Tag Archives: Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Capsules

CAPSULE: HAPPINESS (1998)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Dylan Baker, , Cynthia Stevenson, , , , Louise Lasser

PLOT: An examination of the lives of three sisters, their extended families, and their neighbors reveals an elaborate network of secrets, sickness, perversion, and chronic unhappiness.

Still from Happiness (1998)

COMMENTS: Happiness presents a challenge to reviewers, but as difficult as is to write about, it’s not half as hard as it is to watch. Filled with reference to rape and pedophilia, along with near-constant mental cruelty and depression, the movie is one long trigger warning. Happiness doesn’t hold back; it always “goes there.” Side characters who initially seem like they might be oases of sanity and kindness turn out to be just as rotten inside as the principals. It is, technically, a black comedy, but the few grim jokes only highlight the nightmarishness of the character’s existence. The ironies only start with the title, a main character named “Joy,” and a soundtrack of schmaltzy soft-rock including Barry Manilow, Air Supply, and a version of “You Light Up My Life” performed by a Russian cabbie on the make. This is one dark movie.

With those warnings out of the way, the “must see” rating is warranted, for those with just a little bit of courage. Happiness is masterfully manipulative, totally assured in its execution, and totally ruthless in its worldview. The script is wicked and nuanced, the actors expert in nailing the difficult tone. It is a triumph of fearless cynicism; and yet, while it clearly hates its characters, it also oddly empathizes with them. They are allowed to feel guilt, suffering for their sins, while simultaneously being powerless to change their own destructive behaviors. This makes the movie as sad as it is scathing.

Happiness‘ alchemical majesty comes from successfully mixing strong emotions that should be incompatible. It’s not just the paring of comedy with dark situations. In truth, the movie isn’t all that funny, although it has a couple of conventional comedy moments (such as the psychiatrist zoning out while his patient complains that people find him boring, or Joy becoming a “scab” at an ESL program). Happiness‘ brand of bone-dry humor is really a precursor to contemporary anti-comedy, exemplified by an exchange between sisters Helen (Boyle) and Joy (Adams) that could be the movie’s comic manifesto. After Joy makes an innocent comment that Helen thinks is stupid, the elder sister bursts out in mock laughter, then consoles the younger: “Don’t worry,” she hisses, “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing with you.” Her sister’s confused response: “But I’m not laughing.”

Even more than its juxtaposition of humor and horror, the film succeeds by mixing its meanness with sorrow: Dylan Baker’s climactic tear-stained confession is simultaneously bone-chilling and heartrending. (The performances are uniformly excellent, but it seems odd that standout Baker never landed another major role: playing a child molester must be career suicide in Hollywood.) Happiness is, as noted, a very sad movie.

Is it a weird movie? I’d say no, although it is a unique one. Its unflinchingly downbeat, relentlessly derisive tone puts it well outside of mainstream entertainment. To the extent that we might claim it for the weird, it’s only due to its often exaggerated nature. Scenes play as the tiniest bit unreal: Bill’s conversations with his pre-adolescent son are perverted parodies of “Leave it to Beaver” chats. Catty conversations between the sisters are franker and more biting than they would be in reality. Horrible things are said in deadpan, and received with ambiguous expressions suggesting a mixture of alarm and bamboozlement. Detached artifice is pierced by real human emotion. That is not, in my mind, enough to get Happiness all the way to “weird” (though it certainly passes the “offbeat” marker); but at least I can see what the movie’s proponents are talking about.

Strangely, although it’s remembered by everyone who saw it and critically acclaimed, at the present time Happiness is nearly unobtainable. No streamer seems brave enough to take it on, the DVD has gone out of print, and it has never been issued on Blu-ray. I wouldn’t expect this sad situation to last forever.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… funny, sad, sincere, ugly, tough, weird, occasionally horrifying.”–Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Magazine, 2016 reassessment

(This movie was nominated for review by “CheapSwillBill” who commented “A list of weird movies that doesn’t mention Happiness? That’s weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: MARY AND MAX (2009)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Adam Elliot

FEATURING: Voices of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries, , 

PLOT: A lonely 8-year old girl in Australia picks a random address out of the New York Cityp hone book so she can ask where babies come from in America and begins a lifelong pen-pal relationship with Max, a middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome.

Still from Mary and Max (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s very good for a sentimental drama, but the crazy, damaged characters and intriguing stylized look still won’t rank it any higher than “offbeat” on the weird spectrum.

COMMENTS: The first figure you see in Mary and Max is a depressed, distressed carved koala bear clinging to a mailbox post; it sets the tone of solemn whimsy and announces Adam Elliot’s art style, a heaping dollop of cute cut with a tablespoon of the grotesque.  (When the action shifts from Australia to New York, the first figure you see is a glum and manly Statue of Liberty).  Mary, the little girl, is dowdy, with glasses and a “poo” colored birthmark, but Max is an ogre: a husky pinhead with ears on stalks, a dingy gray Shreck, magnificently voiced in a weary monotone by Hoffman.  The two main characters rarely speak, except in monologues when they read the missives they exchange; the tale is mostly narrated in a child’s storybook style, which gives the movie a literary flavor and a frequent undercurrent of irony (the narrator explains that Mary wishes she too had a friend to play piggyback with, as the lonely girl gazes out the window at a pair of dogs preparing to mate).  The story is sad—Mary’s ugly existence is particularly bleak, and made even worse by bursts of false hope—but the relationship between the two misfits is legitimately heartwarming.  The main characters are almost novelistically complex, and the first act, the most rewarding, is devoted to getting to know the Aussie girl and the overweight New Yorker who always wanted a friend who was not imaginary, a pet, or a figurine.  Quirky secondary characters include a Mary’s agoraphobic neighbor (who Mary thinks suffers from “home-a-phobia”), her “wobbly” sherry drinking mom, and Max’s half-blind neighbor Ivy, who smells like urine and cough drops.  Tiny details and running jokes are embedded in the claymation designs, like the series of rhyming epitaphs and the homeless man in front of Max’s tenement with a sign that changes over the years of the friends’ correspondence.  The Australian scenes are colored in a drab, rustic sepia, while New York is a noirish black and white; both locations have brilliant splashes of red representing the rare intrusion of joy into the character’s dim lives.  Humor—from the wry to the laugh-out-loud hilarious, as when Max explains where babies come from—is a near constant companion, at least for the first two thirds of the film.  The movie is intoxicating while it takes its time introducing the pen-pals, but once their characters are established, the plot hurtles through incidents as Mary grows up, loses her parents, goes to university, finds love and a career and many setbacks, and finally travels to New York to meet Max.  Ironically, the more that happens in the story, the more momentum it loses; it was more fascinating as a series of leisurely, anecdotal correspondences.  Further, as the story heads towards its climax, the humor drains out, as a series of personal disasters pile up on poor Mary and drive her to the psychic breaking point.  Although it scarcely ruins a great film, Elliot overplays the pathos in the climax, ending the story depressingly; the final ray of sunlight, though it brings a tear to the eye, can’t relieve the heavy, heavy clouds that cast the final act into darkness. This bittersweet animated feature isn’t kids’ stuff, or really weird stuff, but it’s worth your time if you have a sentimental old softie buried somewhere inside you, and he likes to laugh.

Mary and Max is the feature length culmination of a theme Elliot had worked on in a series of short films: the relationship between a “normal” person and an eccentric, disabled outcast (the cousin in “Cousin” suffers from cerebral palsy; the title character in the Oscar-winning short “Harvie Crumpet” is afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome). Having finally explored this terrain for a full ninety minutes, it will be interesting to see if the talented director tries something different next.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I can’t remember seeing an animated feature so dark and funny and bizarre and sad, all at the same time.”–James Plath, DVD Town (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Irene.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

27. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

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“I think the movie is fun. It has a lot of serious emotional stuff in it, but it’s funny in a weird way. You don’t have to worry, ‘What does the burning house mean?’ Who cares. It’s a burning house that someone lives in-—it’s funny.”–Director/writer Charlie Kaufman

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener

PLOT: Caden is a community theater director in Schenectady, New York, whose marriage and health are crumbling.  When things seem their lowest—his wife abandons him, and he believes that he’s dying—he inexplicably receives a MacArthur Genius grant.  He uses the money to create a meticulous recreation of New York City inside a warehouse, filled with actors playing characters from his own life, including one playing Caden the director himself.

Still from Synecdoche, New York

BACKGROUND:

  • Synecdoche is the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, who has been the screenwriter behind most of Hollywood’s big-budget weird films in the past decade.  His scripting credits include Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
  • Kaufman began the script for Synecdoche as a horror film to be directed by frequent collaborator Spike Jonze.  Over two years the script evolved into its current tragicomedy form, and, as Jonze was busy with other projects, it was agreed that Kaufman would direct, with Jonze co-producing.
  • Synecdoche, New York won the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best first feature.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Synecdoche is a movie that weirds us out more through the concepts and dramatic situations than through the visuals, but there is a lovely image of a tattooed rose that physically sheds a real dead petal as its owner expires.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Charlie Kaufman.  More to the point, Charlie Kaufman unleashed; unlike Being John Malkovich or Adaptation, where weird and puzzling events are given a rational (if obscure) answer by the end, the weirdness of Synecdoche deliberately frustrates all attempts at a logical solution.  Hazel’s house, which burns and smokes for decades without being consumed, is shamelessly absurd.  The movie is an exploration of dream logic, a life journey that fractures time, space and coherence, where individual events do not add up piece by piece on a plot level, but resolve themselves on an emotional level.


Original trailer for Synecdoche, New York

COMMENTS: “There is a secret something at play under the surface, growing like an Continue reading 27. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008) →