Metrograph

The thwarted souls that populate Solondz’s suburban New Jersey—amongst them, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s flopsweat-drenched dirty phone caller, Dylan Baker’s pedophile father to an 11-year-old boy, and Louise Lasser and Ben Gazzara’s miserably married couple—are united by each being a single degree of separation from one of the three Jordan sisters (Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Cynthia Stevenson), as well as by each striving, against all available evidence of its possibility, to find a measure of contentment in this Vale of Tears. From its immortal opening breakup scene (“I’m champagne and you’re shit…”) to its concluding coming-of-age money shot, Happiness is a remorseless gauntlet run through dysfunction and discomfiture of all shades… and, one might add, a laugh riot.

Distributor: Killer Films