Life During Wartime

Todd Solondz is still perhaps best known for ‘Happiness’, the awkward yet affecting story of an extended New Jersey family, and one of the few recent movies to feature a father-son heart-to-heart about paedophilia. ‘Life During Wartime’ picks up the story a decade on. The characters are the same but the actors different: when child rapist Bill, played then by Dylan Baker and now by Ciarán Hinds, is released from prison, his wife Trish (Allison Janney) and sons try to deal with the fallout; her sisters Joy (Shirley Henderson) and Helen (Ally Sheedy), meanwhile, wrangle with dead lovers and the vagaries of Hollywood. Solondz’s ongoing interests in young adolescence and social taboos ensure some shocks but his underlying interests are sincere and humane: the consequences of trauma, the capacity for self-delusion, the possibility of change and the necessity of forgiveness.