Review: MIFF ‘10: Life During Wartime
Life During Wartime
Dir. Todd Solondz
Is there a contemporary film director more narcissistic than Todd Solondz? Like Eminem writing albums complaining about being famous, Solondz’s films since Happiness (1998) have evinced an obsession with answering his critics’ charges of condescending misanthropy. Storytelling (2001) was an embarrassing case of disingenuous martyrdom: Solondz depicted himself as a female literature student raped by a black college professor in the first half and as a struggling documentary filmmaker who works at a shoe store in the second half, both of whose rallying cry in the face of vicious critics is, “But I’m just showing the truth!” In Palindromes (2004), Solondz gathered a bunch of disabled kids to perform pro-life Christian pop music, a stunt designed to provoke the same condemnations of Solondz, to which the director would maintain (unconvincingly) a position of empathy: “The knowledge that some people believe I was grotesquely mocking them is very, very painful to me,” Solondz lamented in one instance, acting as if the kids were not costumed, scripted and choreographed by him to elicit the maximum humiliation.
Now comes Solondz’s latest, Life During Wartime, a pseudo-sequel to Happiness. Two thirds of the way though, Helen (a successful screenwriter played by Ally Sheedy) tearfully defends herself from charges by her sister Joy (Shirley Henderson) that she is making fun of her: “Oh god, please Joy! I try, I really do. You and Keanu and everyone thinks I mock them, that I’m cruel and condescending, that I have no heart. And it’s really hard! It’s hard on me! Because I really do love you!”
The wonderfully ironic performance of Ally Sheedy is a bright spot in the film, hinting at Solondz’s willingness to satirise himself, but the most telling part of the speech is its defeatist conclusion where Helen says, “You think maybe I have the answer, but Joy, I’m only human!” This sentence articulates the larger thesis developed throughout Solondz’s latest work: People can’t ever change their faults. Self-improvement or attempts to help others change is folly. Why even bother with morality or politics?
And as for Solondz, why even bother with developing as an artist? Life During Wartime has all the faults and limitations apparent in his 1995 debut Welcome to the Dollhouse: Contempt for its characters; simplistic attempts at social critique; reliance on unrealistic caricatures and stereotypes for “humour”. Life During Wartime, as expected, is so over-determined as to be incapable of signifying anything outside of itself, except maybe that this time Solondz has resigned himself to his own artistic mediocrity. Which might make it Solondz’s most honest artistic statement to date.
- Brad Nguyen
