HAPPINESS (1998) • Frame Rated

Could Todd Solondz’s Happiness be made today, in a social (and therefore commercial) atmosphere even more sensitive to issues of abuse and exploitation than we were a quarter of a century ago? Quite likely not; in 1998 it provoked enough controversy that the Sundance Film Festival rejected it and its original distributor refused to handle it—though Universal, that distributor’s parent, reportedly still quietly channelled money to the “independent” distributor which was subsequently formed to release the movie, a tactic which speaks volumes about the gap between corporations’ public and private actions.

The reason for all this was not so much the film’s subject matter itself, but the combination of subject matter and tone. It’s not exactly a movie that makes light of rape and paedophilia, but it presents them undramatically as facts of life in the context of an initially sympathetic, or at least not strongly dislikeable, character. Though the film certainly does not ask us to endorse his behaviour, neither does it encourage us to hate him for it, and it asks a question that is almost unacceptable to ask, even when we know it’s a valid one: can the child rapist also be a good father? It also addresses, in detail and at length, the related and similarly taboo subject of pre-teen sexuality.

What’s more, it tackles these issues in the context of a story which has many desperately, blackly funny moments, even if the most beyond-the-pale subjects are not directly joked about. (Happiness does come close to doing that, too.) The result is a film which is thoroughly entertaining yet also contains some of the most uncomfortable scenes you will ever sit through, mostly in the form of conversations between the paedophile dad Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) and his son Billy (Rufus Read).

None of this is apparent from the beginning, though the opening scene where a romance between Joy (Jane Adams) and Andy (Jon Lovitz) hits the rocks before it’s even begun is startling enough in itself, rolling out a series of emotions in rapid succession—sorrow, pleasure, anger, hate, all amusingly stylised yet completely believable at the same time. Mostly set in Solondz’s usual New Jersey (with some excursions to Florida), over a short period with a brief epilogue taking place six months later, Happiness is on paper the tale of a family, though it isn’t until the very end of the film that we see them together as one: like any modern family, this one is fragmented into individual scenes and storylines, and Happiness is very much an ensemble film. No one narrative thread completely dominates, though given the depth of its darkness, that of Bill can at times overshadow the others.

This family is white, middle-class, educated (at least the younger generation), mostly moderately affluent without being flamboyantly wealthy, cishet: a model of old-fashioned “normality” on the surface, the kind of family that is “supposed” to be happy. But of course, they aren’t.

Joy (her name ironic) is an aspiring but not exceptionally talented musician who finds herself teaching English to immigrants (as Solondz himself once did) in New York City to make ends meet, while she writes songs and longs for love in her spare time. Her sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) seems more successful—she’s a writer—but she hates herself; in soliloquy, she describes herself as “just another sordid exploitationist”; she wishes she had been raped as a child so she’d truly know what she was writing about. Her perception of (imagined) harm to her childhood self as merely a useful experience provides a subtle echo of how Bill manages to ignore the harm he’s perpetrating.

A third sister, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), looks much more content than the others – nice suburban home, loving husband, adorable kids—but the loving husband is Bill, whose secret life will inevitably shatter this stereotypically conventional happiness. And Trish longs for Helen’s life, while Helen longs (or so she claims) for Trish’s… nobody is genuinely content.

The family is completed by these three sisters’ retired parents, Mona (Louise Lasser) and Lenny (Ben Gazzara), who are divorcing but don’t yet seem to have fully taken on board what that means; they like the idea of splitting up, or at least he does, but they’re so used to each other that they can’t help carrying on daily life together as if nothing were happening. A bit like Trish’s blissful, or wilful, ignorance of her husband’s actions, maybe?

From this family group the film expands outward to other people in their lives, notably Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a neighbour of Helen’s who secretly fantasises about her and makes obscene phone calls; today we would probably call him an incel, though there’s no ideological angle to his sexual frustration (“pussy… need pussy…”), and he comes across not as nasty but as suffused with the sadness that Hoffman brought to so many of his roles. Also significant are Vlad (Jared Harris), a New York cab driver and student of Joy’s who has a brief fling with her but (unsurprisingly) turns out not to be everything she has hoped for, and Kristina (Camryn Manheim), another neighbour of Allen’s who is not the sex goddess he had hoped for but may be more likely to bring him happiness.

The film ends as it begins, in media res with no catharsis, no resolution, though the very final line does mark an important moment in young Billy’s journey toward adulthood. Typically of Happiness, though, this line also operates at two other, very different levels: it caps off a gross-out gag worthy of a teen sex comedy, and more grimly it shows us the extent to which Billy has been influenced by his father’s sexualisation of young boys (even though there is no suggestion that he—unlike some of his schoolmates—has been physically abused; Bill tries to keep his depraved private life completely separate from his “perfect” family life, and indeed things only start to go wrong for him when he allows the two to intersect).

Solondz keeps this complex narrative structure and the profuse, sometimes contradictory, ideas running through Happiness grounded in visual simplicity. Colours are often bright but settings are mostly bland and constricted, what Julian Murphet in his analysis of Solondz’s films calls “generic spaces”; the overall impression is of people trapped in their lives. Similarly, although the film as a whole never drags, individual scenes tend to lack urgency; there’s little sense of forward movement in those lives. This makes it all the more effective on the rare occasions when the movie does open up, most notably for a fantasy/dream sequence where Bill mass-shoots strangers in a park—shown before his paedophilia is revealed to us, it’s an early intimation that he’s drawn to the forbidden and the extreme.

The film isn’t relentlessly downbeat by any means. An intense confessional scene between Bill and his son is counterbalanced by a much lighter scene where another, more minor character confesses to murder and dismemberment—“there’s still some left in my freezer”—over a sundae. Much of the dialogue is very droll (occasionally merciless to the characters too), and there are witty passing touches throughout. Almost always, though, the levity has a more sombre side as well. There’s the black humour of the ‘Watch—Children’ sign seen as Bill drives through the night, or the ironic contrasts between carefree classical music on the soundtrack and much darker things on the screen, or Vlad’s ‘I Love NJ’ T-shirt. Not the more familiar ‘I Love NY’; you may have to settle for loving distinctly less glamorous New Jersey instead, Happiness seems to be suggesting.

Acting is of course even more important than direction or cinematography to an ensemble film like this, and none of the cast disappoints. If some stand out more than others it’s often more to do with their characters than the quality of their performances, although Dan Moran also impresses in a much smaller role as the father of one of the boys abused by Bill, and alongside all the fine adult actors a special nod should be given to young Rufus Read’s outstanding performance as Billy, the main child role in the film.

The key to Happiness in many ways is Bill, though not because of his specific offences—Happiness isn’t a case study in paedophilia. Part of the lesson to be learned from him, of course, is that the character who seems more than any other to be settled in a very conventional, loving relationship is also the one with the most awful secret: we should not assume that people are what they appear to be. But he’s also important because this relationship with his wife and children probably is real too, despite his paedophilic secret life: people can’t be easily pigeonholed.

He’s important because he’s the one member of the ensemble who follows his dreams wherever they lead him, while others are nervous about doing so. That they lead him to such an ugly place and eventually to disaster is perhaps a warning that seeking happiness at all costs can be destructive. Two other men in the film—Hoffman’s Allen, and the Russian student Vlad—also go further than others in acting on unacceptable wishes (the obscene phone calls in Allen’s case, petty theft in Vlad’s)—and though they don’t incur terrible consequences in the way Bill does, neither do they seem to gain much.

Solondz had already dealt with pre-teen sex in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and would handle paedophilia again in Palindromes (2004), but Happiness sparked more moral outrage than any of his films and he would be able to make only two more in the decade that followed. The industry enthusiasm for his work that had been generated by the commercial success of Dollhouse was effectively wiped out by Happiness (which did not do as well at the box office, either). In 2009, though, he did direct a kind of sequel—Solondz himself described it as “more of a jumping off point than a direct sequel”— in Life During Wartime, which features characters from both this film and Dollhouse played by different actors: Ciarán Hinds in Baker’s role as Bill and Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire) in Hoffman’s as Allen, for example.

Is Happiness as shocking as a contemporary reaction, and its reputation, suggest? Yes, though more because of the way that it busts through accepted norms of what can and can’t be shown than for what it says about the character of Bill. Anybody who stops to think about it will recognise that of course not all paedophiles are slavering monsters; most are seemingly respectable, well-balanced people. So what is shocking about Bill is not that Happiness is making an outrageous point about paedophilia, but that it’s doing something few movies will do, in portraying the offender as a nice guy most of the time.

There is shock value from a few individual scenes, too. Hoffman’s Allen using his semen to glue a postcard to the wall is “the most disgusting thing” in Solondz’s career, the director has said, and there’s a somewhat similar moment at the end. But, again, the shock here primarily derives from the fact that we just don’t show or discuss this particular bodily fluid on the screen. The hair gel gag in There’s Something About Mary (1998), coincidentally from the same year, has outlived everything else in that film for the same reason.

Get beyond the superficial gasps, though, and Happiness is a poignant (as well as very funny) film. Andy, at the very beginning, tells Joy “I’m fine”, though he looks on the verge of tears. “I had a really nice time,” she says, and you can tell she didn’t. This is what life actually is like, and though Happiness may be exaggerated in many aspects, it’s also honest to a degree that not many movies are. It may have an abstract noun for its title—unusual in itself—but it’s all about real people. You don’t have to like them, but you recognise them… and you may even recognise something of yourself.

USA | 1998 | 140 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • RUSSIAN

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Special Features:

• Two discs. One 4K Ultra HD disc of the film in Dolby Vision HDR, one Blu-ray with the film and special features.
• NEW 4K digital restoration of the film with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Supervised by director of photography Maryse Alberti, the transfer is terrific, with perfect clarity and vibrant colours.
• NEW Conversation between Todd Solondz and Charlotte Wells. This is a genuine conversation, not an interview. Charlotte Wells came to prominence a couple of years ago as director of the acclaimed Aftersun (2022) and is a former student of Solondz in New York. It’s a wide-ranging discussion on independent film-making that does not go into great depth about Happiness specifically but is nevertheless interesting on many broader topics, for example the value of audience testing.
• NEW Interview with Dylan Baker. Dylan Baker, the actor who plays the paedophile Bill Maplewood, describes Solondz’s screenplay for Happiness as “the best script I’d ever read” in this fascinating discussion. He also discusses other performances in the film and his own approach to the role of Bill.
• Trailer. Worth a look to get a sense of how Happiness took audiences aback in 1998; the most extreme aspects of the film are hardly even hinted at.
• English subtitles.
• Essay by screenwriter and novelist Bruce Wagner. (Not received for review.)

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Todd Solondz.
starring: Jane Adams, Elizabeth Ashley, Dylan Baker, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, Jared Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Louise Lasser, Camryn Manheim, Rufus Read & Cynthia Stevenson.