Happiness movie review & film summary (1998)

We meet Joy (Jane Adams), who has just broken up with the loser she's been dating (Jon Lovitz). He gives her a present, an engraved reproduction ashtray he got through mail order, but after she thanks him ("It almost makes me want to learn to smoke") he viciously grabs it back: "This is for the girl who loves me for who I am." We meet Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who describes pornographic sexual fantasies to his therapist (Dylan Baker) and then concludes that he will never realize them because he is too boring. The therapist, named Bill, is indeed bored. Later Bill buys a teen-idol magazine and masturbates while looking at the photos.

We meet Joy's two sisters, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) and Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle). Trish is a chirpy housewife, who is married to Bill the psychiatrist but knows nothing of his pedophilia. Helen is a poet who drops names ("Salman is on the line") and describes the countless men who lust for her. The parents of the three sisters (Louise Lasser and Ben Gazzara) have been married for years, but now Lenny wants to leave. Not to fool around. Just to be alone.

We meet Kristina (Camryn Manheim), a fat girl who lives down the hall from the solitary Allen, and knocks on his door to announce that Pedro, the doorman, has been murdered. (His body has been dismembered and put in plastic bags: "Everyone uses Baggies. That's why we can relate to this crime.") Allen doesn't want to know. He leafs through porno magazines, gets drunk and makes obscene phone calls. One of his calls goes to the woman he fantasies about. It is Helen, the "popular" sister, who enjoys his heavy breathing and calls him back.

We get the sense of warehouses of strangers--of people stacked into the sky in lonely apartments, each one hiding secrets. We watch in sadness and unease as Bill the shrink attends his son Billy's Little League game and becomes enraptured by one of his teammates. When the other boy has a "sleep-over" with Billy, Bill drugs his family and molests the young boy (not shown onscreen).

Later, there is a heartbreaking conversation between Billy and his father. (Billy is isolated in closeup and we assume the young actor is reading the lines without knowing what the older actor is saying.) Their talk lingers in uneasy memory. The boy has been told at school that his father is a molester. He asks his dad if it is true. His father says it is. In a scene of pain and sadness, the boy asks more questions and the father answers simply, briefly and completely honestly. A friend who saw the movie told me, "Instead of lying, he kept telling him the truth, regardless of how hard that was for both of them. The honesty may be the one thing that saves the son from the immense damage done by the father." Well, I hope so.

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