Melbourne International Film Festival: If you’re even remotely familiar with his work, then you won’t be surprised to know that the title of Todd Solondz’s latest bleakly comic moral debate – Life During Wartime – is a jibe. The idea that a war, let alone nearly any other outside event, could penetrate the semi-deluded or simply squalid mindsets of these characters is nearly as funny as some of the awkward conversations that pepper the American auteur’s latest independent feature. The real war, in this film, is to bridge the distance between good intentions and bad outcomes; most of the characters fall short.
Solondz is routinely written off as a misanthrope, but that’s only half right. He’s genuinely committed to these characters, and it’s his sense of identification that allows him to pepper their conversations with barbs that are meant to be statements of affection. His problem, as ever, is arranging the ensemble’s distress into the service of his theme. As explicated by 12-year-old Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder), who is preparing a speech for his Bar Mitzvah, the film is concerned with forgiveness, although typically characters who ask for it don’t receive it and those who accept it were never really offered it.
Various tics of Solondz’s endure: he’s still piqued by commercial success, with one character – former novelist Helen (Ally Sheedy) – now a successful Los Angeles screenwriter who is perpetually indignant when not having noisy sex with Keanu Reeves (it’s heard off screen). It’s not the most piercing of satire, although Sheedy absolutely bristles with narcissistic rage, especially given that Life During Wartime is that most Hollywood of events: a sequel. It is a successor (of sorts) to 1998’s Happiness, which remains the most admired work of Solondz’s career.
Of course, being Solondz no-one returns to play their role. Sisters Helen, Joy and Trish were originally played by Lara Flynn Boyle, Jane Adams and Cynthia Stevenson, now it’s respectively Sheedy, Shirley Henderson and Alison Janney. The role of Allen, a serial phone call abuser, appears to have memorably passed from Philip Seymour Hoffman to The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams – even the ghost of Joy’s former boyfriend has moved on, with Paul Reubens replacing Jon Lovitz. In some cases the transformation is appropriate: Happiness’ respectable dad turned paedophile was played by the genial Dylan Baker, but after emerging from prison the part now belongs to the altogether more menacing Ciaran Hinds.
Sexual gratification – usually selfish, sordid and fleeting – was at the centre of much of what transpired in Happiness, but 12 years on the filmmaker is more interested in the emotional desires of his characters. There are times that Solondz, with his embrace of staggeringly kitsch suburban design, makes you think that it was he that invented the comedy of social cruelty subsequently traded on Larry David; giddy from a first date, Trish happily frames her physical reaction to Timmy, her son, in the most unsuitable of language.
Hinds’ Bill seeks out his family, even though his two younger children with Trish have been told he’s long been dead (if he was dead he’d be more demonstrative – the ghosts that repeatedly visit Joy turn out to be either horny or vengeful). But once he’s encountered the self-loathing Jacqueline (Charlotte Rampling) he has neither ambition nor anger. Life During Wartime lags towards the close, but that could be a result of Solondz’s unfamiliarity with the seeds of hopefulness.
The film ends with Timmy trying to make amends for a disastrous misunderstanding, whereas Happiness ended with the bleak site of the family patriarch, played by Ben Gazzara then and unsighted this time, calmly ignoring his doctor’s advice and overly salting his food in order to speed up his death. Such bleakness, developed as a counterpoint to sexual need, has no lasting place in Life During Wartime. It instead suggests that if these flawed protagonists can find a thread of hope, then there’s a chance for all of us.
