While we have seen footage from the film during its 2009 Venice Film Festival bow — where it won a screenwriting award — this is, for all and intents and purposes, our first real look at Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime,” his quasi weird sequel to 1998’s “Happiness.”
From what we understand (and or based on what we’ve written in the past), the film centers on the lives of several of the characters in “Happiness,” plus a few from 1995’s “Welcome To The Dollhouse” (Solondz’s crowing achievement thus far in this writer’s opinion) and revolves around the themes of forgiveness, which was once the working title of the film. The rub is that every single character in the previous films are now played by new actors. Got that?
Sort of like a continuation of the identity free-association experiments Solondz was playing with during, “Palindromes” (eight different women including Jennifer Jason Leigh played a young girl who runs away from home only to be buggered by all kinds of wackos).
The picture stars several actors including, Allison Janney, Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens, Ciarán Hinds, Ally Sheedy, Shirley Henderson, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Kenneth Williams, Michael Lerner and more (we made a handy cheat sheet last year so you could see who was now playing who).
Our Editor-In-Chief saw the film at TIFF 2009 and didn’t seem to particularly love it, but still seemed to find some value in it regardless, writing somewhat cooly about the film, “[The new Solondz film] is easily one of the more semi-uneventful films we saw at TIFF. That’s not to say its bad either, but a bit of an inspired mess, and we wonder just how confused those who hadn’t seen “Happiness” before must have felt.”
And adding, “[Solondz] thankfully still has an acidic tongue and an acerbic black heart… [yet] ‘Life During Wartime,’ is a noble examination of empathy for heinous acts, if one, that’s partially too on-the-nose in moments and not always entirely successful. [However, it’s] essentially a new chapter in Todd Solondz’s career and one that will be interesting to watch once it’s fully fine-tuned.”
While that’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement, The Playlist braintrust also added the film to its 2010 Anticipated: 30 Films We’ve Already Seen list released earlier this year (which acts as a must-see guide and a buyer beware one as well). It does have an eponymous original Beck and Devendra Banhart song in it (penned by Solondz), so we’re still at least mildly curious (surely there’s going to be no soundtrack released — maybe a one-off ITunes track? yeah? Either way, you can hear the song in the trailer around the 1:26 mark 🙂
The poster looks… decidedly like a U.K. version, but aren’t their posters that weird quad size? You’d think instead of picking one of the minor nerdlingers in the movie, they might try and do some collage-y type poster which each one of the actors’ faces. What do we know. Maybe IFC’s focus group test marketing said, weiner-looking kids (Dylan Riley Snyder) are what sell snide indie movies these days. The trailer? Well it looks deadpan, amusingly cruel and twisted, just like most Solondz pictures, but we mean that in a good way.
The film is expected to his theaters in limited release and same-day Video OnDemand sometime this summer via IFC Films. “Life During Wartime” hits the U.K. some time in April. [via InContention]
