Sunday, August 15, 2010

Life During Wartime

Oh, neglected blog. I feel like I owe you an apology. So here goes: I was sick, and then on tropical vacation, then I was sick again, only this time more violently. In the midst of this second round of sickness came the Melbourne International Film Festival, that most trusty staple of the antipodean winter.

Feeling like utter shit made the stakes somewhat higher for this year’s festival: the sheer willpower it took to leave my hovel and find my way through the cold to the city meant that if a film was balls, as several of my MIFF selections inevitably are, I felt like I had failed myself in some terrible, irrevocable way; that I might never make it home again, stuck in some Faraway Tree-bardo of biting winds and overwrought foreign cinema, my face hot and my snacks gone.

As ever, though, a few films made it entirely worth it, with one in particular reaching parts of me I wasn’t even sure existed. But more on that later.

I started off, or at least tried to, with Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz’s sequel of sorts to his morbid and wonderful Happiness, which might still be the blackest comedy I’ve ever seen. I really wanted to see this one, so much so that I almost passed out trying to leave the house. I decided it was safer to watch it at home, where I could sweat and shiver in peace. (Thanks, internet.)

Life During Wartime features many of the same characters as the original but they are, with one exception, played by different actors. (Solondz makes no attempt to find actors who resemble the old ones; indeed, he seems to delight, as he did in Palindromes (2004), in finding characters that look strikingly different from their earlier incarnations: Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character from Happiness is played here by Michael K. Williams, who played Omar in The Wire; Jon Lubitz’s cameo is reprised by Paul Reubens, better known for his work as Pee Wee Herman.)

A decade on, the characters are, more or less, as we left them, which is to say deeply fucked up and neurotic and desperate. They strike out for new, happier lives, but the future in Solondz’s hands is just a murky spectre of the past. There’s little hope in it; characters move forward only because looking back would be more awful still.

In Happiness, Solondz managed to leaven his black-hole vision of humanity with moments of absurd levity, juxtaposing the most horrible events imaginable with bright pastel tones and Elfman-schmaltz strings. In LDW, he forgoes this bounce and momentum for a suffocating inertia that seems to stem less from any directorial vision than an unwillingness to let go of his earlier, better film.

Happiness had some truly memorable scenes, in particular its incredible opening (watch it above). But instead of seeking new moments of similar oddity, discomfort and resonance, Solondz instead creates scenes and conversations that just cannibalise the older, more successful ones.

Still, all is not lost: the movie is worth seeing for Ciarán Hinds’ devastating portrayal of Bill Maplewood, the convicted paedophile from Happiness, now freed from a long stint in jail. Bill’s face is frozen, a rictus of everything he’s done and all the things he’s still compelled to do, and his wanderings throughout the film evince a depth and heart lacking in most of Solondz’s post-Happiness work.

In particular, Bill’s moments with his older son, now in college, carry with them an instant and devastating gravity that suggest Solondz, ever the provocateur, might be finally ready to move on to new, more interesting pastures.

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