Directors don't normally travel with theme music, but as Todd Solondz walks in the door, the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" comes over the house stereo. It's a fitting bit of serendipity, given that Solondz's films are rich in explorations of the dark side of human nature. Or, as his critics would have it, he's a misanthrope, creating miserable, pathetic characters and then driving them further into the depths of despair.
"Americans are so in love with redemption," he says a bit later, toying with a forkful of pasta. "So many politicians or celebrities, they get drunk, do drugs, have prostitutes, then they say, 'I'm sorry,' they go on Leno or another forum and they apologize, they find God, and then they do it again. It's cyclical, but the public plays along. It's a kind of myth, a paradigm that Americans love. I think my trajectories are not redemptive so much as they are tragic."
Solondz had his breakthrough in 1995 with "Welcome to the Dollhouse," a dark comedy about a junior high outcast. But even "Dollhouse's" most unsettling moments, such as the scene in which a teenage boy offers to rape a classmate without knowing what the word means, could not have prepared audiences for what came next.
In retrospect, 1998's "Happiness" was the first film of Solondz's mature style: bracing, confrontational and utterly unredemptive. Among its dramatis personae are a suburban father of two (Dylan Baker) who drugs and rapes one of his son's friends during a sleepover and an obscene phone caller (Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose violent fantasies find a willing recipient in his next-door neighbor.
These are not pleasant characters in whose company to pass a couple of hours, nor hope to meet again. So there's something perverse — and thus, perfectly characteristic of Solondz — that more than a decade after "Happiness" polarized art-house audiences, he picks up where he left off with "Life During Wartime," which he calls a "quasi-sequel." The movie opens in select theaters Friday.
Building on the central gambit of his 2004 feature "Palindromes," in which the leading role was played by eight widely disparate actors, Solondz recast every part for the new movie. After serving his prison sentence, Baker's blank-faced pedophile has morphed into dark, stern Ciarán Hinds. The three sisters of the first film — perpetual sad-sack Joy, blithe homemaker Trish and self-involved author Helen — are played by Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney and Ally Sheedy. (The roles were originated by Jane Adams, Cynthia Stevenson and Lara Flynn Boyle.)
Solondz opens "Life During Wartime" with an emphatic callback to the first film. Here again are Joy and a man seated at an isolated restaurant banquette in the midst of an excruciatingly awkward breakup. Again, he presents her with a pewter ashtray with her name engraved on the side. And again, once she lowers the boom, the conversation rapidly turns angry and recriminatory. No wonder Joy cops to a feeling of déjà vu.
The repetition, however, is not exact. Joy's soon-to-be-dumped dinner companion is not Jon Lovitz's character from "Happiness," which makes sense, since he killed himself midway through the first movie. (He does turn up later, as a vengeful ghost played by Paul Rubens.) The man, her husband, is the first movie's perverse prank-caller, although it takes a while to recognize that Hoffman's doughy lump has been transmogrified into Michael Kenneth Williams, best known as "The Wire's" fearsome Omar.
"I wanted to play fast and loose," says Solondz, explaining his desire to expand on the first movie without being constrained by it. "I didn't want to have to be so literal. Obviously, the most brazen violation is the first one you see. I didn't want an actor who would in any way evoke Philip Hoffman."
He laughs, a nasal chuckle. "I think I succeeded there."
Where the brightly lighted, flattened-out compositions of "Happiness" reflected the television Solondz grew up watching, "Life During Wartime" embraces a richer palate, its images captured by cinematographer Edward Lachman in high-definition video. But TV still remains a touchstone for Solondz, especially its evocation of a suburban idyll that his movies both embody and ferociously undermine. Part of the reason he set "Wartime" in Florida, Solondz says, is that it "out-suburbs the suburbs. It's a kind of Generica."
Solondz's landscapes are peopled with avatars of middle-class America. Trish's son, Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder), a freckle-faced redhead rapidly approaching his bar mitzvah, seems as if he's stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
"He's such an anachronism, this boy," Solondz says. "There's nothing of the contemporary, TV-addicted, bratty kid about this boy. He really has a quality of innocence about him. Just like on 'Lassie.' That's what I thought of. Or 'Leave It to Beaver.' "
