With Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz delivers an unexpected semi-sequel to Happiness in typically uncompromising fashion. Read critic reviews
Life During Wartime
2009, Comedy/Drama, 1h 38m
105 Reviews 5,000+ RatingsWhat to know
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Movie Info
Nothing comes easily for Joy (Shirley Henderson) and her sisters, Trish (Allison Janney) and Helen (Ally Sheedy). Joy, unhappy with her job and her sleazy husband (Michael Kenneth Williams), is haunted by her dead boyfriend's ghost (Paul Reubens). Trish's pedophile husband (Ciarán Hinds) is behind bars, and she's ready to move on with her life. As an increasingly bitter Helen approaches middle age with a failing screenwriting career, it becomes clear her mother offers little comfort.
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Rating: R (Language|Brief Nudity|Some Disturbing Dialogue|Strong Sexual Content)
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Genre: Comedy, Drama
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Original Language: English
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Director: Todd Solondz
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Producer: Christine K. Walker, Derrick Tseng
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Writer: Todd Solondz
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Release Date (Theaters): limited
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Release Date (Streaming):
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Box Office (Gross USA): $278.8K
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Runtime:
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Distributor: IFC Films
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Critic Reviews for Life During Wartime
Audience Reviews for Life During Wartime
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Eerily cheerful in this follow up to the first film. I hated the ensemble, I hated the fact that all the characters were replaced, not for good. But the screenplay was fantastic, as usual, very dark and deep. Life During Wartime did not fail to impress and entertain.
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Then there's Life During Wartime, the sequel to Happiness. All the questions I never had are more or less answered here. Some of the references actually did put a smile on my face, but for the most part I found it dull. It's not much worse than Happiness, but that's not saying to much. I felt it was to colorful for the topics at hand, and never really accomplished anything.
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<i>"People can't help it if they're monsters."</i> Friends, family, and lovers struggle to find love, forgiveness, and meaning in a war-torn world riddled with comedy and pathos. <center><font size=+2 face="Century Schoolbook"><b><u>REVIEW</u></b></font></center> Director Todd Solondz takes the various dysfunctional characters of his earlier film, "Happiness", recasts them, and places them in "Life During Wartime". This facial reshuffling then becomes an enquiry on Solondz's part: have these people changed? Are major personality or life changes even possible? How contingent is human behaviour? How reversible are past scars? "Happiness" was a jet black comedy which jumped from paedophilia to suicide to masturbation to divorce to murder, deftly hopping from taboo to taboo with a kind of soul crushing cruelty. For Solondz, everything is a masquerade, humans are petty, pathetic and cruel, and every good deed merely masks something horrible at worst, hypocritical at best. With "Wartime" Solondz tries to recapture the cringe comedy and satirical edge of "Happiness", but fails entirely, modern audiences now desensitised to his particular brand of sensationalism. With the taboo shocks out the window, his audience is then free to focus on the film's clunky message: the past scars the future, Solondz says, but all should be forgiven, lest a cycle of animosity, hate, fear and torment be perpetuated. The film then aligns these themes to the events of September the 11th; America as a nation should forgive those who abuse her, as those upon whom pain is inflicted in the film should forgive their tormentors, or themselves if necessary. It's all very reductive, but far from the misanthropy which critics of Solondz often accuse him of spouting. If anything, Solondz's a jaded idealist, his characters all looking for a way out of the rut he keeps digging them deeper into.
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If you have never seen a Todd Solondz film than you will probably enjoy this alot more. My problem with it is that it feels Solondz is very indulgent and lazy fitting this film together with pieces that he has shown us multiple times before. Not one time in this film is there that fun house balance of over the top darkness and comedy that is in 'Happiness', it is either just awkward or flat. It is very very predictable which is one of the worst things that a Solondz film should be.
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