Synopsis
The lives of many individuals connected by the desire for happiness, often from sources usually considered dark or evil.
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Cast
- Jane AdamsJoy Jordan
- Jon LovitzAndy Kornbluth
- Philip Seymour HoffmanAllen
- Dylan BakerBill Maplewood
- Lara Flynn BoyleHelen Jordan
- Justin ElvinTimmy Maplewood
- Cynthia StevensonTrish Maplewood
- Lila Glantzman-LeibChloe Maplewood
- Gerry BeckerPsychiatrist
- Rufus ReadBilly Maplewood
Recommendations
- 100
New Times (L.A.)
Weaving many interconnected plot lines and more than a dozen lives together, this gifted writer-director 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. - 100
Newsweek
Unnerving because it forces us into uncharted waters: Solondz doesn't tell us how to feel but makes us thrash out our responses for ourselves. In doing so, he has made one of the few indelible movies of the year. - 90
The A.V. Club
Thoroughly realized characters and relationships and Solondz's masterful ability to switch the tone from comic to tragic within the same scene help make Happiness a better film than it might have been otherwise. Much better, in fact. - 90
Washington Post
Part of this success is due to the exquisitely cast ensemble-composed of actors, not movie stars. To a man, woman and child, the unforced performers are spot-on. - 80
Village Voice
If Hollywood were truly devoted to telling it like it is, Baker would win a special Oscar. To add to the creepiness, Solondz is (as he made clear in Dollhouse) an extremely sensitive director of kids. - 80
TV Guide Magazine
[Solondz's] blistering, brilliantly transgressive satire is sure to rattle even the most jaded filmgoer. It's also a remarkably compassionate profile of American life at its most desperate. - 75
San Francisco Chronicle
The aftertaste of that father-son scene is so strong, so disturbing, that the riches of Happiness -- its writing, its performances, its trenchant wit -- all seem a bit diminished in the bargain. - 63
San Francisco Examiner
Solondz's greatest success is the pederast, heartbreakingly played by Baker...Had Solondz reached that apex in the other stories, it would have been a masterpiece.
