Of all the depressing, pitiable people in “Happiness,” Todd Solondz’s absolutely disturbed black comedy of suburbia, sex, sickness and sadness, the one I feel the worst for is Trish Maplewood.
Wait, which one is Trish (Cynthia Stevenson)? Is she the sister caught in arrested development, the smug, narcissistic poet who secretly suspects she’s talentless or the woman who described a case of rape and murder over an ice cream sundae?
No, Trish is perhaps the only one in “Happiness” without a crippling sex addiction, perversion, loneliness or self-destructive tendency. Her fatal flaw seems to be that she’s too normal, and worse yet that she managed to fall in love with a monstrous creep.
Trish is like the control group in Solondz’s examination of twisted individuals, the least interesting and noticeable figure of the bunch. We arguably identify with her the least because there’s the least to latch onto. Part of what makes “Happiness” so affecting though is that there’s a little bit of something we can relate to in each of the other dark characters because each has a little bit of normalcy.
She’s not unlike Jim McAllister’s wife Diane (Molly Hagan) in Alexander Payne’s “Election,” a simple house wife who exists in the background. We learn some about her, her desires, her sex drive and what she loves about her fairly awful husband. But for all intensive purposes, she’s nobody.
Released a year apart in 1998 and 1999, “Happiness” and “Election” are both complex satires of those nobodies, simple people in ordinary middle American neighborhoods, people who in their own strange ways feel universally relatable. For those who have levied claims that Payne is mocking and trivializing the simpleton schmucks in his films, that’s absolutely accurate, and it feels no less honest.