Solondz's higher budget and epic-length follow up to Welcome to the Dollhouse' provokes much the same confused response, in that you are never sure if you are meant to be laughing or not. It traces a few days in the lives of some of the most piteous characters ever committed to celluloid, dysfunctional in their relationships with one another, their sexuality and their aspirations. The number of characters involved are responsible for the lengthy running time, because aside from a dominant story involving the paedophile activities of one of them, the actual sub-stories which occur are generally low key and trivial. This is not a criticism, because Solondz has obviously set out to portray a suburban milieu which is poorly represented by the US mainstream. What is questionable is whether subject such as paedophilia should be treated as comedy. Given the brouhaha which arose over the release of Adrian Lyne's Lolita' last year, I'm amazed that the subject has come up in so many recent films. Similar to Class Trip' and Festen', Happiness' treats it more as a plot device than a serious matter, but it is not clear what sort of reaction Solondz is trying to elicit here. The scenes with father and son discussing masturbation were met with stony faced silence and a few embarrassed sniggers in the audience with which I was sitting: There must be more to black comedy than mere taboo breaking? On the whole though, the rest of the film is funny and well-made, and succeeds because the characters are recognisably human, something which Neil LaBute should take note of after the depressingly unamusing misanthropy of Your Friends and Neighbours'. Aside from a few instances where it just goes too far, Happiness' is an entertaining film, but I'd like to believe that this schadenfreude' approach to comedy is going to soon run out of mileage.
