Todd Solondz revisits 'Happiness'

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Todd Solondz in an undated handout photo. Solondz's latest project, "Life During Wartime," is a sequel to "Happiness" that began when he was rewriting a scene from the first film several years ago. (Francisco Roman via The New York Times) -- MAGS OUT/NO SALES; FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY WITH STORY SLUGGED FILM TODD SOLONDZ BY JONAH WEINER. ALL OTHER USE PROHIBITED. --



NEW YORK -- If Todd Solondz, assiduous chronicler of suburban ugliness, perversity and despair, had directed "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," what sort of movie would have invaded theaters?

Would Cameron Diaz's goofy Natalie have started a rocky romance with a man with cerebral palsy? Would Lucy Liu's tough-as-nails Alex have attacked a Planned Parenthood office? Would Bernie Mac's dutiful Bosley have harbored a secret sexual fetish steeped in racial taboos? These are the sorts of themes Solondz has explored in his offbeat, frequently queasy oeuvre, and so he was surprised when, in the early aughts, Drew Barrymore met with him to discuss the possibility of him overseeing the "Charlie's Angels" sequel.

"I loved the idea of doing a movie with these icons of pop culture, and Drew was very excited by what I was proposing," recalls Solondz, 50, one recent morning at a cafe near his Greenwich Village apartment.

Ultimately, Solondz says, he and Barrymore concluded that a studio would never entrust him with a blockbuster franchise. "They wound up making, what, $300 million?" he says with a shrug. "With me, we'd have been lucky to make three."



Solondz, whose new film "Life During Wartime" opens Friday, says he's passed on several studio projects since he became an art-house darling with "Welcome to the Dollhouse," his 1995 Unlike other luminaries of the '90s indie boom -- Steven Soderbergh, say, or Quentin Tarantino -- Solondz is uninterested in making mass entertainment. The stories he wants to tell, he says, lead him down corridors of the soul that are too dark, unglamorous and uncomfortable for the multiplex.

"Life During Wartime," however, may represent a certain softening of his assault. "It's less acid," he says, adding, "maybe it's because I'm older."

The film is a melancholic sequel of sorts to Solondz's "Happiness," from 1998. Played by an all-new cast that includes Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens and Ciar Hinds, many characters from "Happiness" return, reckoning with wounds they inflicted (or received) in the first film.

"You could call it a post-traumatic-stress-disorder movie," says Solondz, who found himself rewriting a scene from "Happiness" a few years ago and eventually expanded it into a follow-up. An obscene crank caller struggles with past urges; a child molester seeks reconciliation with his oldest son; and a lonely telemarketer who killed himself returns in spectral form to haunt the woman who broke his heart.

Solondz's commitment to his misshapen muse has been career-long. After he graduated from New York University's film program, he made his debut in 1989 with "Fear, Anxiety and Depression," an unsuccessful studio comedy he so abhorred that he left the movie business, teaching English, for a time, at a New York school for Russian immigrants.

He returned to filmmaking with "Welcome to the Dollhouse," a modest art-house hit he followed with even darker work like "Happiness," a comedy with pedophilia as a major plot point, and "Storytelling," a movie about the knotty relationship between art and truth telling, notorious for a deeply unpleasant, racially charged sex scene that was censored in America by a superimposed red box.

But Solondz says his approach is, at root, warmhearted.

"The subjects I talk about are on TV every day, in the tabloids every day," he says. "But it's unsettling in my films because it's looked at on a human scale." (Asked why he's drawn to such material, he said, somewhat cagily, "If you're a serious filmmaker, you take up serious issues.")

Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Allen, the obscene caller, in "Happiness," says: "Todd isn't glib. He's truly contemplative. He has huge empathy for these characters. He's not sitting there judging them."

Solondz's movies can be most off-putting because of their complex comic tone -- "Happiness" managed to elicit laughs around the subject of child molestation, for instance, without making light of it.

"There are different kinds of laughter with different meanings," Solondz says. "Is it the laughter of, 'Look at those fools,' of discomfort, of 'I relate'? My movies engage in these antagonistic crosscurrents of what is a valid response to what's on screen. Yes, it's a comedy, but that doesn't mean everything is a joke."

Allison Janney, who plays a divorced woman in "Life During Wartime," says: "Todd doesn't want the comedy to be leaned into in any way. He would pull me back some times when I'd do a wink-wink or push a little for the comedy." Hinds, Allison Janney, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Kenneth Williams, Ally Sheedy and Paul Reubens
Director-writer: Todd Solondz
Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

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