Elegant opening credits, written like calligraphy on a wedding invitation, yield to a couple in blunt close-up—unhappy, interracial, tearfully celebrating their anniversary in a shopping-mall restaurant. After an unfathomable exchange, he presents her with an antique bowl found on eBay and, after reciting a guffaw-worthy litany of sins, promises to turn over a new leaf. The waitress appears, recognizes the sinner, freaks out and spits in his tearful face. Violins herald the title: Life During Wartime.
Paul Reubens and
Shirley Henderson
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Life During Wartime
Written and directed by Todd Solondz. Starring Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, Shirley Henderson, Dylan Snyder, Ciarán Hinds, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Lerner and Paul Reubens.
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Daring the discomfited viewer to laugh at shame and suffering, and then wonder why we're laughing, Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons—race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel and, his old favorite, pedophilia.
Life During Wartime's opening echoes that of Solondz's relentlessly miserablist comedy Happiness (1998), to which the new movie is both sequel and remake. The three Jordan sisters—banal Trish, the self-satisfied mom; high-strung Helen, the bitchy career gal; and hapless Joy, the professional bleeding heart—are back, albeit played by an alternate trio of actresses (Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy and Shirley Henderson, respectively). Trish has relocated from suburban New Jersey to South Florida, where fragile little Joy arrives for a visit.
Newly separated from her husband, Joy is increasingly disassociated. Trish, however, is only a smidge chastened—even though Happiness ended, a decade or so before, with her model husband, Bill, en route to prison for drugging and raping several of his son Billy's fifth-grade classmates. Now, Billy is in college, and Bill (Ciarán Hinds) is about to be released just as younger son Timmy (Dylan Snyder), who's been told his father is dead, is preparing to become a man with a bar mitzvah speech full of quasi-religious masochistic imagery. Timmy is a familiar Solondz child: literal-minded, self-absorbed and very anxious.
Domestic melodrama is Solondz's meat. Assorted dreams and hallucinations, embarrassing parent-child interactions and other forms of intimacy are presented with affectless objectivity. Family relations are never less than fraught, and sex is always scary. Much of the interaction is excruciatingly alienated. Told by the kids in school that his dad is alive and pervy, Timmy asks his mother to explain homosexual sex. Her response sets up for the tragicomedy to follow.
Solondz understands the misery of children. The pitiful longing for a father articulated by both of Bill's sons is, for him, the essence of religion. Seldom straying beyond the confines of a Jewish family, he is all too aware that suffering does not ennoble. But does the filmmaker have compassion or contempt for his characters? Is it possible to feel both? A humanist he's not, but he does seem allergic to hypocrisy.
In Happiness, Solondz sought to test the limits of audience tolerance by making a child molester the most sympathetic character in a cast of gargoyles. Life During Wartime shifts the sin from pedophilia to a phobic fear of pedophilia. I don't think this movie is his apology for Happiness, but given its equivocating title, perhaps he's thinking of it. Life During Wartime's key scene is the sexual encounter between newly released Bill and the lonely, leathery, self-described monster (Charlotte Rampling) he picks up in a South Beach bar. Where the pedophile argues for understanding and forgiveness, his bedmate tells him that only losers expect the latter.
Life During Wartime is full of apologies, only one of which is even partially accepted. The existential situation of atonement made and unaccepted goes to the heart of Solondz's theology: The expression of remorse is crucial. As a onetime yeshiva student, the filmmaker was taught that while it is incumbent upon a pious Jew to atone, only the Creator of the Universe can truly forgive.
However distasteful, Solondz's movies are genuinely philosophical. Appearing for the third time in a Solondz movie, the hyper-rational computer nerd Mark Wiener functions in the filmmaker's oeuvre as the increasingly Asperger'd voice of experience. Toward the end of Life During Wartime, Mark responds to Timmy's increasingly shrill attempt to puzzle out the nature of forgiveness.
Mark's logical conclusion is that the phrase "forgive and forget" is a meaningless contradiction. To forget a wrong is to nullify the act of forgiveness, and yet forgetting is ultimately the most absolute form of forgiving. Or, as the paradox-minded Franz Kafka put it, "The Messiah will arrive only when he is no longer needed."
