Todd Solondz's cruelly evenhanded comedy, tougher and subtler than his Welcome to the Dollhouse, with sophistication now outbalancing (but not eliminating) sophomoricism. The bitter little vignettes in illustration of aloneness, alienation, despair, maladroitness, malformation, and similar human conditions, are structured rather like a TV soap opera, centered around three grown sisters -- one a glamorous and acclaimed writer eaten by self-doubt ("If only I'd been raped as a child, then I would know authenticity"); one a would-be folk singer who in the meantime is trying to do good as a teacher of adult immigrants, and is having to cross a picket line to do it ("I'm not a scab, I'm a strikebreaker!"); and the third a contented housewife who never tires of telling herself, and anyone else who will listen, of her contentment (her husband is a secret pedophile). The characterization of people through their clothes and their décor leaves little for the actors to do, but it's nice to see Jane Adams and Cynthia Stevenson at least, as the folkie and the wifey respectively, in such sizable roles. And Adams has an exquisitely embarrassing scene when she mistakes an obscene phone caller for a potential blind date. (By the end, events will so conspire that he indeed is a potential blind date.) The pace is extremely measured, showing no hurry to get back to any one plotline, and showing infinite patience in bumpy social intercourse; the visual style is clean, uncluttered, direct, economical; the writing as often draws blood by blunt instrument as by sharp object, though it draws blood consistently; and the whole messy business arrives at last at an unforeseeably happy ending. Not a happily-ever-after ending. No more than a fleeting-moment-of-happiness ending. It is not a shared moment: the character who has been told he will live to a hundred if he just lays off the salt, is pouring it on instead. And the happy one has no idea of the troubles ahead. The moment is the more treasurable for all that. With Lara Flynn Boyle, Dylan Baker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ben Gazzara, Louise Lasser. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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