Happiness

I've seen a few weird movies down the years, but Happiness - Todd Solondz' controversial but massively acclaimed follow-up to the brutally impressive Welcome To The Dollhouse - is truly in a league all of its own.

Grim, sick, morbid, perverted - and perversely excellent - the misleadingly titled Happiness is a raging, vengeful, malevolent celluloid beast that hacks away mercilessly at every taboo in the book, and makes the Farrelly Brothers' output look tamer than the dullest Merchant Ivory.

Quite how Happiness managed to pass the censor is something of a mystery: paedophilia, murder, rape, stalking and adolescent masturbation are all on the menu. It will almost certainly not be showing in the 'plexes of rural one-horse Midwestern towns, and even the very hardened will definitely find themselves squirming in their seats several times before the film runs its course.

In spite of Solondz's unremittingly bleak view of human nature, the film somehow manages to triumph through its immense infusion of twisted black humour. While Dollhouse captured the misery and torment of childhood maladjustment with pin-point scalpel precision, Happiness goes several steps further.

With the best will in the world, the characters herein can best be described as a bunch of freaks, sickos, whackos and perverts. The most well-adjusted character in the entire movie, Joy (Jane Adams) is a thoroughly mis-named, neurotic bundle of misery who aspires to be a singer-songwriter, but might be better off killing herself for all the fulfilment her life contains.

Her two sisters are equally screwed up: Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a pretentious novelist with far more self-confidence than she's really entitled to, who becomes prey to a barrage of obscene, sexually threatening phone calls from the revolting, psycho-blob (Seymour-Hoffman) who lives in the same apartment block.

It gets worse. The other sis, Trish (Cynthis Stevenson) is a spookily normal housewife who mistakenly believes herself to be blissfully married to Bill (Dylan Baker), a reserved psychotherapist who harbours predatory paedophiliac desires for his eleven-year-old son's friends. The unfortunate kid makes recurring appearance throughout - his futile attempts at masturbation providing one of the film's running subplots.

To say the very least, the characters are a memorable bunch - which is not to say that you'd willingly let any of them within a million-mile radius of your life. When the most sympathetic character in a movie is prone to storing human body parts in the fridge, you know the feelgood factor doesn't exactly reach Saturday Night Fever levels. What Happiness has to offer is humungous helpings of side-splitting comedy and spine-chilling morbidity (often in the same scene), while the morality of the film should be blatantly obvious to anyone with a conscience, in spite of the pounding it will undoubtedly take from both the right wing and the PC brigade.