie Reviews

Okay, I've figured out a sure way to make a movie that I won't like, and which I'll quite possibly hate: all you have to do is to populate the film entirely with unlikable characters. Now, this is not some kind of obvious, universal thing, as I know that a lot of critics have given seriously high praise to movies devoid of likeable characters. The Good Girl and Igby Goes Down are two examples of this. A lot of people apparently liked these films a lot, but I hated both of them because none of the characters had any redeeming traits. I now consider Todd Solondz's 1998 film Happiness to be the worst offender.

This is one of those 'character pieces' that follows a number of more-or-less unconnected people as they occasionally bump into one another. For instance, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Alan, a sexually-frustrated loner pervert who lives next door to Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a snobbish upper-class writer, who is the sister of Trish, who is married to Dylan, who happens to be a pedophile and who becomes attracted to friends of his 11-year-old son.

Dylan, the pedophile father, is a particularly disgusting character. Maybe the film deserves some merit (if you can even call it that) for being the first to feature a harshly-realistic depiction of an otherwise ordinary person who happens to be a pedophile. But frankly, I thought it was revolting, and I felt seriously sorry for the young actor who plays Dylan's son, considering some of the awful sexually-explicit conversations they have.

I'd heard that Happiness was supposed to be some kind of "dark comedy". I didn't laugh or smile once, and to me it just seemed like some kind of "dark piece of exploitative crap".