Life During Wartime The Criterion Collection

In Life During Wartime, independent filmmaker Todd Solondz ( Welcome to the Dollhouse) explores contemporary American existence and the nature of forgiveness with his customary dry humor and queasy precision. The film functions as a distorted mirror image of Solondz’s acclaimed 1998 dark comedy Happiness, its emotionally stunted characters now groping for the possibility of change in a post-9/11 world. Happiness’s grim New Jersey setting is transposed to sunny Florida, but the biggest twist is that new actors fill the roles originated in the earlier film--including Shirley Henderson ( Topsy-Turvy), Allison Janney ( The Ice Storm), and Ally Sheedy ( The Breakfast Club) as alarmingly dissimilar sisters, and Ciaran Hinds ( Persuasion) hauntingly embodying a reformed pedophile. Shot in expressionistic tones by cinematographer extraordinaire Ed Lachman ( Far from Heaven), Solondz’s film finds the humor in the tragic and the tragic in the everyday.