Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10228 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-05-15
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: English, Russian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 134 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
At times brilliant and insightful, at times repellent and false, Happiness is director Todd Solondz's multi-story tale of sex, perversion and loneliness. Plumbing depths of Crumb-like angst and rejection, Solondz won the Cannes International Critics Prize in 1998 and the film was a staple of nearly every critic's Top 10 list. Admirable, shocking, and hilarious for its sarcastic yet strangely empathetic look at consenting adults' confusion between lust and love, the film stares unflinchingly until the audience blinks. But it doesn't stop there. A word of strong caution to parents: One of the main characters, a suburban super dad (played by Dylan Baker), is really a predatory paedophile and there is more than an attempt to paint him as a sympathetic character. Children are used in this film as running gags or, worse, the means to an end. Whether that end is a humorous scene for Solondz or sexual gratification for the rapist becomes largely irrelevant. Happiness is an intelligent, sad film, revelatory and exact at moments. It's also abuse in the guise of art. That's nothing to celebrate. --Keith Simanton

Special Features
4:3 Full Frame
English
Region 2
Dolby Pro Logic English
Dolby Pro Logic
Trailer
TV Spots

Synopsis
Building on the darkly comic angst of WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, Todd Solondz's HAPPINESS conveys suburban desperation and frustration on a larger scale than his previous film. The ensemble cast of characters centers around the lives of three sisters: Joy (Jane Adams), an awkward, naive, and unlucky musician; Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a beautiful, self-obsessed writer; and Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), a conservative housewife who is married to Bill (Dylan Baker), a psychiatrist harboring an unhealthy fascination for young boys. Other dysfunctional characters include the sisters' unhappy parents, Lenny and Mona Jordan (Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser), and the lonely, sex-obsessed Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who lives next to Helen and goes to Bill for therapy.

At once both scathingly funny and shockingly bleak, HAPPINESS addresses subjects that most films are afraid to touch, including pedophilia and masturbation. Unapologetic and unflinching, Solondz's film features bold performances from the entire cast and makes for uneasy but intriguing viewing as it peers behind the fragile facade of the American dream.

Customer Reviews

Happiness
Happiness. What a strange title for a film that is anything but!

It's one of those films that is almost impossible to sum up. It's really a long collection of short interconnecting sketches that detail the personal quirks of a dozen or so characters and the skeletons in their closets they'd probably wouldn't want us to know about.

The main thread of the plot is the three Jordan sisters who are all dealing with their own individual crisis. Firstly we meet Joy, who is having dinner with the boyfriend she's just dumped. Joy is insecure, vulnerable, naive and a little goofy. When Andy, her ex-boyfriend, commits suicide days later and she receives a nasty phone call from Andy's mother, she quits her job and starts to teach immigrants English, only to fall for Russian romantic Vlad, whose partner attacks poor Joy in the staff room when she finds out.

We then meet Allen who is seeing a therapist about his obsession with Helen his neighbour. Helen is one of the Jordan sisters and Allen's therapist is married to the other one, (with us so far?) Allen starts to make dirty phone calls to Helen, but to his amazement Helen actually enjoys them, which just doesn't compute with sad lonely Allen. He has his own problems anyway with his other neighbour, Kristina.

Perhaps the most controversial storyline is concerning the final sister, Trish. As we've said she married to Bill the therapist, but what Trish doesn't know is that Bill is a secret paedophile who secretly drugs his family to take advantage of his son's sleep-over friend. What makes this section even harder to get our heads around is that in every other way Bill is a regular likeable chap, some of the heart to hearts he has with his own son are very tender and sweet, and yet here is a man who represents possibly every parents' worst nightmare.

The film can be laugh out loud funny, sentimental and sometimes quite sickening. There are tender moments and vile moments and even some heartbreaking moments. The performances are to a man absolutely perfect and although I'm not going to single out anyone for special mention all the actors put in totally believable performances and capture you from the first scene onwards.

It's not easy viewing sometimes and there are going to be some viewers who find this to be unwatchable in parts. But that all said it is clever, singular and challenging.

The Best Film of All TIme
This is my favourite film and, if you open your mind just a little bit, you will be greatly rewarded.

Yes, this movie contains child rape, murder, masturbation, paeodophelia etc. but the film is as masterful as it is because it already assumes the audience knows that these things are bad. This is a rare film that will not preach to your "inner conscience" and respects its' audience.

An connecting tale of family disfunction and sexual inadequacy all joined Short Cuts/ Magnolia/ Pulp Fiction style by one or two events is centrally about three daughters, one a terminally smiling but incredibly unfulfilled social worker (Jane Adams), another an unknowing housewife (Cynthia Stevenson) to a paeodophile and the "succesful" one, a beautiful poet with many sexual conquests but feels emotionally empty (Lara Flynn Boyle) and their parents' (Ben Gazzera and Louise Lasser) breakdown of a thirty-year marriage. The film shows all of these (outwardly) normal people, yet many other detailed and brilliant characters, on their search for fulfilment, love and happiness.

Todd Solondz's incredibly ambitious and emotially shattering third film (see also his last: Welcome to the Dollhouse, almost perfect) is a masterpiece, not only of genius scriptwriting that makes you want to laugh, scream, cry and burn the film all in a single line, but also some of the most beautifully underplayed direction, unlike Sam Mendes' recent Oscar winning helming. The relationships are perfectly portayed with the ending scene between Bill, the paeodophile, and his betrayed son one of the most heart wrenching in cinema history.

The acting is completely perfect. From Jon Lovitz's (yes, Jon Lovitz) initially confusing breakdown at the outset to the now eponymous Phillip Seymour Hoffman's phone sex pervert and Dylan Baker's psychiatrist paeodophile, every one would, in a perfect world, take home Oscars.

Instances in this film may make you want to stop watching and damn the film for filth. Don't. This is one of few masterpieces to come out of America in the last decade. Many will not have the stomach for anything quite so perverse but it simply demands to be seen. Purely unmissable.

Not for the Tame of Heart
This smacks a bit of a director (Solondz)out to make something of a splash for himself. An attention-getting, semaphore-waving, "hey looky here how cutting edge, mod, hip, shoot from the hip, auteur I can be!" On the other hand, it's a pretty darned well directed movie, with many carefully-crafted, dramatic and dark comic vignettes, that don't quite add up to a great sum total.

Without going into the lurid details of what makes this movie so controversial (read any other review to get the idea), Solondz' main strength would appear to be his allowing his excellent ensemble cast the latitude to fully investigate their roles. Even Jon Lovitz, not exactly what one would usually think of when the word "method acting" comes up, delivers a delightfully unrestrained, semi-monologue at the beginning of the film that serves as the keynote address in the convention of the mad that is to follow. Perfect delivery. Perfect timing. Nice payoff.

Self-indulgent or not, the film will definitely hold your interest (even when you wish it wouldn't) and have you believing in the characters and the storyline. Don't watch with Grandma and the kids, unless you have an even more bizarre and dysfunctional family than the one depicted here.

BEK