HAPPINESS

dMYD DVD

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman

Trailer

Y

If Pulp Fiction is Pulp Fiction for psychopaths, then what’s Happiness? Well, it’s a film, and thank God, because films only require a paragraph of your thought and a little letter at the top of the post. Debating the rhetorical query would at least take an essay, perhaps with some follow up questions at the end and some biscuits. Happiness, the film, is a twisted little dog, played for laughs, a damn good dog at that. The sort that brings you dead birds.

It’s only a comedy in the sense that it juxtaposes its hideous circumstances and personalities with a veneer of tradition; the American sitcom, the twee Indie flick, but its real strength comes from the reality under the chuckles. We wander around our dirty streets knowing that there are people behind the windows phoning strangers to talk about cum, we know that there are lonely, empty women desperate for any form of physical contact that will fly into diseased specimens and possible danger. We know there are child-grabbing paedobastards, though not one in every semi-detached house as the Daily Mail would have us think. By making scary light of these everyday insanities the film forces us to giggle at the depths of human nastiness, the only sane course of action aside from stomping it out with a gigantic Facist Doc Marten. Though every character is largely terrible in almost every way it’s hard to avoid the sense of pity seeping through every frame, from the uneasiness of the actors treating the sickness as comic gold, to the croco-snappy dialogue of the writers laughing at the derelicts of the modern condition. A funny kind of sickness, a japesome lump of scum and a timely reminder that the world couldn’t lose its losers but was content to simply paper over the cracks with adverts and action films.

Actually, let’s clear up the other question. It’s biscuits. Happiness is biscuits. Baked with Heroin.