Happiness (1998)

Comedy, Drama

Director: Todd Solondz
Writer: Todd Solondz
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jane Adams, Jon Lovitz, Dylan Baker

Todd Solondz’s twisted comedy-drama Happiness is a highly funny yet disturbingly upsetting film.

Centered around three sisters and their disappointing lives, it moves back and forth between several stories, which often link up, telling the story of people who seek happiness and fulfillment, but, due to their desperate and depraved nature, fail at achieving them. We see a pedophile father who wants to molest his son's friends, an creepy, unhappy and depressed loner who makes obscene phone calls to the woman across the hall, a teacher who only dates losers, an attractive and successful writer who can't get a man to love her and gets aroused by disturbing phone calls from strangers, an elderly couple who get separated after 40 years of marriage, but won't get divorced, and a kid who, throughout the entire film, attempts to make himself ejaculate.

Rejected by the Sundance Film Festival for allegedly being too disagreeable, Happiness is clearly not a film for most people. However, for those that can handle disturbing content, Happiness is one of the funniest and most powerful dark comedies ever.

Plot summary from IMDb: When a young woman rejects her current overweight suitor in a restaurant, he unexpectedly places a curse on her. The film then moves on to her sisters. One is a happily married woman with a psychiatrist husband and three kids. Unfortunately the husband develops an unnatural fascination for his 11 year old son's male classmates, fantasizes about mass killing in a park, and masturbates to teen magazines. One of his patients has an unrequited fascination for the third sister. Meanwhile the apparently stable 40 year marriage of the sister's parents suddenly unravels when he decides he has had enough and wants to live a hermit's life in Florida. Obviously, the whole movie is slightly warped in its viewpoint and certainly presents abnormal relationships among all of its parties.

Awards: Nominated for 1 Golden Globe. Another 13 wins & 19 nominations.
Runtime: 134 min
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