Where do you begin with a movie like Happiness? For starters, I would not recommend watching this on a plane. The performances were mostly fantastic, but there were two scenes in the first hour that made me switch to something more suitable for the environment.

Happiness is called a black comedy. There is some comedy involved but I think the black is doing the heavy lifting in that category. Holy smokes, it deals with some subject matter that can make people quite uncomfortable, including myself. I mentioned the performances being great, but the actors are playing some really vile and horrible people that do some abhorrent things while the cheeriest music is playing in the background. It's a unique experience.

After the first hour and the scene with Phillip Seymour Hoffman engaged in masturbation while dialing random numbers and then with Dylan Baker engaged in something similar with a magazine that should never be used for that purpose, I hated this movie. I hated the people. I hated the story. I'm glad I took the break and returned to it, because between my first session on the plane and finishing the movie I read a quote from Roger Ebert. The full quote can be found below, but essentially the message was "the movies are like a machine that generates empathy." Happiness gave me an opportunity to see a filmmaker exploring these people and by me watching it I got to understand the crazy people who share this voyage around the blue marble we call home. I still hated them, but I better understood them.

My rating reflects that. I can't say it's great, but it is interesting. I also will never watch it again so long as I live.

>"We are all born with a certain package. We are who we are. Where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We are kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people, find out what makes them tick, what they care about. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them."

Here's Todd Solondz making me laugh at the cruelest things once again. I think this is a better, more ambitious effort than _Welcome to the Dollhouse_, even with a lot of the artistic traits carrying over. It's clear that he loves exploring the hidden tragedy of everyday life, deconstructing societal norms and performative behaviour. With this film in particular, all the vignettes add up to a study of dysfunctional individuals unable to find the happiness they're looking for. It's essentially _Magnolia_ for people with a messed up sense of humor. Solondz directing carries a lot of personality; often juxtaposing his dark themes with fun, upbeat music and satirizing the behaviour of his characters through brilliant acting and dialogue. It's quite an achievement how he gets every actor to deliver such perfect performances, given how specific the tone of the bigger piece is. Yet for as visionary as this film is as a whole, his camerawork and lighting continues to be bland. The sets and use of colour are slightly more interesting than _Welcome to the Dollhouse_, but a lot of this doesn't look much better than your average 90s sitcom. It's a shame, because I genuinely think it could've been a masterpiece with a sharper visual sense.

7.5/10

Simply too hard to watch due to the subject matter.

But... it is clearly an excellent film, I just can't recommend anyone watch it. Enter at your own risk.