Life During Wartime
Dir: Todd Solondz
Rating: 3.0/5.0
IFC Films
96 Minutes
In the world of Todd Solondz’s films, relationships are an overly oppressive force, particularly those of the familial variety. Solondz’s characters are constantly running from the relationships around them but like planets, they’re innately tied to the gravitational pull of these relationships. Life During Wartime is no different, acting as a sequel to and picking up the pieces left by Solondz’s earlier film Happiness. Where Happiness often focused on characters pursuing relationships outside of the ones they’d grown tired of and mostly failing, Life During Wartime returns to these characters after nearly all of their relationships outside of the family have ended.
Utilizing the same characters from Happiness but with different actors portraying them, Life During Wartime feels less like a sequel and more like a case of deja vu. Like Happiness before it, Life During Wartime centers around eldest sister Joy, here played by Shirley Henderson instead of Jane Adams. Joy is literally haunted by her ex-boyfriend Andy (Paul Reubens) who killed himself after she rejected him; Joy is now married to the equally troubled Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams), a former drug addict who can’t stop making obscene phone calls and just one in the long line of men with intense emotional baggage that Joy has been drawn to.
Despite her inherent timidity, Joy is the center for the family at the heart of Happiness and Life During Wartime. Though she’s the eldest, she’s treated like the youngest, a frail thing for the other sisters to fret over and nag. Trish (Allison Janney) uses Joy as a distraction from the immense strangeness of her own life, which had been “normal” up until the point that her husband Bill (Ciaran Hinds) had been arrested for sexually molesting several young boys. Normality has come to define Trish so much that it’s the only trait she looks for in partners, drawing her to Harvey (Michael Lerner) despite his lack of any other characteristics she normally looks for. Similarly, she’s convinced her youngest children that their father died rather than letting them know the truth, a choice that wreaks havoc once her middle child Timmy begins to learn about his father from other kids.
On the other end of the spectrum is Helen (Ally Sheedy), who sees in Joy an opportunity to make herself feel oppressed and discriminated against because of the alienation her fame as an author wields. Because Joy is so meek, she is unable to fight back and put Helen’s needs in perspective- where Joy has experienced real tragedy, Helen’s tragedy is one of a lack of self, consumed as she has become by her own fame. But Joy’s ties to family keep her from stepping out and reclaiming her own identity, instead disappearing into the needs of her sisters.
That Solondz is able to make this oppression so palatable in his films is a real skill; neither Happiness nor Life During Wartime feel grating or overbearing. Both films are well-paced and have the timing of the best comedies, providing laughs that are true guilty pleasures, making their dark subject matter more easily digested. How often can it be said that a film with pedophilia, suicide and mental illness at its core breezes by? This is both a testament to the performances of Solondz’s actors as well as the writing itself. Nonetheless, Life During Wartime can’t help but feel somewhat lacking in the context of Happiness, weighed down especially by the distracting change in actors. Where that film was a true tour-de-force, and inarguably incendiary for its time, Life During Wartime feels like an unnecessary afterword. For viewers who haven’t seen Happiness, it’d be interesting to see if their response is different, if the film stands on its own without the burden of its predecessor. And in a way, this just makes Life During Wartime all too like its own story, unfortunately tied forever to its sibling, incapable of escaping from what came before.
