Happiness: Love & Mercy

The naked power of those first few minutes was created by the scene’s elegantly botched pauses and fixed presentation, and the director’s sudden, deliberate, immersive drowning of the audience. As I watched, thoughts like rogue waves swept me overboard: This is what I should have done! I’m Losing You should have been like this, like Todd Solondz’s movie! Awash in the irrational covetousness of a disconsolate artist in the presence of something great, I wondered if the rest of the film would be a series of static, stunning, apocalyptic tableaux vivants. What he’s doing is profoundly interesting, I thought. But there’s not much cinematic flair, is there?

And then came one of the most beautiful, directorly shots I’d ever seen: the camera rising on a crane above the head of the therapist-pedophile (ha!) during his daydream of being an active shooter in a quiet park. (There’ve been ten thousand slaughters since, alfresco and school-bound, but it still makes me laugh.) In the painterly, detached gorgeousness of that moment, I understood that Todd Solondz was born to direct in the same way he was born to write.

He might drolly amend that by saying, “I was born to die.”

Todd and I have always recommended books and movies to each other. Years ago, he told me to read the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, and Bernhard quickly became the father I never had; then he suggested Love on the Spectrum, a show whose uncanny language and heartrending beauty nearly destroyed me. Only a few months ago, I alerted him to a young artist who goes by the name of Cumwizard69420, and Todd became an instant fan. He’s an OG reality-show junkie, and when I’m in New York, we’ll watch FBoy Island and Shark Tank at his apartment—Jews with catholic tastes. Not always being able to predict the other’s response to a suggestion, we’re occasionally hesitant about sharing our infatuations. In such a case, he’ll say, “It’s probably not your thing,” a phrase that always brings me back to the sixties. (I don’t know where the phrase brings Todd, since he’s a full “gen” after me.) All this is a quirked-up, roundabout way of saying it’s not my thing to give a casually formal précis of the triumphs and travails of a unique American director’s career, or so-called career, as Todd would say. It’s not my thing to give order, whether aesthetic or historical, to his tender, shocking corpus; to delve into the genealogy of the Wieners and sundry recurring characters (see 2009’s Life During Wartime); to recapitulate the innovative, uncompromising red-box censorship of Storytelling (2001), or his recent work in the theater; not my thing to catalog the dogged, sacred persistence of his efforts and vision, nor to be tiresomely ekphrastic about the filmography, raking celluloid leaves into neat-messy piles.

Todd Solondz loves the lowest of the low as much as he loves Elroy, his real-life only son. (Or Pebbles, his only daughter.) For me, Happiness leaves in its wake the scented, dissonant, atonal, soaring, liturgical chords of love and mercy. I always think of Todd at the piano, indifferently enraptured by the music. It’s Bach and Debussy and the silence of Cage . . .

Perhaps you already do, or will, feel the same as me after watching. It isn’t mandatory.

May we each do the best with the hands we are dealt.

That is the prayer behind Todd Solondz’s work.