Life During Wartime

Indie provocateur Solondz’s brutally funny Happiness was one of our favorite films of 1998, but somehow we’ve never screwed up the courage to watch it a second time, Solondz being the one guy who could school Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Hidden) in the finer points of cinematic sadism. Eleven years later, he’s followed up that bleak gem with a highly conceptual sequel that catches up with the same miserable middle-class characters played by a radically different cast. The result is a mixed bag, markedly inferior to the original as well as to Solondz’s upsetting 2004 satirical melodrama Palindromes, but far better than the botched 2001 Storytelling.

At its worst, this reminded us of Robert Altman’s more annoyingly stylized ensemble satires (Beyond Therapy, H.E.A.L.T.H.), but many of the better sequences are outstanding. The scenes between Hinds as a paroled pedophile and Marquette as his scarred teenage son are absolutely riveting, and Pecci all but steals the show in a brief Aspergian turn as an affectless nerd obsessed by the impending Chinese takeover of the global economy. The parts never gel to a satisfactory degree, and Solondz’s heavily flagged, overriding theme of forgiveness doesn’t make much headway against the prevailing misery, but this does arguably succeed as an acting showcase.

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