Life During Wartime

Review

Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime is a genuine, all-enveloping bad-dream movie, and I’m still wrestling with its squirmy mix of grotesquerie and humanism, stylized camp and acid realism. It’s a sequel to Solondz’s queasy 1998 Happiness, a broad satire of Jewish-suburban life with a subplot about a doctor who molests little boys. Life During Wartime has the same characters but none of the same actors, and the tone and look are different�less glib, more malignant. Largely set in Florida and L.A., the film bears no traces of the natural world: Everything is artificially colored and overbaked. Jane Adams, who played the youngest of three warped sisters, has been replaced by Shirley Henderson, the gap more vivid between her twittery little-girl voice and withering demeanor. Lara Flynn Boyle’s husky-toned sexpot has aged into a drawn and twitchy Ally Sheedy. Cynthia Stevenson has been elongated into Allison Janney in full-tilt delirium. The male actors (Paul Reubens, Michael Kenneth Williams, Michael Lerner, Ciarán Hinds) either are ghosts or might as well be; they’re finished. Stars of David, flags of Israel, images of carnage in Gaza show up in the background, but they’re not belabored. Solondz conjures a world that’s rotting away from the inside, in which only the children�freckle-faced Dylan Riley Snyder and Emma Hinz�weep over the loss of moral authority. This might be some kind of goddamned masterpiece, but I’m not sure I want to watch it again to say for sure. — David Edelstein

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• Director Todd Solondz on His Latest Film, 'Life During Wartime' (7/19/10)