Soldondz’s ‘Life During Wartime’ assembles ‘Happiness’ characters with new cast

‘Life During Wartime’ quasi-sequel to ‘Happiness’

VENICE, Italy — Todd Solondz assembles the same characters from 1998’s “Happiness” but an entirely different cast for his latest film “Life During Wartime,” premiering Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.

The extended Jordan family is mostly living in Florida, its shopping malls and superstores, condos and gated communities forming the “a clean and pristine” backdrop, or as Solondz dubbed it, “The Land of Generica.”

“I didn’t ever think I would go back to these characters. They certainly haven’t haunted me,” Solondz said Thursday. “Once I started to write, I wanted to feel free to play with the characters anyway I wanted. … If I wanted to make a white character black. Some characters age 20 years, some five.

“People say, why not just make a totally different movie? Maybe that is what I did in the end.”

The director said the movie is more political than the first, but he was at a loss to classify it, calling it both a “a quasi-sequel variation” and “something of a post-traumatic-stress-disorder kind of movie.”

There’s a lot of traumatic stress to recover from.

Trish, played by Allison Janney, has told everyone, including her young son, that her pedophile husband is dead, avoiding the truth that he has been in prison and freeing herself to fall in love with Harvey, played by Michael Lerner.

Her sister Joy, played Shirley Henderson, has just learned that her husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams as the character played in “Happiness” by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is not a reformed pervert, as she had believed. While the third sister, Helen, played by Alley Sheedy, has fled the madness to Los Angeles.

The movie deals with the issues of forgiving and forgetting, themes examined from several characters’ points of view.

Charlotte Rampling is the most wizened on the topic, as Jaqueline, who says while picking up a man (Harvey) at a hotel bar: “Only losers ask for forgiveness. Only losers expect to get it.”

“I put it out there not to dictate a response obviously,” Solondz said. “We all have different philosophical and religious convictions. I just ask the audience to open itself up to the experience.”

Jackson, as the character of Joy originally played Jane Adams in “Happiness,” said she didn’t realize at the audition that this project was reprising the same characters as “Happiness,” a movie she had seen but hadn’t remembered in detail.

“I tried not to worry about the original Joy,” Jackson said. “I obviously watched it just to pick up little things that might make it interesting. I can’t be her, I can’t do what she did. I have to do my own version.”

“Life During Wartime” is among more than 20 films competing for the Golden Lion in the Sept. 2-12 festival.