'Life During Wartime' explores the taboo

Life_During_Wartime.jpgDylan Riley Snyder and Allison Janney in "Life During Wartime."

The opening scene of "Life During Wartime" is a perfect representation of Todd Solondz's visual and thematic aesthetic.

Allen (Michael K. Williams) and Joy (Shirley Henderson) sit in a gaudily decorated restaurant booth. It's their wedding anniversary. Both are crying. He pours his heart out, thanking Joy for helping him through his myriad troubles. They're interrupted by their waitress, who recognizes Allen as the voice of a creepy, obscene serial prank caller, and is angered. They both plead that he has changed.

"We even threw out the phone book!" Joy implores.

As the moment unfolds, we laugh despite ourselves, squirm in our seats, feel the horror of shame, sense the poignancy of people in pain. This is Solondz pushing us outside of our comfort zones, forcing us to contemplate empathizing with unlikeable people, some of them self-confessed monsters. Are those who have caused others' suffering worthy of forgiveness, of happiness?

"Happiness" was, of course, the title of Solondz's infamous 1998 film, and "Wartime" revisits its characters and themes, with different actors cast in the roles. The writer/director's pointed, satirical, melodramatic tone is intact, but the setting has changed. Hence, the title, which suggests that the modern "war on terror" has deepened our anxieties and paranoia and made forgiveness an alien concept.

Twelve-year-old Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) is nearing his Bar Mitzvah. His room is decorated with war planes. He believes his father William (Ciaran Hinds) is dead, but his mother Trish (Allison Janney) has never told him the truth -- that her ex-husband is a convicted pedophile, just released from prison. Trish, meanwhile, finds love with another lonelyheart, Harvey Wiener (Michael Lerner), and gushes about how "normal" he is.

Joy and Trish are sisters. Joy, a sweetheart who works rehabilitating convicts, has regular conversations with the ghost of her former lover (Paul Reubens), who committed suicide. Meanwhile, William stalks his family, desiring information, but reluctant to upset them. His chance encounter with Jacqueline (Charlotte Rampling), a razor blade in a designer cocktail dress, is the film's most riveting, psychologically twisted moment, from a screenplay full of them.

Whether exploring explicitly taboo topics or prompting affected line readings from his cast, Solondz's intent is to provoke discomfort and discussion. Like its predecessor, "Life During Wartime" can be gloriously, exasperatingly, shockingly unsettling; you've been warned. We can forgive him for that, but we're not likely to forget his work.

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