I've been a fan of Todd Solondz's dark, even mean-spirited brand of humiliation comedy since Welcome to the Dollhouse, and the squirmy problems of his put-upon heroine, Dawn Weiner.
I've hung with him through experiments like Storytelling and even Palindromes, in which he had several different actresses play the same character in different scenes.
But he lost me with Life During Wartime, a kind of sequel to his bitterly funny Happiness of 1998. Picking up the story a few years later with some of the same characters -- played by a new group of actors -- Solondz has intriguing things to say about the nature of forgiveness and remorse, but says them in a way that alternately grates or simply bores.
It's not the subject matter that is so problematic in this film -- though that includes pedophilia, suicide and the like. Rather, it's the pacing and the writing: The former is grindingly slow and the latter is devastatingly flat. There is very little story to speak of -- a sister reconnecting with her family; a family trying to move on after a horrifying scandal -- with characters that seem more like constructs than people.
The cast -- which includes Shirley Henderson, Paul Reuben, Michael Kenneth Williams, Allison Janney, Michael Lerner, Ciaran Hinds and Ally Sheedy -- does what it can in the torpid tale but, really, it's an exercise (or perhaps an experiment) in style that is deliberate but never compelling. I sat through the entire film at the Toronto Film Festival last year and kept waiting for Solondz to pull away the curtain and show his real intent. But the film is his from start to finish -- and it is what it is.
I have watched others of his films -- Happiness, Storytelling -- a couple of times to delve into the sourly witty world he creates, a place of the most rueful laughter and intense discomfort while still being weirdly entertaining. Life During Wartime may be exactly the film that Solondz wanted to make but it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to watch it.