Life During Wartime

During 2020, I started watching the films that the critics praised and/or blockbuster films.The more I watch, the more I painfully realize those "art" movies awarded in film festivals are just not worth watching at all.

As a big fan of foremost Happiness and Storytelling, I'm very disillusioned about the fact that Todd Solondz may never make great films like those again. This was a disappointment, but not exactly a shock after the gloom of Palindromes.

Life During Wartime is of sorts a sequel to Happiness, but Todd Solondz chose a different cast for his latest film to play the same characters. I have seen Happiness, but don't remember it well enough and going into Wartime was actually unaware it was a continuation of events.

"Happiness" was a funny yet very disturbing film. It's a very good film but one I can't see too often since some scenes are too weird.

A sort of sequel to Happiness(with most of the characters returning, albeit all recast, aged and... well, not matured), this picks up years after, and we see how Trish deals with the events of it, and meet Joy again(and she's taken a turn for the...

"People can't help it if they're monsters." – Bill (Life During Wartime) Director Todd Solondz takes the various dysfunctional characters of his earlier film, "Happiness", recasts them, and places them in "Life During Wartime".

11 years after Happiness, his poisonous stab at moral absolutism, Todd Solondz returned with this equally bleak sequel, a continuation of the all-American domestic grotesque. The characters return, except now played by different actors (including a bleary Paul "Pee Wee" Reubens), as does Solondz' ability to challenge expectations with disarming directness and surgical precision.

Life during wartime seems to attempt to make you forget there was a movie before it, I am of course referring to "Happiness",wonderful actors such and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jane Adams have been replaced by nearly unlikable actors that strain to meet the standard and fall short. To avoid spoilers I'll stay away from the plot, but I have to address that I was shocked by how flat the writing is, and how stale the dialog becomes after only a minute or so.

Todd Solondz comes back one more time resuming stories about joy and sorrows, forgives, forgets and regrets, the same gears that leaded his previous works as Welcome To Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998) and Palindromes (2004), in one way or another.Here the story surrounds the life of a kid and the members of his family that are trying to discover the meanings of when and how could people achieve the joy or the happiness in their lives just forgiving or forgetting something harmful enough to be forgotten or forgiven.