Happiness

Plot synopsis:
Happiness is an ensemble drama that skips around between multiple storylines. The protagonist, Joy, is the youngest of three sisters. The film opens with her breaking up with a man. He responds with unreasonably malicious vitriol and ultimately takes his own life a few days later. In an attempt to contribute more to society she decides to work at a refugee education center, where she is despised by her students for being a scab during the teachers strike. The only student who is kind to her seduces her only to rob her and then request $1,000 (to which she complies).Joys middle sister, Trish, is a housewife who claims to be happily married, and casually remarks to Joy how their entire family assumes that Joy will be a terrible failure. Trishs husband, Bill is a therapist and, in addition to instructing their son how to masturbate and having fantasies about going on shooting sprees, is also a pedophile. He develops a fixation on Johnny, a friend of their son and eventually sodomizes him after drugging his entire family when Johnny is sleeping over. Bill later rapes another of his sons friends and is eventually accused and indicted.Joys eldest sister, Helen is a conceited author who writes fiction that she herself recognizes as empty and exploitative. She desires to know what it is like to be raped and abused. Coincidentally, her neighbor Allens hobby is making obscene phone calls to women (including Joy) while masturbating. Allen eventually calls Helen and she unexpectedly demands that he meet her. He agrees and when she discovers that he is her homely, shy neighbor she rejects his advances and demands that he leave. Allens feelings of loneliness and isolation, which he expounds upon in great detail to Bill, his therapist, are eventually quelled when he finally pays attention to Kristina, another tenant who lives down the hall. While on a date with her, Kristina confides in Allen that she was raped by the doorman of their building. Subsequently she broke his neck, chopped his body into pieces, placed the pieces into Ziploc bags and stored them in her freezer. She has been smuggling them out of the building piece by piece for the last week.Joy's parents are also unhappy. Her dad separates from her mother but upon trying to have sex with another woman, discovers that he simply cannot feel any emotion for anyone or anything. The end of the movie finds the three sisters sitting at dinner with the parents, everyone condescending to Joy. Meanwhile Trishs son is out on the balcony and finally, at long last, successfully masturbates. The dog races over to lick up the ejaculate only to return to the dinner table and lick Trish on the mouth. The boy races into the kitchen and proudly declares, I came!

Tags: pornographic, comedy, dark, cult, flashback, humor, satire

Review:
I wasn't going to write a comment for this one, but after reading all the nasty things said about it, and considering that _Happiness_ was the basis for one of my final undergraduate philosophy papers, I feel a duty to defend it.First of all, what you've heard is true: this movie is very graphic and almost impossible to sit through without covering your eyes at least once.
There are moments of great hope in this movie, when you think misery may finally give way to happiness.
There are only a handful of films that have a distinct polarizing affect on the audience--A Clockwork Orange, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and I would even lump in American Beauty--these are movies you either get, or you don't.
The subject matter is truly unsettling--a parental figure, respected in his community, does some horrible things, and this is the main reason why so many people have a hard time with this movie.
Involving a lonely sister, a sister with a good family life, a paedophile, a telephone sex pest and an elderly couple breaking up, the film follows their short stories through whatever it takes them.I remember hearing this film reviewed as being pretty good, but it was pointed out by the critic that it was far from a movie to take a first date to!
Special mention should go to Lovitz for a great little cameo that opens the film  in 4 minutes he gives a better performance than I have seen him give anywhere else.Overall this film is not an easy, fun film to watch but it is very well written even if some of the threads do not engage as much as the others.
It's tough to admit that we may have something in common with a Suburban pedophile, a pathetic dreamer, a pretentious literary snob or a obscene telephone sex stalker and one of the most frightening ideas ever put on film is here: Solondz makes plausible the people we view as being "sick" or generally look down upon aren't that much different than us.
"Happiness" was written and directed by Todd Solondz, the mind behind the film "Welcome to the Dollhouse", a film that was fantastic but really hard to watch if the viewer has any kind of heart.
"Happiness" follows in the same vein, though this time, instead of centering around one character, Solondz puts a New Jersey family at the center of the film and develops new characters through their relationship with the family.Overseeing the family is Mona Jordan (Lasser), the matriarch of the family who has just been told by her husband that he no longer loves her.
Another neighbor, Kristina (Manheim) is an insecure, quiet woman who is constantly trying to befriend Allen, possibly as a love interest.There is quite a cast of characters to this ensemble picture, and the story lines become intricate and increasingly more complicated as the film progresses.
Baker was the clear star of the film in my opinion, but the performances of every person in the cast were fantastic as well, particularly the young boy who played Baker's oldest son.As I stated earlier, "Happiness" is rife with irony because on the surface, everyone is miserable.
It's not an easy film to watch, and it's not an entirely pleasant one to watch at times, but it is truly a piece of genius with the way it is intricately put together; envision trying to glue tiny shards of crystal into place with a tweezers  the characters in "Happiness" are as fragile and ready to shatter at any moment, whether they can see it for themselves or not.
Happiness acknowledges this fact, in the character of family man/psychiatrist Bill Maplewood.Loneliness, rage, sexual repression/obsession, disintegrating marriages, sadly sophisticated children, relationships built upon artifice, this film has it all.
It's Prozac Cinema at its best: try to be on an even keel when pressing 'play'.Spouses, parents and children seem to be communicating across a void.After viewing Happiness for the second time, I realized that the entire soundtrack intentionally consisted of melodramatic, and/or ultra perky canned music: a perfectly ironical compliment and contrast in style with the strong, harsh, quirky film scenes.Presentation: director Solondz sets up the viewer for traditional father/son talk scenes, via mood and pseudo canned music: giving the subject matter and dialogue all the more impact.
Happiness - which centres around the lives of three sisters - Joy who's permanently unlucky in love, Helen a successful poet whose next door neighbour is obsessed with her and phones to explain this in graphic detail and finally there's Trish who has it all, a big house, a couple of kids and a successful psychiatrist husband who himself harbours uncontrollable urges.The sisters are all somewhat fractured of mind - for example Lara Flyn Boyle's character plays an author suffering writers block bemoaning the fact that she wasn't abused as a child that could lend her work some authenticity - so she's delighted when she gets an obscene phone from a one of the many fat ugly sex obsessed dysfunctioning American neurotics that seem to be this seasons slim sexy movie star successes.
Open and willing for some perverted notion to crawl right in...Directed by Todd Solondz Happiness is a slice of American life that isn't normally dealt with this honesty, making it a compelling watch, which will both amuse and seriously disturb for its two hours and fifteen minutes running time.
American Beauty is a Hollywood mainstream cop out of what Happiness had the real guts to say about life.Anyone who doesn't like this movie is living with their head in the sand and has forgotten all the little "sordid" details from their own lives.
It's so hard for them to view because it throws their own lives right up at them on the screen.I think this movie is incredible, and one of the best films ever made.
It says something that the movie's most human, sympathetic character is a child molester.And, yes, it's a comedy - often a very, very funny one.
Joy (Jane Adams) is a born loser who drifts through a series of menial jobs and drives her boyfriend to suicide; her sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is so self-absorbed that she thinks her biggest problem is that everyone loves her too much; her neighbor Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) can only connect to people by making obscene phone calls; and Bill (Dylan Baker), his therapist and Joy and Helen's brother-in-law, is a pedophile who rapes two of his 11-year-old son's friends.
It's hard to watch, but it's an acting master class and absolutely fearless film-making.This is a real actor's movie; the cast gives career-best performances.
Adams is sad and sweet as the luckless Helen, the closest thing the movie has to a moral center, while Boyle is priceless as the contemptible Helen, swanning around as if waiting for the world to thank her for being born."Happiness" is the epitome of "acquired taste" - its humor is bitter, acidic and often cruel, and it takes real joy in offending the audience.
Happiness is a gruesome and uncomfortable drama about sexual dysfunction, focusing mainly on three characters: a 30-something woman who lives with her parents and attracts romantic disaster; a schlubby office drone who can't speak to his sexy neighbor so he masturbates while making obscene phone calls; and a seemingly normal therapist who lusts after his son's pre-pubescent friends.
Happiness is an interesting movie but it wasn't funny or entertaining in the traditional sense of the word and it's nothing I'd ever want to see again.At times, the film felt like a hollow exercise in wallowing in the misery of the characters; I imagined the main protagonists as ants and the writer/director sitting there with a magnifying glass, making them burn.
Really, Happiness reminded me of The Ice Storm, except that movie addressed similar themes in an intelligent way with real characters and asked us to take the situation seriously.
Everyone has had these moments at one point or another in their lives and now here's the hot-faced shame and moral nausea experienced vicariously through a parade of terrible, terrible people, not parsed out by blessed months or years between horrifying events as one would hopefully find in real life, but non-stop for however many minutes this film lasts.
The whole film is like an awkward date with a complete stranger where neither says anything beyond the most placid of banalities and you're both happy to leave after the main course.The worst thing is that I cannot deny this film the right to exist.
I stumbled upon this gem during one of my numerous internet research extravaganzas and boy was I pleased.Happiness is a dark comedy, and for most it's brutal to sit through, but if you enjoy crude humor this movie is perfect.The plot is pretty basic, three sisters and their encounters in New Jersey.When I look at a movie critically, I usually weed out all the propaganda and controversy.
The Lovitz character is one of many who are disappointed with their current life situation, but he is the only one who can conjure up any sort of sympathy.Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays the nebbish Allen, a lonely man who gets off on thoughts of his sultry neighbor, Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), and making prank phone calls.
Allen confides his secrets to Dr. Mapplewood, but Bill has a secret of his own: an insatiable lust for young boys.Happiness wants to be an ironic comedy about life, but the film is too heavy handed to be found funny.
But just the fact that the film feels the need to place her in such a situation proves how miserable the movie really wants to be.
You won't be bored but you certainly will not be enlightened.On another note, I very strongly recommend the director's prior film, "Welcome to the Dollhouse" which is quite easily one of the greatest and most perceptive movies about  teenagers..
In "Happiness", director Todd Solondz manages to craft a true masterpiece that will definitely make some people a bit too uncomfortable to really like or enjoy.
This movie, "Happiness", provides an excellent example of why no one should ever believe that the Academy Awards actually represent an honest view of the best films made in any given year.
This means that films that tackle gritty subjects like molestation must never be considered as award worthy lest these self appointed groups get offended.If you enjoy incredibly great script writing, direction and acting, this is a movie for you.
All the characters in the film apart from two little boys who are raped are obsessed by sex like maniacs, including the eleven year-old.
I kept saying "no way, that isn't what would happen" If it had be done to the humorous extreme - it would have be funny but instead I came away feeling a bit ill and frustrated for having wasted my time..
It depicts several people causing and experiencing suffering, and then eventually the credits roll.I've seen other films that had no storyline, some of which I think were very good, so when I say that Happiness has no plot, I don't mean it as a criticism.
It is this revealing of the sad and beautiful complexity beneath our common human suffering that makes these films great.In Happiness, I saw none of this revelation.
Even when supposedly deeper motives were revealed, these too proved to be equally shallow and equally deformed.The question that immediately rose to mind upon watching Happiness was "why?" Why did Todd Solondz make this movie?
The first is that he thinks that watching people suffer in the way presented in this film is funny.
If so, I would like to say to Solondz, and to those people who have described Happiness as a comedy, "please seek out the help of a good counsellor or caring friend, because right now you are very, very lost".
Such scenes can be laughed only in the absence of empathy, and without empathy, we're less than human and life is little more than a confused nightmare.The second possibility is that Solondz wanted to inflict the disturbing content of this movie on audiences as a form of violence.
Doomed relationships, broken dreams, Paedophilia, adolescence, family/sibling relationships, frustration, desperation, sexual frustration, murder, Rape, emptiness & loneliness are just some of the themes dealt with here but little in the way of happiness.Its hard to descibe the film, you just need to watch it really to make up your own mind.
The second sister, Helen Jordan(Lara Flynn Boyle) is a successful writer who is attractive and has good ideas, but her neighbor, Allen(Philip Seymour Hoffman) makes obscene phone calls to her and she happens to be turned on by the disturbing threats due to a recent urge to be dominated.
Like Todd Solondz's WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, his following film is about a person or persons who want things that they can't have.
But this film has a clever and original style with its horrifying characters, its shocking dialog, its utter bleakness, rounding up with one of the most disgusting and heartbreaking endings of movie history..
It is very funny and yes at times serious and hard to watch but if the cinema were filled with more of these kind of movies it would be better for it.
If you like dramas with black humour and are tired of watching bad actors overact in predictable movies, see this film..
And he wasn't even sure about the Universe..) Besides there are a lot of films that deal with similar (disturbing) subjects (sex, human behaviour) with much more style (and a good story), such as: Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange, Twelve monkeys, Tokyo fist, Thesis, Braindead (this one at least made me laugh), 8mm, Audition and so on...
His character is aware of the depraved nature of his being yet he functions as a good parent, a respected member of society yet underneath he admits he's sick meanwhile his wife ironically thinks they have a perfect life and while Trish lives a life of constant comparison to one sister who is a success story and another who is a failure.
She would love me back." Is this line full of deep despair but more importantly irony as Allen gratifies his sexual desires by cold calling random women speaking to them in degrading ways to satisfy his sexual needs yet he can't even say more than a hello in person.Even Joy's character, one of sadness and melancholy where nothing seems to go right for her seems to have been doomed right from the beginning for just having the name Joy. Happiness is a great movie overall, a great cast and it serves as unique work of cinema as there aren't many films like it.How do you feel at the end?, well unlike Bill's character after his dream, you don't wake up happy, feeling good.you get very depressed, because you're back living in reality..
It looks at the lives in and out of different characters, mostly it examines what makes them happy when it comes life, relationships, and intimate pleasure.
Happiness is a story of three sisters; Joy, Trish and Helen, and weaves in characters who are a part their life.
Happiness makes thick-skinned audiences squeamish, but it resonates with you for days like many films don't and is a must see if you can handle the subject matter..
Happiness (1998)A slightly surreal and unhappy movie, a dark comedy, and overall intriguing.Imagine a mixture of really believable, everyday people, a doctor and his family doing things like eating supper and talking about sweet things before bedtime, or a man working at his desk who talks casually to a neighbor across the hall..
If you ignore that stupid detail the movie is a number of different stories tied to together by one dinner table/family in search of "Happiness" in relationships, but since they are so very very messed up in the head, they tend to attract what they are.Some of the thematic elements are going to sicken or disturb sensitive viewers, so don't watch it if you are easily offended..
however, after that it just turned into every other self indulgent sex comedy I've ever seen, drawing upon such great laughs as pedophilia (ha!) and gay rape (haha!)  the characters were paper thin, the jokes were raunchy, the conclusion was laughable (in the bad way) all in all a very very poor film.
Solondz does a fabulous job of releasing information about the main characters, a little at a time, until, by the end of the movie, each layer of the onion has been completely removed.
Happiness isn't an easy movie to watch;  but, it's a film of profound psychological insight and depth.
Films like There's Something About Mary, American Pie and even one hilarious scene in 1994's Serial Mom was just laugh out loud funny.Unfortuanately, I cannot say the same for this movie.
If I had to say something positive about Happiness, it would be that it's different from most other movies I've ever seen and that it had a few surreal moments that were quite funny and yet disturbing at the same time.
However, it is far from consistent and in general, being different doesn't constitute a good movie in my eyes.Happiness is more like a series of unrelated sketches than an attempt at a cohesive, meaningful film.
(Remember this future directors, less is more.)In short, if you think you want to see this movie, watch American Beauty instead..
I was expecting a painful movie to watch, but in the good way: where you can really relate to the pain that the characters go through.
It's extremely rare for me not to see a movie through to the end, but it was simply torture to watch the very long (10+ minute) scenes where not all that much happened and I started forgetting about all of the other characters.Things happened, but with no insight into why they happened.