Word: solondz
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...film is Todd Solondz's Happiness, winner of the International Critics' Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival and already the fall's succes de scandale. "I realize some of the material is shocking," Solondz told TIME, "but it's out there in the media every day. Celebrities are always talking about their own abuse. TV news programs discuss the atrocities of children being killed or raped. It has a freak-show quality; it's titillating. Still, I don't think anybody could use the word titillating about my movie. I hope people see there's a certain...integrity...
...right. The sick kick of the scenes in Happiness is integral to the pageant of misery and yearning--of the all-American pursuit of happiness, in forms simple or bizarre--that is Solondz's great theme. His intent, to cleanse by shocking, is just as important. In an age of creeping movie sameness, Happiness resounds as a declaration of independence...
...narrowed his focus from that film's gang of five to a two-hander in Apt Pupil, from a Stephen King story. The other three directors have bought a big canvas (at a cut rate) and splashed strange people on it till it's as busy as a Bruegel. Solondz has a dozen major characters trudging through Happiness. Stanley Tucci, the co-writer, co-director and star of everyone's favorite Italian-food film, Big Night, has created a shipful of fools in his farce The Impostors. Todd Haynes, known for his furtive, paranoid parables Poison and Safe, goes wide...
Happiness doesn't easily admit to comparisons; though it carries echoes of Manhattan, Nashville and Hartley's pictures, it has a unique equipoise of soap opera and slasher film. After Solondz's scabrous little preteen angstathon, Welcome to the Dollhouse, earned more than $4 million on a budget of $800,000, October Films sponsored his next, $3 million project. But October was pressured this summer by its corporate parent, Universal Pictures, to dump the film. It will be released, unrated, by its own production company...
...evil." But the spookiest character, Gazzara's, is the man who feels nothing, is in love with no one, does not pursue happiness. And the sweetest, awfullest moments are in the connection between a normal kid (brave Rufus Read) and his mad, bad dad. "He's not a demon," Solondz says of the father; "he's possessed by a demon. He's a predator--and a tragic figure who loves...