Life During Wartime
The Criterion Collection
In Life During Wartime, independent filmmaker Todd Solondz (Welcome To The Dollhouse) explores contemporary American existence and the nature of forgiveness with his customary dry humor and queasy precision. The film functions as a distorted mirror image of Solondz's acclaimed 1998 dark comedy Happiness, its emotionally stunted characters now groping for the possibility of change in a post-9/11 world. Happiness's grim New Jersey setting is transposed to sunny Florida, but the biggest twist is that new actors fill the roles originated in the earlier film - including Shirley Henderson (Topsy-Turvy), Allison Janney (The Ice Storm), and Ally Sheedy (The Breakfast Club) as alarmingly dissimilar sisters, and Ciarán Hinds (Persuasion) hauntingly embodying a reformed pedophile. Shot in expressionistic tones by cinematographer extraordinaire Ed Lachman (Far From Heaven), Solondz's film finds the humor in the tragic and the tragic in the everyday.
Member Reviews
Not for the faint of heart - luminol
An intrepid resuscitation of Solondz's earlier film "Happiness" aged by 10 years, recast with entirely different actors and moved to where the sun always shines. For example, Ciarán Hinds becomes the Dlyan Baker character (the good doctor); and Michael K Williams becomes the Philip Seymour Hoffman character (Mister heavy breather).
Key phrases? The great weight of the past crushing the life out of the future. Deceit. Suicide. Living with demons. Vengeance. Ghosts begging for closure. The emotional costs of refusing forgiveness---and that's just the first scene.
Acting-wise---the film belongs to an excellent triumvirate of actors formed by Ciarán Hinds. Hinds meets a fellow monster (Charlotte Rampling) in a cocktail bar and questions his estranged son (Chris Marquette) on his sexual proclivities to see how close the apple has fallen to the tree. The other two only have one sequence in the film, but both work their magic. I remember Hinds played a father in the film "Stop-Loss"; there were several occasions he literally could have stole the film from the young lions surrounding him; but steadfastly remained in character. As an actor, Hinds never stoops to mannerisms or acting tricks.
I thought the film only briefly got off the ground near the end. This may be fine wine for connoisseurs of black comedies; but at a certain point as one of the characters carefully described the fool proof, 100% guaranteed way to do yourself in---avoiding that difficult morning after of a botched attempt and permanent physical disability ... I caught myself wondering: "Ish-ka-bob! Why didn't I catch that silly action film playing next door?"
Member Reviews
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Not for the faint of heart - luminol
An intrepid resuscitation of Solondz's earlier film "Happiness" aged by 10 years, recast with entirely different actors and moved to where the sun always shines. For example, Ciarán Hinds becomes the Dlyan Baker character (the good doctor); and Michael K ...