Life During Wartime: Todd Solondz, Again With the Pedophilia?

Francisco Román/IFC Films

Janney's overprotective mother provides bad advice to her son (Snyder).

Details

Opens at Varsity, Fri., Aug. 13. Not rated. 97 minutes.

Related Content

• The Big Lebowski Quote-Along
  March 21, 2012
• Headhunters: Art Theft and Murder in Norway
  May 23, 2012
• The Weekly Wire: This Week's Recommended Events
  March 28, 2012
• Bad Santa
  November 16, 2011
• O Brother, Where Art Thou?
  March 9, 2011

More About

• Todd Solondz
• Life During Wartime (Movie)
• Happiness (Movie)
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• War and Conflict

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Daring discomfited viewers to laugh at shame and suffering, and then wonder why we're laughing, Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons—race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and his old favorite, pedophilia. Life During Wartime is both sequel to and remake of Solondz's Happiness (1998). The three Jordan sisters—banal Trish, high-strung Helen, and hapless Joy—are back, albeit played by an alternate trio of actresses (Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, and Shirley Henderson, respectively). Trish has relocated from New Jersey to Florida, where fragile little Joy arrives for a visit. Newly separated from her husband, Joy is increasingly disassociated. Trish, however, is only a smidge chastened—even though Happiness ended with her model husband, Bill, en route to prison for drugging and raping several of his son Billy's fifth-grade classmates. Now Bill (Ciarán Hinds) is about to be released, just as younger son Timmy (Dylan Snyder), who's been told his father is dead, is preparing to become a man with a bar mitzvah speech full of quasi-religious masochistic imagery. Does the filmmaker have compassion or contempt for his characters? Is it possible to feel both? Solondz's sensibility has obvious affinities to such masters of cruelty as Neil LaBute or the Coen Brothers—but he is less smugly punitive and more obviously tormented. A humanist he's not, but he does seem allergic to hypocrisy.