Movie: Life During Wartime
Starring: Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney and Chris Marquette
Writer/Director: Todd Solondz (Happiness)
Duration: 98 minutes
3 stars out of 4
Bill: Are you alone here?
Jacqueline: Married … Alone, same thing.
Todd Solondz has called his latest venture into the human pathos, Life During Wartime, more “politically overt” than anything. Well, he could mince his words to any end, but Life During Wartime is an absent minded, yet connotative morality tale that hurdles past its contrivances to achieve a moral fibre.
I laughed sporadically, but I suppose that’s the point. It’s a dark comedy that’s more dark, than comedy. After all, we are dealing with wartime.
The last time we heard the song “Life During Wartime” in film was in the 1984 Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense. Here, the closest we get to a self-referential number involves Joy (Shirley Henderson) strumming a redolent version on guitar. It strums out pathos, longing and futility.
But in Life During Wartime, the Talking Heads are nowhere to be found—but there are talking heads. These are characters, enclosed in tight, encapsulated close-ups to slowly deconstruct their facial gestures and despondent nuances.
Who are the other characters? The ensemble follows Trish (Allison Janney) the ex-wife of a pedophile, trying to nurture her three children while under the wing of Harvey Weiner (Michael Lerner). Her husband is Bill (Ciarán Hinds) who wanders the scenery like a ghost. He’s essentially a memory, an awful one—one that haunts and is best heard silently.
But the real highlight is the springtide Billy (Chris Marquette), the freckled and precocious son of Trish, who is too young to understand the macabre and the sins of his father. There’s that awkward scene involving Billy asking his mother how a man rapes another man. Trish, out of all explanations, tries to romanticize it and give it a justification.
Life During Wartime strives for truth by bellowing its characters in a gust of cynicism. The characters dress in 1970s attire (when the song of this title was, coincidentally, released) but we never exactly get the sense of which war we are dealing with. There are no subtle shots of army posters, explosions or messengers delivering KIA notifications. The lingering idea of war is merely juxtaposed by Solondz’s vibrant scenery, which represents beauty over sordidness, like how the fancy apartments in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby contrasted the diabolical plot.
One thing is for sure: this is one squalid movie. These are characters on the brink of suicide, so delirious they dream about death and the beauty of disappearing. Trish loves Harvey not because he is lucrative or attractive, but because he is normal and has will power. Some characters fight for normality in Life During Wartime, others kind of mock it and in a sense that is their freedom. The reassuring notion for the characters is that forgetting and forgiving will lead to freedom and democracy.
Life During Wartime is a powerful practice in deciphering its character archetypes and then breaking them down to their honest bones. But once Solondz breaks the truth, there is destruction, coincidence and carnage. And ultimately, as we breach our emotions, we find a true darkness within.
Just like Solondz’s Happiness (which Life During Wartime is said to be a sequel to) and Welcome to the Dollhouse, the film takes opposing characters and puts them on the Solondz Pedestal—asking when the worst can happen, can we ever amend? Usually the answer is immaterial and Solondz dares us to speculate, as great filmmakers do.
The film does become overwrought in the last half hour, interchanging its black comedy with self-parodying quirks meant to exploit its purpose. Solondz is a talented filmmaker however and his constant need to make us cry may turn some off.
Life During Wartime is a sullen film, but it circumvents its erratic quirks by showing what all great black comedies can prove—the point is to be repelled and then naturally, you will find yourself compensating for the humour that follows.
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