Life During Wartime

Todd Solondz is not for everyone, and neither are his movies. They play like the creepy stepchildren of Woody Allen's films. Life During Wartime is a sequel to Solondz's infamous Happiness, in which Dylan Baker drugged the tuna fish sandwich of one of his son's friends so he could rape him. Happiness played like a series of sick jokes strung together by a deprived plot. It worked as a gut-wrenching exercise in black comedy, testing the limits to which you were allowed to laugh.

At the end of that film, Baker gets sent to prison. Life During Wartime picks up when he is released. This time he is played by the Irish actor Ciaran Hinds, who has had good roles in a number of films including Margot at the Wedding, There Will Be Blood, and Munich, and who, here, delivers a quiet and powerful performance that is, at times, almost unbearable to watch because of the sadness and confusion he goes through.

The film is filled with great performances from actors who get a lot of roles, but rarely ones they can sink their teeth into. There are good turns by Allison Janney as Hinds' ex-wife, who has told their children he is dead; by Michael Lerner as Janney's unlikely new boyfriend (considering he is six inches shorter and twenty years older); by Shirley Henderson as Janney's screwed-up younger sister who is still getting over the suicide of her husband (Paul Reubens), and isn't helped much by the fact that he keeps visiting her as a ghost; and by Michael K. Williams as Henderson's current fiance, who was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the first film, and is now, somehow, a black man.

There are a lot of good conversations in the film that deal honestly with awkward topics, which is a specialty of Solondz's. How, for instance, do you deal with your son when he asks what pedophilia is? You try to sidestep the answer. But what if he keeps coming at you? The kid, played by Dylan Riley Snyder, has been told by the kids at school what his father did to those boys all those years ago, and he just wants to know the truth. He wants a clinical description so that his father's actions are no longer vague or exaggerated in his imagination.

The whole film plays like a series of awkward situations performed by the disturbed and broken characters caught up in them. You laugh as a defense against it. The opening scene has Williams tearfully pleading with Henderson, saying, "I'll give up cocaine. I'll give up crack. I'll give up crack cocaine." It gets a laugh, but the performance is so sincere that I almost regretted laughing.

The best scene in the film comes when Hinds visits his college-age son at school. The son, played by Christ Marquette, has been telling his friends that his father is dead, and dreading the day his father is released from prison. The scene is played very quietly, with the two stalking around the room, keeping a distance from each other. Hinds wants to know if Marquette has inherited any of his dysfunctional tendencies. He wants to know if his son is gay, if he has ever had homosexual thoughts, if he has ever thought about little boys. Without really saying it, he wants to know if his son is going to be okay. It is such an awkward situation that I cringed as if I were watching a horror film. Here is a monster both apologizing to his son, caring for him, and yet knowing that he is a failure as a father and that he will never see him again, and that it is the right decision to leave and never come back. It is a fine balancing act by both Hinds and Marquette, and by Solondz.

The film, alas, is fairly unbalanced aside from the acting. There is no through-line to the plot, and some of the threads are forcefully connected. The appearances by Reubens as a ghost sidetrack the otherwise harsh realities of the characters, even though he is obviously a psychological manifestation of the demented Henderson. But there are great scenes and great acting by all involved, and Solondz continues to examine the human being behind the monster's mask.