Happiness (1998)

Rolling Stone
"...Unique and unmissable....HAPPINESS is potently funny and painfully affecting, often at the same time..." 10/29/1998 p.80

Entertainment Weekly
"...Tender, shocking, cathartically honest....Solondz leaves us giddy....Breaks through to haunted levels of erotic compulsion that place it close to the hypnotic artistry of BLUE VELVET..." -- Rating: A 11/06/1998 p.56

Box Office
"...A superb black comedy....HAPPINESS leaves viewers feeling disturbed, amazed, and fascinated..." 07/01/1998 p.126

Premiere
"...[A] marvelous, multifaceted, and endlessly unsettling third feature....[Solondz is] an imaginative, witty, and deeply subversive filmmaker..." 11/01/1998 p.32

Los Angeles Times
"...Solondz has an impeccable ear for current speech patterns....He also has a gift for skewering self-centeredness..." 10/16/1998 p.C1

Total Film
"...Blackly comic, yet touching and sympathetic, it never flinches in its depiction of human darkness..." 07/01/2003 p.137

New York Times 0 of 10
In Happiness, a much bigger film than his first [Welcome To The Dollhouse] and another murderous comedy of manners, Mr. Solondz gets even closer to the bone. His natural tendency to make audiences squirm leads him into material that wouldn't be mentioned in many other films; here, it's linked to the eating of ice cream sundaes. But Mr. Solondz doesn't seem to be straining for shock value when he turns the man in the sunny family portrait on the wall into the man who drugs his family's dessert. (His purpose: an assault on the son's young friend.) He fills Happiness with enough misery to make its most outrageous joke its title -- and with enough true, unexpected tenderness to warrant this view of the world. - Janet Maslin
 
Dallas Observer 0 of 10
Weaving together myriad interconnected plot lines with more than a dozen lives, this gifted writer-director [Todd Solondz] has fashioned a bleak, brilliant comedy about loneliness, lovelessness, and alienation -- a film that constantly upends our assumptions about what is heartbreaking, what is hilarious, and what is both. Here's a graveyard of shattered self-esteem, a lonely crowd of walking-and-talking wounded that provokes, by turns, laughter and shocked silence. For 135 minutes this moviemaker sends us wildly mixed signals about what it means to be human; about the proximity of tragedy and comedy; and about life in a society where no one in a roomful of office clerks can remember the name, or the face, of a former co-worker who's just committed suicide and where an apartment-house doorman can wind up chopped into little pieces in an upstairs tenant's freezer. Happiness is risky business indeed. Now 38, New Jersey native Solondz chooses not to satanize a pedophile, but rather to turn him this way and that in the light, looking at all of his facets. Solondz neither idealizes nor mocks a seemingly Cleaveresque household in New Jersey; instead, he examines it with pinpoint accuracy, layer by layer. In his disparate characters, he shows us rage inflamed by sadness, isolation governed by impotence. He shows the excitement in the face of a needy woman when a Russian cab driver takes up a guitar and sings to her "You Light Up My Life," of all things, in an accent as thick as borscht. Anything to find happiness. We don't know whether to laugh or cry, but the emotional jolt is powerful. - Bill Gallo