Life During Wartime

City Paper Grade: B+

by Sam Adams

THIS AIN'T NO FOOLIN' AROUND: Allison Janney plays the former wife of a pedophile in Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Even those who escaped Todd Solondz's 1998 movie Happiness unscathed could be forgiven for not wanting to revisit its bleak terrain. But Solondz has never been one to give his audience what they want, or what they expect.

Life During Wartime opens with what looks like a re-enactment of Happiness' first scene: a restaurant banquette floating in a sea of black, an unhappy couple in the midst of a breakup. But the actors are different, and so, we glean, is the pairing of characters. Rather than stick-thin Jane Adams dumping schlubby boyfriend Jon Lovitz, it's Shirley Henderson asking for time off from husband Michael K. Williams. Henderson is playing a new incarnation of Adams' character, but Williams, best-known as The Wire's Omar, has taken on the role of Philip Seymour Hoffman's crank caller. Confused? Good. Solondz wants you off-balance.

Wartime extends the scalding if occasionally glib pessimism of its predecessor, but here it's balanced with a deeper sense of sorrow. Where the first movie ended with a pedophile's son passing into biological manhood (signified by a seminal spurt), this unlikely revisitation follows the father, Bill (then buttoned-down Dylan Baker, now brooding Ciarán Hinds), on his return from prison, on a path toward a reconciliation he is not sure he wants or deserves.

Apart from a handful of references to terrorism, here used as a stand-in for ultimate evil rather than a tangible threat, the title is as far as Solondz goes toward explicitly referencing the post-9/11 landscape, but the question of whether there is such a thing as an unforgivable act is threaded throughout. Bill's ex-wife (Allison Janney) has resettled in Florida and is close to marrying Michael Lerner's ardent Zionist, but the threat of betrayal clouds their prospects. The ghosts of the past linger literally and figuratively in a world where innocence is gone for good.