Life During Wartime

Disquieting family bonds, revisited
By Ann Hornaday
Friday, August 13, 2010

"Life During Wartime," the latest squirm-inducing bleak comedy from Todd Solondz, opens with a scene of a woman in tears, crying her way through a dinner date with her bemused husband. It's a measure of Solondz's singular sense of humor -- wryly forthright or ironically detached, depending on your worldview -- that the distressed lady in question is named Joy.

Moments later, after that first sequence culminates in an excruciating confession, Joy's sister Trish laughs manically during a blind date with Harvey (Michael Lerner). Thus viewers encounter the singular, unsettling enterprise of writer-director Solondz, who since making his breakout film "Welcome to the Dollhouse" in 1995 has set out to keep audiences in a near-constant state of puzzlement, unsure whether they're meant to laugh or cry.

Fans of Solondz's cinema-of-discomfort will recognize Joy and Trish as characters from his 1998 film "Happiness," in which a New Jersey family grappled with sibling rivalry and sundry forms of sexual compulsion, including pedophilia, a favored Solondz leitmotif. "Life During Wartime" catches up with the Jordan sisters 10 years later, by which time they've decamped for warmer climes and are now portrayed by a new cast.

Joy, played by the kitten-voiced British actress Shirley Henderson, is still married to the troubled Allen (here played by Michael Kenneth Williams). Trish (Allison Janney) now lives in Florida with her two kids; Trish's husband, Bill (Ciarán Hinds), who has served time in prison for heinous sex crimes, is on the verge of getting out. And Helen (Ally Sheedy) lives in Los Angeles, pursuing an improbably successful career as a television screenwriter.

Sheedy takes a big, relishing bite out of her L.A.-contempo scenery as the most narcissistic member of her self-involved family. And she provides most of the comic relief in "Life During Wartime," in which the Florida characters move wanly against garish tropical backdrops, their tortured inner lives at grim odds with the region's cheery pastel palette.

Less a story than a series of encounters with ghosts real and imagined, Solondz's film pushes familiar buttons having to do with children and sexuality. The filmmaker stages his most disquieting scenes between Trish and her young son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder), who provides a too-easy target for both her heedless sexual confessions and clumsy attempts at protecting him from predators.

Solondz has always walked a wobbly line between contempt and compassion for his characters -- and, by extension, the audience. In "Happiness" he managed to strike that balance with nerves of steel, but in "Life During Wartime," even with its overarching theme of forgiveness, he seems mired in simply rehearsing his characters' most fatal flaws. The Jordan women aren't given any depth or texture; rather, they're billboards for the ennui and self-absorption that Solondz himself seems incapable of snapping out of. After watching as his protagonists grasp and grope their way through "Life During Wartime," viewers are likely not to laugh or cry -- but shrug and, unlike Solondz himself, move on.

Contains nudity, sexuality, profanity and disturbing thematic material.