Happiness [DVD]

I’ve always enjoyed ‘Happiness,’ despite asking myself WHY I ever bothered to watch it after every single viewing. Yes, the title is deliberately ironic as there is barely a trace of anything vaguely happy in the entire mover, but then it knows that. It’s safe to say that ‘Happiness’ is definitely not a ‘feel-good’ film and you really do need to know what you’re in for before you sit down to invest over two hours with this manic depressive beast of a movie.I suppose you could call it an ‘ensemble’ piece as there are numerous characters all woven together around the three central characters who are sisters all at various stages of adulthood and doing their best to either live with what’s become their lot in life, or desperately try to change it. It’s basically a family drama, but with a few – very – dark helpings of black humour. However, the overriding thing to say about ‘Happiness’ is that it deals with the worst themes you can probably think of and presents them in a way that forces you to think about those who it’s easy to despise without a second thought. Therefore, you don’t just have to be in the mood for something depressing, but also something that really goes into areas of human nature that you would probably not like to dwell on, most notably child abuse.‘Happiness’ is a film that will certainly leave an impact on you, even if it’s just you swearing you will never watch something like that again. However, for all the darkness and realism it presents, I have watched it about three times and I think it’s a worthy film. The performances are all excellent. You’d be hard put to it to find a weak link among the cast. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is naturally excellent, but perhaps the hardest role falls to Dylan Baker who plays possibly one of the most (bizarrely!) relatable child molesters you’ve ever met. It must have been a horrible role for him and he plays it to perfection.Like I say, don’t expect feel-good and get ready for a rough ride. But, if you’re in the mood for something as deep as this it will certainly make you wonder who’s sitting opposite you and what goes on behind the façade of family-friendly life.

This film won the Cannes Critics prize in 1998. It is an unflinching look at the lives of dysfunctional people, focusing primarily on the lives of 3 sisters (adults) and their elderly parents. Through a series of vignettes we are introduced to other characters e.g. Philip Seymour Hoffman. The film is controversial, and apparently alot of famous film critics love it.In this film there is family breakdown, psychoanalysis, adult magazines, divorce, masturb- one handed love, stalking, perversion, .....and boredom. The film is interesting, and dull at times. The pace is very slow; many scenes drag on for ages and barely anything happens. In regard to the characters, they really are a hideous group of people and the type of people you would not like to be stuck in a lift with. They are dull, boring, creepy, pathetic and unlikeable, and you never feel any sympathy towards them.The cinematography is very flat and makes the film resemble a TV movie ergo it must have been low budget. I have a varied taste in films, from big budget blockbusters to no-budget arthouse films, and I'm going to be hideously uncool by saying that this film is a tedious look at the lives of a group of odd-ball people. Brave film-making; it's like a curate's egg.7/10

Never before has a film addressed "coming of age" quite so literally.This is a dark, dark comedy: the sort of thing that might emanate from the deepest circle of the hell of Woody Allen's nightmares. The titular happiness, in case you were wondering, is colossally ironic. This is a story of loosely related individuals - more loosely related than you'd expect given most relations are of the blood or marital sort - all of whom are profoundly at odds with themselves and their environment. Much of their collected oddness manifests itself in sexual dysfunction of one sort or another, but of a far deeper and sicker kind than is commonly found in Woody Allen's material. Indeed, by comparison Allen's neuroticism seems positively winsome.These people are deeply, darkly, fatally neurotic: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who seems to revel in these kinds of parts, an overweight, greasy, bespectacled misogynist who has unspeakable fantasies, fantasies which he nonetheless brazenly speaks about, to his shrink and to his victims, through inept crank calls. His shrink Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) is a paedophile. Maplewood is married to Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) a woman whose hi-tensile smugness betrays a fundamental insecurity about her place in the world. Trish doesn't know of, but we suspect she may fear for, her husband's ghastly proclivities. Trish has two sisters who, in turn, field Allen's crank calls, and seem to enjoy them. The sisters' parents, holed up in a Florida condo, see their Marriage as a loveless contractual bind.In the middle of it all is a teenaged boy, Timmy (Justin Elvin), Trish and Bill's son, who is fruitlessly willing on the onset of his own puberty, providing his father a running commentary. His father darkly enjoys.Could the set-up be any more neurotic?The narrative gradually displaces itself from early focus on Allen towards the Bill, at which point whatever tacky residue of humour the film had retained is jettisoned and we are let into the paedophile's modus operandi. From there, for thirty minutes, Happiness is unrelentingly grim. Relief comes in the form of the travails of the third sister Joy (Jane Adams), a chronically frustrated spinster, who has stumbled into the arms of a Russian taxi driver (Jared Harris), whom we are invited to like for his uncluttered and direct approach to life, but who also turns out to be a monstrous pig.The film has as its climax a harrowing exchange between Timmy and his father, now exposed as a paedophile, in which Timmy interrogates Bill about his sexual proclivities and his father answers him calmly and directly. It really is a striking sequence, but as with much of the film, it is thoroughly contrived.These characters are archetypes we recognise as being profoundly American. Had the film been located anywhere else, the screenplay could would have seemed utterly implausible: you just can't imagine Europeans, let alone anyone else, being this self-involved.Black humour returns at a stroke in the final scene, in a scene which will have you bent over in mirth or nausea depending on your, well, taste for such things. It seems a little bit of a cheap shot, though that's clearly not how Timmy will have felt about it.Olly Buxton