LIFE DURING WARTIME (Todd Solondz 2010)

[Chris Knipp]

This review originally appeared in the Festival Coverage section.

Todd Solondz: LIFE DURING WARTIME (2010)

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/7804/ldwaj.jpg
ALLISON JANEY AND DYLAN SNYDER IN LIFE DURING WARTIME

Laugh-to-keep-from-crying

There's not much that Todd Solondz doesn't excel at as a filmmaker in this new work, perhaps making up titles. Life During Wartime doesn't tell you much, except it means all life is wartime. Above all it's about the screenplay, and this one is as dazzling, shocking, and packed with riveting dialogue as Pulp Fiction's, but without the violence. (The violence is repressed, as in ordinary life.) From the first scene between Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams of The Wire) and Joy (English actress Shirley Henderson), a one-year wedding anniversary dinner in a restaurant when she discovers the man she's married is still a pervert (she flees back to her mother and sisters in Florida and California), the dialogue is cranked up as in A Clockwork Orange to an acid-trip intensity. Solondz gets the maximum from his actors, and has assembled a fascinating cast. Even the brief turns are memorable, such as those of Charlotte Rampling as Jacqueline, a desperate woman in need of sex, and Paul Reubens, of Peewee Herman fame, as Joy's deceased former suitor Andy, who reappears to her for several troubling conversations.

The images, bright and yellow-tinged, are heightened but not caricatural versions of everyday Americana, ranging from a middle-class Florida kitchen to a fab Hollywood pad. The sense of precise control the director achieves overlays and contrasts with the edge of hysteria in the characters' emotional lives. If the casting is virtuoso, the beautifully modulated cinematography of Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven, I'm Not There, Virgin Suicides) is one more illustration of Solodnz's mastery of the whole production of making a film.

Most of the characters are freely carried over from Solondz's most important previous film, his 1998 Happiness some ten years older here but some more, some less, aged and with completely different actors playing them. This is a family that suffers from dysfunction -- but there is also normality. Trish (Allison Janey) has three children, and has met a very "normal" man, a lonely divorcee, Harvey (Michael Lerner), and they're in love and want to marry. Her 13-year-old boy Timmy (Dylan Snyder), a composed, preternaturally articulate boy, is about to be bar mitzvahed. Joy is Trish's sister, and turns up. She also sees their mother, Mona (Renee Taylor). Later she goes to California and sees their other sister, Helen (Ally Sheedy). These scenes are skillfully interwoven with the central ones directly or indirectly involving Timmy.

Harvey is truly "normal," but then there's Bill (Irish stage actor Cieran Hinds), who is just being released from prison, where he has served a long sentence for pedophile acts. Bill is the father of Trish's three children, but she has told everyone he's dead. After Bill visits older brother Billy (Chris Marquette) at college, to assure himself the sex crime gene hasn't been passed on, Timmy finds out about his father.

Solondz is exceptionally good at dialogue, and it can be jaw-dropping and hilarious, but Life During Wartime is further strengthened by the ingenious ways the characters and their conversations interlock. If there is a theme, and at one or two points this is presented almost too didactically, it is forgiveness (which was the original working title). Picking up Bill in a hotel bar Jacqueline (Rampling), who's hardened and brutal, says "Only losers ask for forgiveness. Only losers expect to get it." But Timmy and Harvey's pessimistic son Mark (Rich Pesci) discuss seriously whether you can forgive and forget, and how it might be necessary to forget without forgiving. As for Bill, Trish's view is "Once a perv, always a perv."

Those who find Solondz's material too shocking or bitter need to consider that confronting such horrors as pedophilia head-on with grim but sometimes hilarious humor may be a kind of provisional forgiveness of humanity's worse faults. The movie seems to skirt on the edge of the difficult question of what's forgivable and what's not. And thus in Life During Wartime an already brilliantly original filmmaker has moved perceptively (but subtly) in the direction of maturity and mellowness. There's still a lot of specific stuff that's topical and funny, more than you can put into any review.

Timmy (not present in Happiness) is really the central character, in the best position to change and change others. Because his Bar Mitzvah is coming, he considers himself to be almost "a man." He is horrified to learn both of his father's true identity and his mother's lying about it, and terrified that he might be a "faggot" too, and now, thanks to his mother's warning, terrified of the idea of being "touched" by a (big, grown up, old) man. Bill provides a shadowy, haunting counterpart to the brighter scenes of Trish and Timmy. His encounter with his older son Billy is surprisingly intense, perhaps the most real moment, because its emotional content is more wordless. Again and again and in many different ways the film astounds with its dialogue scenes, especially one-on-one. The operative technique is not wit but surprise. Not all the moments work equally well; Bill as a character may be too heavy-handed, a bit of a waste of the brilliant actor Cieran Hinds (who has played a pedophile murderer on stage). But the way the screenplay interlocks and flows this from mattering too much, and all the scenes work separately (another link with Tarantino).

Joy's encounter with successful, but completely unhappy and mean Hollywood sister Helen is an illustration of how people aren't who they seem, but more than that is another spot-on illustration of subtle sisterly in-fighting. The threat of bodily harm with an Emmy statuette is one of many laugh-to-keep-from-crying moments in the movie. Todd Solodnz achieves mastery here, and has made one of the best American films of the year.

Shown as part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2009. Also shown at the Venice, Telluride, and Toronto festivals. Life During Wartime opens in theaters July 23, 2010.

[oscar jubis]

It's great to see such an experimental and original filmmaker like Todd Solondz create films so consistently good. I love how Life During Wartime resurrects and juxtaposes characters from both Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse and casts actors different from those who originally played the roles. This is a treatise on "Forgive and Forget". It ponders the value of seeking redemption by atoning and asking for forgiveness, and seeking transcendence by granting it. I don't think Solondz's former mentors and peers at the Yeshiva would approve of most of the conclusions one would draw from the film's tense dramatic content. What irks me at times is a conception of characters as puppets within a grand design. Gives me pause, so to speak. However, most of Life During Wartime "works". One thing I learned from it is that miserablism seems to "work" when imbued with comedy; perhaps that pathetic miserablism absolutely requires a comedic counterweight. I will watch it today for a second time.

[Chris Knipp]

Glad you like it too. Not everybody does.


miserablism works when imbued with comedy
Another word for that is being Jewish.

[oscar jubis]

Thoughts following a 2nd viewing:
I admire Solondz and I like Life during Wartime but I find it hard to get behind this film completely. I ascribe it to a certain poverty of vision or what Nietzsche called "nihilism". Todd Solondz journeyed from giving serious consideration to becoming a rabbi to describing himself as "atheist". It is a long distance to travel. Most of us who decide, or realize, one day that we don't believe in God fill the dark hole with some kind of spiritualism or humanism. But there is no trace of either in this film in particular and, to a large extent, in Solondz's previous films.

Solondz really understands South Florida. I am not referring to Miami, but to communities such as Boca Raton and Deerfield Beach where Miami Jews moved when the city became too crowded, loud, and cosmopolitan to suit them. He understands how the whole area is more than anything a transformative space, "a mythical place where you can go tabula rasa, erase the past. Visually, it has this wonderful flatness; a color palette of toothpaste that is inimitable", he says, rightly so.

Solondz is at his most experimental with regards to casting. The casting of multiple actors of different race and gender for a single role in Palindromes proved quite fruitful, for instance. Solondz is particularly sensitive to the way in which an actor's previous roles and his public image can enrich a characterization, such as the ghost played by Paul Rubens and the self-described "monster" played by Charlotte Rampling in Life During Wartime. On the negative side, some of his characters lack dimensionality. This was alluded to in my previous comment, in which I implied Solondz functions as a kind of puppeteer. An example of what I am talking about can be found in CK's review, in his comment regarding the character of Bill, but it can possibly be extended to other characters.

[Chris Knipp]

You seem to take back some of what you gave this time.

I don't see the negativism that many do but instead find Solondz's outlook very humanistic, despite the dark comedy of his world. I don't know what it is I said about Bill that struck you. Personality I would hardly take Solondz's films as 'realistic and so I don't know what it means to say his characters "lack dimensionality." Secondary characters, and he manipulates so many most are that, rarely have maximum depth in any fiction. However, Solondz is a tough nut to crack, I'll grant you that. This film turned me into a fan. I see complete mastery of all the elements here, the use of Ed Lachman's brilliant cinematography, the pacing, the work with actors, the writing, every element is in control, and this is a director at the top of his game. But quite good film critics have always dismissed him as a bit of a creep. I'm not sure you liked the Coen brother's A SEROUS MAN. That has a similarly dark outlook that at the same time is humanistic and forgiving, and has been similarly misunderstood and rejected. Maybe you should watch it a (LDW) third and a fourth time. Keep watching. You may really begin to like it.

[oscar jubis]

[QUOTE=Chris Knipp]You seem to take back some of what you gave this time.
Notice that I never called the film "one of the best..." or one that "achieves mastery" as you did. I think he is a "consistently good" filmmaker, which is not the same. I also referred to his conception of characters as something that "irks me" in my first post. I do like the film for a lot of reasons: the quality of the dialogue (Solondz, like Neil LaBute, is first and foremost a writer with a penchant for cruelty), the subtext created by the casting choices, the well-observed satirical look at family relationships, the eagerness to expose hypocrisy, choice of music, etc.

I don't see the negativism that many do but instead find Solondz's outlook very humanistic, despite the dark comedy of his world.
The dark comedic element is welcome but I don't see much of that humanistic outlook.

I don't know what it is I said about Bill that struck you.
"Not all the moments work equally well; Bill as a character may be too heavy-handed, a bit of a waste of the brilliant actor Cieran Hinds."