Happiness (1998), Todd Solondz

 

Just as being titular, the audience joins the quest of searching meaningful happiness through it's subversive characters of normalization.

'Happiness' is an excruciatingly dark and extremist film whose extremism lies not in it's graphic screens but in it's bold and brutally psyched characters.

With it's emerging first scene, Todd Solondz sucks us into the depraved and messy world of his exploitative irony, which has quite a staging resemblance to the absurd 'Dogtooth', with just this one being a bit more harsh to gulp down.

Blending the tangent between satire and tragedy, the film provokes our calm with many blunt questions;

• Does the film aim on the portraiture of human loneliness?
• Is it a flamboyant sketch of perversion?
• Or it is just a plain dreadful dark comedy?

'Happiness' is blatantly hilarious while portraying it's failed relationships on the expectant matter of connecting a handful of desolate people and distressingly savage while implying rape, murder, sexual violence and pedophilia, and even rather blanketing it's harshness with desperate comedy.

You know what takes over and gloriously dominates your jovial optimism? 

-The satirical elements and Solondz's cruel exposure of it's characters to the filth, that you can't keep yourself from laughing at their helplessness.

Briefing it, ‘Happiness’ takes seemingly ordinary familial people and strips off it's dysfunctional layers over the course of the film.

The perplexity that has surrounded you, can very well be conceived on numerous occasions when it's humane morality falls incompetent against it's rather 'unhappy' depravity.

One such brutally funny excerpt that is shamefully staying with me is the dad and son confessional conversation;

-"I fucked them"

-"Dad, would you fuck me too?"

-"No. I would jerk off to you"

'Happiness' is a disgustingly brutal and humanely honest presentation of miserably funny sicknesses, that it's uncompromising negativity molests you and it's characters out of the rationality.