{"id":1323,"date":"2010-09-17T21:26:54","date_gmt":"2010-09-18T02:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/?p=1323"},"modified":"2021-08-26T10:27:51","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T15:27:51","slug":"life-during-wartime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/17\/life-during-wartime\/","title":{"rendered":"Life During Wartime"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since Todd Solondz\u2019s breakout second feature Welcome to the Dollhouse<\/a><\/em> (1995) grossed nearly $4.8 million, the trajectory of his career has been decidedly downward, with each new film grossing half of the previous box office, culminating in Palindromes <\/em>(2004), which promptly put his once promising career in limbo. As a result, the script for Life During Wartime<\/em> floated around for a number of years, while Solondz struggled to obtain financing. Life During Wartime<\/em>, his latest comeback effort, screened at a number of prestigious showcases, such as the New York Film Festival, Telluride, and Toronto, and won Best Screenplay prize at Venice. The film is being distributed by IFC, showing on VOD, and recently played locally at Sundance Cinemas for a week.<\/p>\n

At the end of Happiness<\/em><\/a> (1998), Helen, a tortured writer, offers to set up her sister Joy, the family scapegoat, with Allen, a sexual pervert, who makes obscene phone calls and happens to be her neighbor. Life During Wartime<\/em> begins with a teary-eyed, sepia-toned restaurant scene between Joy (Shirley Henderson) and Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) on their anniversary \u2013 one that\u2019s nearly identical to the scene that began Happiness<\/em>. Allen, rather than Andy, now gives her a reproduction Gainsevoort ashtray. The scene introduces what becomes a mantra in the film, namely whether it\u2019s possible for its characters to \u201cforgive and forget.\u201d But when the waitress recognizes Allen from his voice, she refuses to forget and promptly spits in his face.<\/p>\n

Virtually every scene in Life During Wartime<\/em> verges on hysteria, mixed with delusion and denial. The above scene cuts to Trish Maplewood (Allison Janney), the ex-wife of a convicted pedophile, Bill Maplewood (Ciaran Hinds), who\u2019s now serving time in prison for molesting a couple of his oldest son\u2019s friends. Trish is on a blind date with Harvey Wiener (Michael Lerner), Dawn\u2019s father from Welcome to the Dollhouse<\/em>. Short, pudgy, older, and recently divorced after thirty-five years, Harvey is hardly a catch. He\u2019s moved from New Jersey to Miami to be with his son Mark (Rich Pecci), whom he calls \u201cparanoid with a good heart.\u201d Harvey doesn\u2019t want Mark to be \u201cmisinterpreted,\u201d but anyone who has seen Palindromes<\/em> knows that Mark has been suspected of molesting a young girl. Mark, a systems analyst, peaked in graduate school and now has become even more robotic in his demeanor.<\/p>\n

Solondz claims that viewers don\u2019t have to know the references to appreciate Life During Wartime<\/em>. I can tell you from watching it with people unfamiliar with Happiness<\/em>, Welcome to the Dollhouse<\/em> and Palindromes<\/em> that viewers will miss many of the film\u2019s nuances and in-jokes. Like an episodic television series, the film resonates in an entirely different way when you actually know the back story of the various characters. Trish is clearly desperate. Despite recognizing that Harvey is \u201cso not her type,\u201d except for the fact that he\u2019s a big booster of Israel, she immediately falls in love with him. And when she returns home from the date in a swoon, she speaks as inappropriately to her twelve-year-old son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) about her sexuality, as her ex-husband Bill did to her older son Billy in Happiness<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Through Trish and Harvey, Life During Wartime <\/em>connects the two dysfunctional families, the Jordans and the Wieners, creating a mashup between the characters from Welcome to the Dollhouse<\/em> and Happiness.<\/em> We thus meet all three Jordan sisters: Joy, Trish, and eventually Helen (Ally Sheedy), who has severed ties with the rest of the family. She now lives in California, where she given up poetry for the \u201cpurity\u201d of screenwriting, and taken up with \u201cKeanu\u201d [Reeves] even though \u201cSalman\u201d [Rushdie] remains a close friend. Their mother, Mona (Renee Taylor), is bitter about being dumped by their father. She cries at the airport when she picks up Joy, who has temporarily separated from Allen because of his assorted misdeeds.<\/p>\n

Andy (now played by Paul Reubens), who committed suicide in Happiness<\/em>, returns several times as a ghost to haunt Joy in her dreams and actual life. If this doesn\u2019t begin to feel like a hall of mirrors, all of the actors have been recast, with Allen (originally played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) now played by a black actor from the television series The Wire<\/em>. We also know from Palindromes<\/em> that Harvey\u2019s daughter Dawn also committed suicide, and learn via Trish that Harvey\u2019s ex-wife Marge is \u201chorrible,\u201d which hardly comes as a surprise.<\/p>\n

Like Happiness<\/em>, Life During Wartime<\/em> has a multiple-plot structure. Timmy Maplewood, who is about to have his bar mitzvah, is preparing his speech \u201con becoming a man.\u201d In this film about deception, Trish has told Timmy his father is dead, but he learns the truth from a school friend, who has discovered on the Internet that his dad is actually a child molester. Timmy laments to his Mom, \u201cI could have helped him.\u201d Like so many of Solondz\u2019s characters, Timmy suddenly turns on Trish with a vengeance, as he screams, \u201cI hate you\u201d and \u201cFuck you, bitch\u201d \u2013 just as Andy shouts at Joy, \u201cEat shit, you fucking cunt,\u201d once she again denies him.<\/p>\n

When Timmy later comes into her bedroom for a sex talk, Trish gives him the worst possible advice that will have major implications later on. Dressed in a dark suit, Bill seems like a refugee from film noir<\/em> as he incongruously navigates the Miami sunlight upon his release from prison. He later tracks down Billy at college in Oregon, demanding to know whether he\u2019s gay. Their heart-to-heart talk is as painful as the one they had in Happiness<\/em>, where Bill admitted that the real object of his desire was Billy, who refuses to forgive his dad, even though, on the basis of his research interests, he\u2019s obviously headed down a similar path. Solondz\u2019s world view is an overdetermined one, where characters seem destined to repeat past mistakes.<\/p>\n

Trish and her family are coping with the aid of anti-anxiety medications. Like Debra Granik\u2019s Winter\u2019s Bone <\/em>or Mary Sweeney\u2019s Baraboo<\/em>,<\/em> the war abroad impacts the one at home. It\u2019s Timmy\u2019s classmate who first connects pedophiles with terrorists, which proves to be a skewed but interesting analogy. In an interview<\/a>, Solondz responds to the question of his obsession with pedophilia: \u201cThe whole thing about pedophilia is that I don’t have any inherent interest in it but rather in how it functions as a metaphor for that which is most demonized, most ostracized, most feared and loathed.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most intriguing scenes occurs when Bill gets picked up by an older woman named Jacqueline (Charlotte Rampling) in a Miami bar. In need of a lay, she claims to be a monster and insists, \u201cOnly losers expect to get forgiveness.\u201d Bill counters that people can\u2019t help it if they\u2019re monsters, and suggests \u2013 continuing Solondz\u2019s wartime theme \u2013 that the real enemy lies within. In their exchange, she comments, \u201cWhat are you, a shrink?\u201d Yes, but a terribly messed up one, as is evident in the way (typical of Solondz\u2019s heterosexual sex scenes) that Bill mechanically and dispassionately pounds away during sex. When she catches him rifling through her purse afterwards, he asks for forgiveness. Jacqueline responds tersely, \u201cFuck off, prick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Andy, Allen will later haunt Joy\u2019s dreams as well. He tells her, \u201cWar\u2019s evil, but what you did was worse.\u201d By the end, even Timmy has had it with the abstract principles of freedom and democracy, as these maladjusted characters create their own personal hells. Masterfully shot with a RED camera by veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman, Life During Wartime <\/em>strikes me as Solondz\u2019s most stylized film, with its discordant colors, inventive mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, and clever use of music, such as a collaboration between Devendra Banhart and Beck<\/a>. Bill\u2019s recurring dream involves several repeated pans over a park landscape with a pond to an out-of-focus figure, whose identity is only revealed the final time.<\/p>\n

Todd Solondz loves to provoke viewers. Yet Life During Wartime<\/em> might be one of the best films to register the effects of 9\/11 on the American psyche, even if the fire power of his self-loathing characters indiscriminately turns all of them into casualties of their own private demons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since Todd Solondz\u2019s breakout second feature Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) grossed nearly $4.8 million, the trajectory of his career has been decidedly downward, with each new film grossing half of the previous box office, culminating in Palindromes (2004), whichRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1317,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1323"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4338,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions\/4338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}