Life During Wartime

A ‘quasi-sequel’ of style and sadness: Solondz revisits characters looking for forgiveness

August 06, 2010|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Twelve years after Todd Solondz’s “Happiness’’ introduced a cauterizingly bleak honesty to American independent cinema, the writer-director has returned with — well, what do you call “Life During Wartime’’? Solondz has referred to it in interviews as a “quasi-sequel,’’ but it’s something harder to grasp: an annotation, an obbligato, a ghost harmony. The smoke after the inferno.

“Wartime’’ returns to the characters of the earlier film — played by different actors, sometimes radically so — and finds them spent, desperate only for forgiveness before calling it a day. The movie’s one of the saddest I’ve ever seen, occasionally to the point of tedium but often enough with a piercing beauty few other filmmakers even approach. At times, it makes you realize Solondz may be the closest heir we’ll get to Robert Bresson, the French filmmaker of human despair and mysterious grace.

Allen, the depressive, obscene phone-caller played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the original and now played by the African-American actor Michael Kenneth Williams, is still married to Joy (previously Jane Adams, now Shirley Henderson), the most cringingly self-conscious of three damaged sisters. Their relationship is suffering, though, since Allen has backslid to the point where even their restaurant waitress recognizes his voice as the heavy breather on the other end of the line.

Joy’s oldest sibling, Trish (Allison Janney, stepping into Cynthia Stevenson’s shoes), is a tightly wound suburban mom who has told her young son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) that his father is dead and has embarked on a glowingly physical relationship with a local divorced man (Michael Lerner). It’s unsettling fun to see Janney, a long-established character actress, play lust with such abandon: She puts across Trish’s big, selfish soul and small-minded moralism.

Timmy’s dad, of course, isn’t dead but in jail, serving time for raping young boys. Where Dylan Baker in “Happiness’’ played Bill as a civilized suburbanite tormented by demons — Ward Cleaver crossed with Peter Lorre in “M’’ — the bear-like Irish actor Ciarán Hinds makes the character a figure of racked, implacable guilt. He’s the hole at the movie’s center: a human stain that blots out the sun.

Bill is released from prison early in “Life During Wartime’’ and hangs around his old haunts when no one else is there, the phantom in the wallpaper. He wants what all the characters want — forgiveness — but he has no illusions that he’ll ever be granted it. One of Solondz’s points, though, is that illusion and hope are different things.