Happiness

Todd Solondz is easily one of the most controversial contemporary American filmmakers. Despite his perverted sensibilities and obsessions, Solondz seems to rarely receive negative criticism from film critics. I guess the rationality is as long as it's contributing to the decline of morals in the United States and abroad, it's OK. Todd Solondz's Happiness, which isn't a happy film at all, attempts to dissect various Americans real hidden sexual perversions and embarrassments.

One of the main characters of Happiness is an upper middle class psychiatrist name Bill who likes to masturbate to magazines featuring "cool" pre-teen boys. Like many psychiatrist's, Bill really isn't too mentally stable himself as he likes drugging and raping young boys. Todd Solondz paints Bill's family as the ideal American family in upper middle class suburbia. Only Mr. Solondz could make such a sick joke out of the most seemingly typical of nuclear families. Dr. Bill has a bitch for a housewife that seems to have some pent up aggression from her lack of sexual activities. It must suck for a wife when her husband would rather fuck young boys.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman does an extraordinary job as a pervert that likes to jerk off whilst making dirty phone calls. This man in obsessed with his next door apartment neighbor and is willing to make a complete degenerate ass of himself while trying to obtain her love. This perverted prank caller also happens to have a beast of a woman infatuated with him. A woman that is raped by a tiny Latino man name Pedro who is about 1/3 her side. She also likes to mention how Pedro lost his penis.

Sick Pedophile or just your average psychiatrist?

Happiness features a variety of other perverts that are guaranteed to make the most desensitized of viewers feel uncomfortable. Todd Solondz manged to create an ordinary looking and constructed film that is full of the most depraved sexualities ever captured celluloid. When I say depraved sexualities, I don't mean the type you would expect to see in a Mexican surrealist film. I mean the type that you would expect to hear about on the five o clock news. Todd Solondz is a director that does the opposite of what most directors do; he confronts the harsh and unmentionable realities of our society.

-Ty E