Jesus Roosevelt Christ, this is dark.

Like, if you're just bopping around FanFare looking at things you can watch, please know that this movie routinely upsets people. Perverts, pedophiles, pathetic people, pickup artists, mass shooting fantasies, masturbation.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:14 PM on December 22 [1 favorite]

I so deeply dislike this film. I watched this film once when I was 21 years old and swore never again. Recently a group of friends decided to watch it, and I opted out. But I was curious about their experience of it thinking maybe I had just been particularly sensitive when I saw it and my opinion now would be different. Nope, we've watched some weird shit together and their general response was my 21 year old response to never watch this again was the right one.
posted by miss-lapin at 5:15 PM on December 22 [2 favorites]

I thought this was very good the first time I saw it. But that was 25/26 years ago. I got the new Criterion and will be giving it a spin soon.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:21 PM on December 22

I think it's worth mentioning Lolita (the book, not any of its adaptations) in connection with this movie, for a couple reasons.

One, a child rape scenario in the movie is almost wholly cut-and-pasted from the book.

Two, the story is essentially told entirely from the point of view of absolutely horrible people (who are dealing with mostly other horrible people), so in watching it there has to be a disconnect from the typical experience of watching a movie and pulling for the person who is ostensibly the protagonist. It's a rough go and "bleak" and "dark" only begin to describe it. A series of awful scenarios that you hope don't "succeed" while watching, but they do. Horrible conversations that you would hope would never actually happen, but they do, and then they keep going.

I watched this film once when I was 21 years old and swore never again.

Yep. Some friends got it for me as a gag gift, we all watched it, and then they apologized because they didn't think it would be that bad.
posted by LionIndex at 5:22 PM on December 22

Someone put a "4K upscale" of this on Internet Archive so there is now at least one way to see it online without buying the Criterion.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:24 PM on December 22 [1 favorite]

I thought this was very good the first time I saw it. But that was 25/26 years ago.

Yeah, it doesn't have the typical hallmarks of a "bad" movie - it's well done. The actors all do really well, the story makes logical sense and the way it's portrayed is good, it's just the subject matter. I was interested in watching the movie in the first place out of a sense of morbid curiosity and also because Welcome to the Dollhouse was extremely my bag and I wanted to see what Solondz was doing.

Some things I still remember as (darkly, duh) humorous, and there's probably more: the opening scene with Jon Lovitz; how Joy's students initially treat her as a "strikebreaker".
posted by LionIndex at 5:57 PM on December 22

Please note: I didn't call it a bad film. I said I deeply disliked it. Having said that it's possible for a film to have high production values, a talented cast and crew doing their best, and STILL be bad. Cheesy and cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad just like high production values doesn't necessarily mean good.
posted by miss-lapin at 6:26 PM on December 22

I am not sure what to make of this film, it stuck with me and I will rewatch it to see how the experience measures up to 20-something me watching it. That person no longer exists but we do what we do

I know nothing of the director, but in a world where offensively saccharine pablum permeates so much of our environment I take a weird comfort that someone attempted to depict a father trying to explain to his son why he'd rape the son's friend, but not the son

Defiantly perverse
posted by ginger.beef at 8:48 PM on December 22 [3 favorites]

Please note: I didn't call it a bad film. I said I deeply disliked it. Having said that it's possible for a film to have high production values, a talented cast and crew doing their best, and STILL be bad. Cheesy and cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad just like high production values doesn't necessarily mean good.

My prior comment was clarifying where I called it bad myself ("they didn't think it would be that bad"), but I agree with you here. I think beyond just the production values, it's a "good" movie because it feels believable. I felt like its conclusions followed logically from its setup and its characters' motivations - like I don't feel like anyone in the film was carrying the idiot ball for any length of time and nothing works out for anyone in any miraculous way, similar to how in Dollhouse where Wienerdog doesn't end up being popular or appreciated at the end like what would happen in a typical teen movie. Contrast to Solondz' movie after this, Storytelling, where I just didn't buy it and the whole Scooby story felt mean just for the sake of being mean.
posted by LionIndex at 9:35 PM on December 22

Interesting bit of trivia that I learned because this post reminded me I was wondering about it: Gaeten Matarazzo (Dustin in Stranger Things) is not related to Heather Matarazzo (Dawn in Happiness) although Gaeten's mother's name is apparently Heather as well.
posted by emelenjr at 7:56 AM on December 23

My best friend permanently revoked my movie picking rights for this. Or maybe it was Breaking the Waves.
posted by whuppy at 10:08 AM on December 23

I feel like Todd Solondz is probably an asshole. It's partially because his movies are like this, and partially because his name is Todd. Have you ever met a cool Todd? I sure haven't.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:15 AM on December 23

Welcome to the Dollhouse was a horror movie.
Happiness was a daring comedy.
Storytelling was complete and utter failure garbage that finished Solondz for me.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 12:07 PM on December 23

Happiness! This was filmed in and around the town I grew up in, so a lot of the locations were familiar ("wait, is he masturbating in the parking lot behind Silverman's? oh no, wow") and honestly if you're from that particular slice of northern New Jersey, your reaction to Solondz's work is generally "yeah, that tracks". Like, I used to play with a kid in kindergarten who was pulled out of school and the word around town was that his parents, who owned the local donut shop, were neo-Nazis who didn't like their kid spending time with Jews. I had teeth extracted by an oral surgeon who was an actual sadist! We grew up swimming in weird shit and couldn't recognize it. It's hard to overstate how much Welcome and Happiness resonated with us. In retrospect it's strange that these movies found a wider audience to begin with.

I went to see Dark Horse in the theater with a fellow northern NJ refugee and we were howling half the time. If you're not from that particular place and time, honestly, I have no idea why you'd want to watch these movies. If you are, though? They are like perfect toll house cookies wrapped in gold, and the chocolate chips are actually shit, and it was made just for you.
posted by phooky at 12:48 PM on December 23 [2 favorites]

I watched this again. I still think it's brilliant, but the 25 or so years since I last saw it was about the right length of time between watches and I am not sure I will be up for another one as long as I live.

I'm tempted to joke that the movie should have a longer title and should really be called Even Terrible People Are Searching for Happiness. But I think that overlooks Joy, who is kind of the key to the movie. Joy isn't a terrible person, she's just terrible at life, a born loser whose good intentions are never enough to keep her from terrible decisions. And while this makes her easier to forgive/identify with, Solondz sees her failures as essentially similar to those of Bill the pedophile and Allen the pervert. Something deep inside her makes her do the wrong thing, it hurts other people and makes her miserable, but she cannot help it.

And I think that's what Solondz is after here. He's situating all of the other characters as people for whom he has empathy, people he believes are trying their best, as damaged and fractured and toxic and dangerous as their best may be. He is not excusing them, but he is insisting that they are not simple villains who are entirely incomprehensible to us either.

To hear most of the plot recounted if you have not seen it is to recoil in horror, but descriptions of it fail to convey how howlingly funny much of it can be. The opening scene with Jane Adams and Jon Lovitz is both heartbreaking and hilarious. Solondz handles it as straightforwardly as possible, and it makes it hit all the harder.

So is Solondz going to come at this movie in a minimalist way? No. The very next scene is an elaborate mass shooting fantasy with sweeping setups.

And the acting! Every single actor in this movie is committed to their roles 100%. Dylan Baker does probably his best work. Those father-son conversations are as skin crawly as it gets, and yet you have to laugh. It's a tightrope and he walks it.

This is the very epitome of A Difficult Watch and of Not for Everybody. Even as someone who thought it was (very) darkly funny, I don't think I could watch it again for 10 or 20 years at least.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:27 AM on December 24 [2 favorites]

Something that has really struck me this time that I didn't pick up on the first time is how several of the men in the story manifest loneliness in the form of toxic horniness and several of the women in the story manifest it via terrible decisions to throw their lot in with toxic men.

That's a generalization and I expect as I keep thinking on this one, the exceptions/variations will present themselves and complicate and/or enhance this line of thinking.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:35 PM on December 25 [1 favorite]