Suburban shocker

Interview, Nov, 1998 by Kitty Bowe Hearty

Two years ago Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse, a disturbing but funny love song to the hell of junior high, hit a nerve with audiences and critics and went on to win the big daddy of all alterna-film festival awards - the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. With the release of Happiness, the writer-director focuses mora closely on the family, but this time his story goes far deeper and gets much darker. Here, the well-grounded exterior of the suburbs is a cover for lost souls: obscene phone callers, sexually dysfunctional wives and neighbors, a father who crosses over into pedophilia. In telling their stories Solondz presents some truly alarming situations, but the real shock comes with the film's flashes of humor - which only serve to heighten its intensity. In a year when a number of movies are pushing the envelope of acceptable onscreen material, the cynic might wonder If Happiness is more of the same. But, according to Solondz, a small, brainy-looking man who is fast emerging as a truly individual voice in the overpopulated world of American independent filmmaking, "To do [something] for the sake of pushing it is not very Interesting."

KITTY BOWE HEARTY: Throughout Happiness, even before factoring in the pedophilia engaged in by Dr. Maplewood [Dylan Baker], there's an undercurrent of sexual frustration and dysfunction. The characters seem to be living in a state of permanent sexual crisis. Has sex become a bad thing?

TODD SOLONDZ: I certainly would never say that sex has become a bad thing. But desire is very much a theme of the movie, as is connecting, and the way in which each can be frustrated. Right from the get-go you have a man desirous of a woman who is not desirous of him. But to say sex is a bad thing would be very much a misreading.

KBH: The doctor's wife [Cynthia Stevenson] is this seemingly happy suburban mora who gets upset at the idea of drugs in the schools. Why Isn't she concerned about the fact that she's got a sexless marriage?

TS: She's not in fact cheerful; that's the surface she projects. There is a scene in the movie in which she is in bed with her husband and isn't sure if she's had sex with him. It's very ambiguous because she really wants to know that he loves her and him to know that she really desires him, and to me the cheerfulness is a coping mechanism. One has to live in denial about certain pain. It's as if she's trying to will a kind of happiness into the home through the mechanisms of smiling and cheerfulness.

KBH: The movie presents tough material for the two young actors playing the Maplewoods' eleven-year-old son [Rufus Read] and his friend [Evan Silverberg]. How did you prep them?

TS: They read the script. I didn't explain anything; that I left to the parents. And if the actors didn't understand, I only felt, Well, they're eleven years old and I didn't want to spoil that.

KBH: You have scenes where Dr. Maplewood is explaining very graphic sexual facts to his son, including the fact that he's raped two of his son's friends. Is the child old enough to understand what his father is saying?

TS: I don't know. He can't really understand the full ramifications of what his father has done and what it really means but he knows enough that his father is a terrible man and that his father has done wrong and that his father loves him.

KBH: Joy Jordan [Jane Adams], one of Mrs. Maplewood's sisters, seems to suffer at least three men gladly, including an obscene phone caller played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Yet she continues to trust. Is she a victim?

TS: If she feels somewhat victimized after the Jon Lovitz character tells her off, and after being fooled by the Russian cab driver [Jared Harris], she is not a victim. She walks away with a certain kind of dignity, and the fact that she's been deceived by the cabbie is beside the point. And I actually hope that the obscene caller will in some way connect with her.

KBH: So is the obscene phone caller a good guy?

TS: I don't want to refer to him as the obscene caller because that is to reduce him to his sexual perversion, and it's not about that for him. He's living in a kind of frustration that goes beyond the sexual. In fact, when the third sister [Lara Flynn Boyle] calls him on it, the actual idea of contact terrifies him. It's a real emotional connection that this guy is so much in need of.

KBH: In his last sequence, his neighbor [Camryn Manheim] tells him that she has killed the building's super because he was trying to have sex with her and she hates sex.

TS: I find his moments with the neighbor the tenderest in the movie. For me, the fact that that kind of hope exists is everything. Will it work out or not? That's not the point.

KBH: Onscreen sexual frustration is sometimes very funny but this film certainly turns a corner. You've shown some really graphic stuff that hasn't been seen before outside pornography.

TS: I don't think anyone is getting off on this movie.

KBH: What about the ejaculation scenes?

TS: Well, when I was shooting it I wasn't thinking, Ah, nobody's seen this. It was a scene I had written, and I was covering it. It wasn't until afterwards when I was in the cutting room and the distributor saw the movie that I realized they were cum shots. I never looked at them in that way.